One year later...

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/35675071/q1-almost-baked-and-wi.aspx This was a rant I posted almost 1 year ago. Just out of curiosity, re-read it and see if it still rings true. Sure I think some of the names changed and I don't know who's in the WW sales positions. And of course, 1 year later we know that Q1 didn't bring 'double digit' growth either. So as we prepare for the next IIUG conference, I don't know about you, but I lost count of the number of 'plugs' pushing the conference. One has to wonder what attendance will be. The more late reminders usually means that attendance is down from the earlier projection. Is it that people are giving up on Informix, or is it that their managers are a bunch of penny pinching twits who won't let their DBAs go? Or could it be that with all of this downsizing, the DBAs are now being asked to finally do work instead of pretending to do work. ;-) Yes, you heard me. We all listen to IBM's meek marketing message that IDS is the engine that you set it, tune it, and let it just run on its own. So what do all of these dba's do while pretending to do work? ;-) So, what should we take away from all of this? Simple. When or if you go to this conference, over drinks, ask each other where IDS fits in to their company's long term strategy. How many Oracle, DB2, MySQL etc instances are cropping up? Sorry, but not to paint a bleak picture, but rather to point out that unless IBM gets their collective act together, IDS is going to be toast. Well maybe not dust, but it will shrink to the point where its got as much relevancy of the other IBM "i" database that they still support. (IMS for those database knowledge challenged...) Note to Jerry Keesee. How many more years till retirement? ;-) How Ironic that Mike Olson of Illustra is now the head of Cloudera, a company who's business model is supporting Hadoop and HBase? (Can you say NoSQL?) But hey! What do I know? Nota Damn Thing! _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/210850553/direct/01/