User Group

A bit more detail about last week's meeting of the UK User Group. Please read even if you're not UK-based, there are some items of general interest: I attended a meeting of this group at the Natural History Museum on Tuesday 12/9/00. I'd never heard of this re-constituted group, by my client's IS Director had had a mailshot and asked me to go to find out about the corporate restructuring post-Ardent. We started off with an introduction from the chairman of the group, a Mr Nigel Dorian, who pointed out that attendance was much lower than anticipated (more of this in a minute). There was then a talk from Terry Ralph of Informix UK regarding the new set-up. Quite interesting in its way. the highlights were: the senior execs remain remorselessly US-based, products are to be banded as "developing" (eg IDS9.20) and "legacy" (supported but not developed, eg 4GL) and the sales divisions are being split up into "Database" (mainly existing customer base), and newer areas "Business intelligence" (I clearly don't go to enough seminars as I'd never heard this phrase, but apparently it's what we use to call MIS), and "Web-enabled". (I think - at this point I lost a little focus as the man in the row behind me decided to start clipping his fingernails). "What experience and history teaches us is this - that people ... never have learnt anything from history..." (George Bernard Shaw). As I listened to the separate areas of sales, particularly the web division, I wondered if Informix are destined to repeat the mistakes of the mid-1990s when the took their eye of the core products in pursuit of something sexier, but ultimately transient. I hope not. The second chat was by an expert in source control by an Ardent consultant. Sorry, but source control leaves me cold! Nonetheless, it was a competently-executed and breezy discussion with several points of general application, but over-long. Finally, in the best prsentation of all, but unfortunately fore-shortened by the overrun on previous segments, Alan Snow of Informix talked about the pitfalls of building a Data Mart. Excellent stuff, that rang true for several sites I've worked at. After that session there was a debate about the poor attendance. I ventured that I had known nothing at all about it, and hadn't seen it advertised in c.d.i. for example. I used to be a member of INFUSE but quit when they hiked the rates for independent consultants and contractors to subsidise corporate rates. But it would appear that the INFUSE membership lists had not been used for advertising. The Informix and Ardent groups are to be merged, and the meeting attendance was clearly split, perhaps 70/30, along Arent/Informix lines. I didn't stay for the Ardent-based afternoon session nor, to my shame, did I take the opportunity to look around the Museum, having been just a few weeks ago with my kids.