Hey Rocky watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!

For those of you in the US, many of you are old enough to remember that gag from the Saturday morning cartoon show Rocky and Bullwinkle. For those who don't See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7mmrF-4rUE Or you could go to hulu and watch complete episodes. The point in this running gag, Bullwinkle tries to pull a rabbit out of his hat, and that trick never works. IBM's marketing is very similar. Sometimes it plays well to the faithful. I mean the Cheetah stuff. Not so much the marketing but the product. I mean they could have taken a picture of Stuart's face saying 'Buy This Product' instead of any marketing, and IDS 11.x would have still been as successful. Because of the product and that they were selling primarily in to a captured market. (Sorry Stuart, but you do have a face for Radio... :-P ) And you can pick half a dozen well know Informix Community Members, myself included with the same results. ;-) So now we have the "New and Improved" Informix Marketing. About this time two years ago, Jerry Keesee came out with a 'Go to Marketing Message' with a slide show. The interesting thing was that if the IBM sales critter showed the slide one way, you would see IBM showing off IDS. But if he rotated the image, it would show off DB2. Not much of a marketing message when you have a slide deck which didn't clearly show a positioning statement. (Or was that 3 years ago? Time really does fly when you're having fun!) Nor were there any incentives to the sales teams. I mean you could have provided incentives to the FLMs (First Line Managers) of the Information Management Sales Specialists that they get a bump or bonus each qtr based on the number or percentage of their IT Specialists that got certified on IDS. (Or if you just put it in their PBCs you'd get the same thing for free. ;-) You didn't see any sales contests or incentives on taking out Oracle or Sybase with Informix and you'd get a bonus. You didn't see any special incentives to customers that they'd get a % off their normal level discount for net new licenses they purchased. No, nothing like that. Do we see these things as part of Jerry's new and improved launch? ... ... Didn't think so. Of course the year is still young and he's got a world wide sales force that will definitely be 'all ears' when he does yet again another 'all hands' internal calls. (Yes, Jerry, you can get pissed off because I know what I'm talking about and I know the success rate that 'All Hands Calls' generate. Charlie Ills got more motivation out of fear than any of the 'all hands calls' I have been on. Not that I approved of his methods.) [Charlie Ills ran SWG at the time of the acquisition. At our first eBU, we're sitting outside in a tent having lunch and in his introduction speech he said the following "... You will be given a quota. If you fail to meet your quota, you will be on probation for the next quarter. (90 days). If you fail to improve or make your quota, you will be gone." [Paraphrased but there should be some other Heritage Informixers who remembered that warm welcome...] Yes Jerry, I'm skeptical that you will do what it takes to make this "new and improved" marketing campaign work. Sorry, no offense, but we've seen it all before, going way back to the late 90's with Diane Fraiman's Bill Boards along the 101 that did nothing more but piss off Larry Ellison and make customers in Peoria scratch their heads wondering "..what is up with that?" ... ;-) And when I say Peoria, I meant like the rest of the world who doesn't care about the 'Valley'. I'll give you a free clue Jerry, one more of the many that seemed to bounce off your thick skull and fly over the heads of some of the fscktards who either report up through you or are cross matrix'ed in to your organization. Here's a little known secret Jerry. Customers buy solutions. Selling a great RDBMS that isn't part of a solution is only going to get limited market penetration. Especially when the person or persons who are making the buying decision don't know who or what IDS is and are being told by their new young recent college grads that they can get the job done using other products that cost a lot less and that they are familiar with from working with them in college.... Solutions are like what Oracle offers. Now they can sell you the hardware, software and services all underneath a canned application like an ERP solution. A one stop shop for their Enterprise management software. (Oracle Financial, PeopleSoft, JDE, ... ) Oh if you don't like Oracle's apps, you can look at Lawson, SAP, which also run on Oracle. IDS? Not so much. That's a solution Jerry. There used to be a whole army of 4GL apps that ran on IDS. Only when the paradigm switched to GUI and Web based solutions, where was Informix/IBM? To be fair, the market detached the app from the persistence layer so it was more portable and you weren't locked in to any application. So then Jerry,you need to ask yourself how can you differentiate your engine, your core product and make a compelling story? Oh I fed you some ideas and hints. But you and some of your tech staff didn't see the larger picture. Too bad. There are a couple of options Jerry, but you have to have an open mind and realize that the longer you continue down your current path, the harder it is to get back on track. I don't need to know the numbers Jerry. Just the fact that unlike last year, you're starting a "new and improved" campaign for IDS. I guess you're watching the numbers start to slide. That is because of a lack of net new customers to replace those who are completing their conversions from IDS to something else. Whether we're talking about SAP/Lawson/AGS etc ... or we're talking about those who can run their apps on MySQL well enough or PostgresSQL. IBM also isn't seeing revenue from migrations from IDS to DB2. Steve Mills et al, need to understand their white space and that IDS played well in to that white space but that now looks to be a lost opportunity. Its a shame Jerry that you just don't come in to Chicago. The Drake Hotel on Michigan Ave is a Hilton property so you can stay there. Catch a cab to the new IBM digs in the Loop, meet with a couple of clients or soon to be former clients like the AMA and TransUnion. (Although TransUnion is a DB2 shop.) There are more customers and OEM partners like Moto, Hyatt I think is back downtown, UBS has operations and I think one unit of JPMC runs IDS here in Chicago... But I haven't followed Informix and I'm a little rusty on who does what where these days. ;-) Maybe you can find some money from Mills and IBM research to do a couple of proof of concept projects. Even lease/borrow some hardware from your counterparts? You see Jerry, its not that you need to spend lots of money to make IDS successful, you just need to find the right and compelling stories that you can sell to your customers. But hey! What do I know? -G _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469230/direct/01/