Wednesday, bloody Wednesday ..

Hey! If you don't work for IBM, but you have friends that do, call them to see if they're still employed. I got an e-mail from a friend who's in sales and he said that there was a lot of action with respect to SWG sales. Didn't get a lot of specifics yet, and I don't know if this is a local, national, or global action. Based on Capt P's comment, I think that it could be a couple of regions like EU (EMEA) and NA (US). I mean heck.. If IDS *is* saving IM's bacon, and the sales force doesn't understand IDS, isn't the sales force redundant? ;-) (Oh I'm going straight to hell for this post!) C'mon, lets face it. IDS has been a product of IBM for something like 8 years and a couple of weeks. (We don't count the Informix/IBM time). In all of that time, doesn't make sense that a sales rep or SE would want to learn about their product line? Sure Janet tried to kill IDS. Sure she said lead with DB2. Sure she tried to convince customers to switch from IDS to her baby DB2 on LUW. But Janet left the building at the end of '05. 3 Years later, after what is rumored to be 'double digit' qtr/qtr and yr/yr growth, the sales force still doesn't know jack about IDS. Nor are they incented to *learn* about the one product that they have which is *selling* and where they can make *money*. If the reps don't know their product line and they aren't incented to *learn* their product line, are they good reps? IMHO, they are not. IBM SWG Information Management has really two customers that need to be marketed to. Those outside of IBM and the client reps who are internal. What has IBM SWG IM done to market to the client reps? Clearly in the past 3 years post JP, what has been done hasn't worked. Let us hope that the survivors of the restructuring get a clue and start to market and sell IDS. Yeah, I know that they are showing double digit growth, yet the industry is growing faster and the new competition is going to be MySQL now that Sun owns it. Just be thankful that Sun doesn't have a clue on how to run a profitable software group.... But hey! What do I know? ;-) -G

Ian Michael Gumby wrote: > Yeah, I know that they are showing double digit growth, yet the > industry is growing faster I'd be pretty fucking amazed if that were possible. Allegedly. Certainly, if the database industry were growing faster than Informix, it would be sufficient to ward off the worldwide credit crunch / recession / bad thing of your choice, all by itself. ;o) > But hey! What do I know? Do I really need to answer this? -- Cheers, Obnoxio The Clown http://obotheclown.blogspot.com -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by OpenProtect(http://www.openprotect.com), and is believed to be clean.

On Jan 22, 7:59 am, Obnoxio The Clown <obno...@serendipita.com> wrote: > Ian Michael Gumby wrote: > > Yeah, I know that they are showing double digit growth, yet the > > industry is growing faster > > I'd be pretty fucking amazed if that were possible. Allegedly. > > Certainly, if the database industry were growing faster than Informix, > it would be sufficient to ward off the worldwide credit crunch / > recession / bad thing of your choice, all by itself. ;o) > >  > But hey! What do I know? > > Do I really need to answer this? > > This message has been scanned for viruses and > dangerous content by OpenProtect(http://www.openprotect.com), and is > believed to be clean. Well, if your outgoing messages are being scanned for viruses, then maybe you didn't learn to wrap that rascal *before* you got infected. :-) So I'd be suspect of your knowing of what I know. :-P Ok, to address your point... Yes the database market is growing faster than IDS. Keep in mind that we're playing a numbers game here. The growth rate is a bit harder to track because not all of the databases are being tracked back to sales. JavaDB is being shipped out with Sun's tools and JDKs. (Sun has a nice netbeans combo bundle of the IDE, glassfish, javaDB and 1.6 JDK) So while Sun can track the downloads of JavaDB/Derby/Cloudscape, they can't really track deployment... (Note: RIP Cloudscape). Then you have MySQL. Again, you can only track those companies that actually pay the license fees which is going to be a fraction of the copies out there in production. The point is that we *don't* know, and neither does IDC and the other research groups. What we do know is that in a recent open source developer study of 360 developers, C is the language that most are using and MySQL is the database of choice. Again this poll only reflects a segment of the developer community. So while we can't see the mass of the rock(s) that hit the pool of water, we can only see the ripples. But I digress. The point of this post was that IBM isn't hitting on all cylinders and that even with no/limited marketing and sales support from IBM, its still pulling in decent results. One has to ask... IF IBM WERE TO ACTUALLY SUPPORT AND ACTIVELY SELL IDS, WHAT WOULD THEIR NUMBERS LOOK LIKE? Sorry to 'shout' but I wanted to be clear about the question. Yes, I am implying that if IBM IM sales/marketing were to actually try to sell IDS and not rely on the BPs in the SMB world, what would those numbers look like? My guess is that you'd see a ramp up and within 3 yrs, there would be a serious increase in growth rates. Of course why would IBM want to do the heavy lifting when they make money without having to do it ? (Its rhetorical. Can you say cross sell / up sell?) :-) But hey! Why would IBM listen to some guy who posts under a fictitious name? -G