The funny thing about numbers is that they're just numbers...

While Eric brings up an excellent point: http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUSN2634118720080826?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0 Its just numbers and its only a guess as to how the market breaks down. But assuming that it is accurate... The comments made by the analyst do show that IBM SWG IM is doing a pretty poor job of getting the word out. It seems that Ambush doesn't like to spend money on marketing. It also seems that Ambush doesn't understand how to motivate sales critters either. Most of my local sales critters have moved on to different companies, even to Oracle. So I may be out of touch, but I haven't heard anything about a sales program to take out Sybase from financial accounts. And no, it won't happen any time soon, because IBM didn't seed the market. Unlike Timmy who wants to seed the "developers", the real way to seed the market is to give that market segment a story or an example of how and why IDS is better than their current solution. Its called seeding the niche. By doing this, you now have a story that the sales reps can sell. Selling the story, sells the product. Only no such program exists. (And when will this simple concept sink in to IBM's thick skulls? God only knows...) IBM is good about spinning their numbers however. They can say that they don't break numbers down to the public because its misleading and has no effect on the overall numbers, however they also hide the numbers/growth, due to acquisitions since they are bringing new products to market with new revenue streams so that the overall revenue stream grows, and the growth of individual products gets lost in the flow of things. So IBM can spin numbers when they want to. But this is only a part of the market. When you ask a customer as to why they buy a database, most don't know. Thats because the database is part of an application that they are purchasing for their business. Most companies are also rather small. There are more companies in the SMB market than there are in the Aligned and Integrated market. Most of these companies have *tiny* (relative to a General Electric or a Hyatt, or a Sears) budget for IT. So they are going to go with the lowest cost alternative that meets their needs. This means *MICROSOFT*. Microsoft only supports Microsoft on Microsoft products. So they don't have to worry about maintaining ports to different flavors of OSs and different major releases of the OS. That's a big advantage. So what if the product doesn't scale. It will meet your needs today, and probably tomorrow unless you really grow quickly and then, well that would be someone elses job to worry about. After all, if this happens, you cash out your stock options and move on to the next big thing. ;-) So Microsoft is outselling IBM's boxes. That's ok. But IBM isn't targeting the niche environments where their products outshine the competition. So you won't see the stellar growth in net new customers either. And we have to look at vendor relations. Lawson, SAP, etc ... no longer support IDS as a viable platform. (Gee I wonder why that happened?) So you're not able to compete on the general application front either. Yes the funny thing about numbers is that IBM can spin the numbers. Feel proud that they are "growing" at "double digit growth", yet ignore that their overall percentage of market penetration is shrinking. What this really means is that while IBM is growing, the market for the product is growing at a faster clip. But don't tell that to IBM. -G _________________________________________________________________ Be the filmmaker you always wanted to be—learn how to burn a DVD with Windows®. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/108588797/direct/01/