Q1 almost baked... And with the IIUG conference coming up...
- From: Ian Michael Gumby <im_gumby@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 06:51:31 -0700 (PDT)
Hey!
I just got yet another plug in the e-mail for the IIUG conference. Now
don't get me wrong, I do like the idea of the IIUG conference and this
little rant isn't about the IIUG at all. In fact I want you all to
attend so that you can ask a lot of questions. Seriously.
What set me off today, besides being a cold, icy, midwest Monday
morning... is what I saw in today's plug.
"Alyse Passarelli, IBM WorldWide Database Vice President of Sales and
Inhi Cho, IBM WorldWide Vice President of Database Marketing, will
discuss the marketing and sales efforts that revolve around Informix
and answer questions from the conference attendees and open the floor
to Question and Answers from all attendees!"
One has to ask how a pair of incompetent nitwits have quietly been
promoted to VP slots. I guess gender had a lot to do with it. After
all, if they were men, they would have been RIF'd long ago. Assuming
of course that IBM is being honest about their sales and marketing
efforts behind the Informix brand.
And you have to say 'Gumby! How can you call Alyse Passarelli and Inhi
Cho are incompetent as Informix shows 'double digit' growth qtr over
qtr and year over year! Say it ain't so!'
And that's a good point. Informix has been growing. And its had good
growth, albeit, overall market share has declined. But is that growth
due to Informix being a great product, or due to any form of
marketing? I mean, heck, during the 90's Oracle sold well because they
had great marketing. Sorry Mark, but c'mon where's your 'data
cartridges' today? ;-)
OTC made a very good point that I could spend a lot of time finding
misbranded products like Alphabullox. But when IBM IM was re branding
Informix and DB2 as product lines, don't you think that their branding
effort should have also included making sure that all of the products
within the pillar were also properly branded? Ooops! My bad, Alyse and
Inhi are 'database' sales/marketing vps. And I bet that it doesn't
include Ass-n-tail, or the other non-database products that make up
the pillar's portfolio.
For those who do go to the conference, I don't think you should give
Alyse and Inhi a free ride. IBM is inviting you to ask questions, so
lets put some out there ...
1) Hey Alyse, Inhi, what is Informix's Q rating? And to be clear, I'm
not talking about the Q rating for the average American, but the Q
rating for the average IT professional? (Q rating means brand
recognition.)
2) Just to put the Q rating in perspective, what's the Q rating for
Oracle? mySQL? SQLServer? heck, lets include Sybase to help make
Informix look good!
3) Alyse, what have you done to bring parity in to the sales force so
that the S&D teams have equal access to IT Specialists that know
either DB2 or Informix? Preferably both.
(Hint: This is an old Gumby rant. Besides, I personally told Alyse at
an IIUG BoD dinner about the problem and how easy it was to fix. Too
bad she didn't write it down or talk to Jerry K. Heck, I even blasted
it out here to the point that even the faithful readers who are not
IBMers could tell you what a PBC is. ;-)
4) Alyse or Inhi, while its true that nobody makes their database
purchasing decisions based on a standardized benchmark. (We know that
they're all rigged... ;-) The benchmark is an indication on how
willing IBM is to stand behind a product. If IBM isn't going to spend
money and get in to a 'database war' with Microsoft and concede
victory in the TPC-E benchmark without a fight, what is IBM willing to
do? I mean specifically, how does IBM demonstrate that they are making
a long term commitment to Informix?
5) Alyse, I was on the last conference call ('chat with the lab'
series) that talked about Solid and IDS. Ok so I had to drop off
early. I sent some questions to Denise and Jerry K. (Denise er Dennis,
covers Moto btw...) One question had to deal with the fact that they
'benchmarked' using Solid vs DB2 in terms of demonstrating an in-
memory database versus a disked base solution (IDS and DB2). What is
IBM's competitive advantage over Oracle's solution of Times Ten and
Oracle 10g? Don't you think that its a more relative comparison?
Hey there's more questions, but I don't want to steal all the fun.
Why don't we get a list of questions together?
Oh and BTW, I'll wager that they'll preview the questions ahead of
time so lets at least get our questions out there ahead of time. This
way they can't say that we sandbagged them and didn't allow them to
come prepared. ;-)
But hey! What do I know? ;-)
-G
.
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