There is a new customer success story available:

• NetworkIP Continues to Evolve Platform - Drives IBM Technology Into a Real-Time Telephony Environment

I'm wondering if a customer success story once a quarter is all that IBM's marketing strategists have to offer. Don't get me wrong. I'm delighted by the excellent high availability infrastructure that my friend Andrew Ford has established at Network IP. This is really impressive from a technical view. No doubt about that !

But customer success stories are only a drop in a bucket if there are no other vendor marketing activities surrounding those. Informix has an excellent high availability story, much better than DB2 LUW that relies on expensive hardware components and has only a very limited platform choice as well as many many more restrictions. The Informix HA and scale out solution works on Unix (AIX, Solaris, HP/UX), Linux, Windows, MAC as well as in the "Cloud". It gives customers the freedom of choice and with the new attractive Informix package offerings it would be perfectly suited to attack Oracle's RAC and MySQL business.

However, how should anyone outside of the existing community discover Informix if IBM hides it like Cinderella ?

Look at the Open Source integration activities of Jacques Roy's group which are hosted on the IIUG website. I appreciate Jaques activities and believe that it would be possible to convince existing MySQL customers from the technical superiorty and business advantages of Informix. But as with the customer success stories it is only a drop in the bucket if those technical initiatives are not surrounded by marketing programs. Posting the completion of the Drupal/Informix integration in a blog entry is NOT enough.

IBM, how many Drupal customers do you think will switch from MySQL to Informix just because you posted the availability of the database interface in an Informix blog ?

In order to establish Informix as an attractive choice in the Drupal world you need to:

• build a team that visits Drupal conferences and presents the Drupal/Informix integration
• socialize with the Drupal community
• publish white papers that describe the advantages of Informix over MySQL
• publish tutorials, developerwork articles and more that describe the Drupal/Informix integration
• build marketing material
• start a developer program
• create a website with rich and acutal content solely focused on the Drupal/Informix integration
• get customer references
• educate your sales force on Informix technology and the Open Source integration projects

And if you are successful here, you can move to the next Open Source integration project and refer to the success you have with Drupal/Informix and the trust you already earned there.

Yes IBM, it will cost you time, men power and money. But it the only way it works !

Everything else is just another drop in the bucket and a waste of time and resources (:-