Bruce Weed, who is responsible for leading the strategic direction for the Informix business at IBM, has posted a new update to his blog.

In his update Bruce mentions the big Informix Event that will take place today in New York City. Prominent speakers from IBM including Arvind Krishna, Robert D. Thomas and Jerry Kessee will talk about IBM's Informix strategy. This is only the kick off for a worldwide series of events of this type.

Bruce also posted an interesting Powerpoint chart that contains a high level overview about IBM's Informix strategy (please click on the graphic to enlarge it):

We can see that beside delighting the current installed base, which is is probably always a worthwhile strategy, IBM positions Informix as it's flagship database for the following markets:

• Retail
  Informix is traditionally very strong in this market. Key factors here are the extremely low administration costs of IDS as well as the low hardware requirements. Enterprise Replication is probably another key factor here as it allows the distribution of data on a large-scale basis.
• Telecommunication
  A market where Informix is a key player for many years now. Key factors here are the superior performance of IDS especially in high end OLTP environments as well as the high reliability of IDS (Set it and forget it !).
• Healthcare
  This is a traditional key market for Informix as well.
• Gaming
  The Online Gaming market is a relatively new but fast growing market. Informix has established itself as one of the key database players here. The ability to scale out on cost efficient hardware with the MACH11 cluster technology is probably one of the key reasons for the success of IDS here.

Another important area for Informix is referred to as OEM - Deep Embedd by IBM. The small footprint of IDS, it's extremely low administration requirements as well as the it's high reliability and opportunity to scale makes it an ideal choice for this market segment. Here I see a great chance for Informix as the companies tend to buy solutions not databases. IDS must be a part of these solutions !

Mid-Market will be a key market for Informix. Beside the low administration costs and the small footprint there is another factor that makes IDS the ideal choice for the Mid-Market: IDS runs extremely well on Intel or AMD based servers in combination with the Linux operating system. Together with the MACH11-technology, that doesn't require expensive additional hardware components to perform, this is the ideal platform for mid-market customers to achieve high availability as well as to be able to scale out in a cost efficient way. However from my point of view this is an ideal solution for the large enterprises as well.

While IBM positions DB2 and Power-Hardware as one optimized bundle on one hand, it positions IDS together with System x servers/blades on the other. Please check the following URL's regarding this:

• http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/informix/systemx/
• http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/informix/cluster/

After all the years of nebulous positioning of IDS in the overall IBM software portfolio, it is the first time that a sustainable strategy for the Informix business is visible. It seems that IBM learned it's lesson and I'm curious what we will see next.

• Read Bruce's new blog entry here...