English Translation: Interview with Jerry Keesee in Czech Computerworld

As promised here is the english translation from Jerry's interview with the Czech Computerworld.

I would like to say THANK YOU to my good friend Milan for sharing this translation with us. Thank you also to Pamela who did send me a Google translation of the interview. However I think humans can still do this job better than software programs :-).

• Czech Computerworld: Interview with J. Keesee

There are two interesting answers that I would like to highlight and comment on:

As an example, I would mention two main database platforms at IBM - 
DB2 and Informix, which are developed in parallel, and thanks to 
its specialization, they almost do not compete each other, because 
the first is positioned for use in data warehousing or XML 
documents processing while the other is more suitable for OLTP 
(On-Line Transaction Processing) applications requiring fast transaction 
throughput and high availability features.

That DB2 and IDS do not compete is more wishful thinking of IBM :-)

Anyway, the question is: Why isn't IBM marketing/press emphasizing on this positioning and spreads the message out ?

Hint to IBM:
There is a little known instrument, I think it is called advertising, that sometimes helps to communicate the benefits and unique capabilities of a product to existing and prospective customers. And there are other vendors that seem to use that instrument from time to time to increase their market share and vitalize the ecosystem around their products. This brings a real benefit to their customers, their partners, their ISV's as well as for themselves.

I wonder why IBM isn't willing to provide those benefits to their Informix customers, partners and ISV's as well ?

We also plan to extent data warehousing support of Informix products 
and full autonomy of operation with almost zero administration and 
unavailability. This way we want to approach customers wishing to 
build their data warehouses on Informix platform.

This is promising. We could ask why it took IBM about eight lost years (since the takeover of Informix in 2001) to realize, that IDS is probably an excellent datawarehouse platform and the legitimate successor of XPS. But history is history. Again it is important that IBM marketing/press gets the message out to the market and advertising is an ideal instrument here as well.

Thank you for listening, IBM !