Great news for existing Informix customers as well as new customers that are looking for an extremely efficient data server powering their enterprise data warehouse: IBM announced the availability of the IDS Warehouse Feature.

For details please take a look at the various press announcements, blog entries and the new documentation available:

• Fernando Nunes Blog
• Guy Bowerman's Blog
• Jacques Roy's Blog
• Press Releases concerning the Informix Warehouse Feature
• IDS 11.5 Information Center

James Kobielus - an analyst at Forrester Research - describes the new IBM Informix offering as follows:

While IBM has positioned the DB2 database as its top back-end platform for BI and 
data warehousing, a significant number of Informix customers are already 
performing such tasks with their systems, said Forrester Research analyst 
James Kobielus.
Wednesday's announcement is meant to reflect that reality, as well as reward 
those users "for their loyalty with continued feature enhancements," he said. 
"IBM is implicitly saying, 'We're not going to force you to migrate to DB2 to 
do data warehousing. We're not end-of-lifing Informix -- far from it.'

Let me pick up one sentence:

IBM is implicitly saying: We are not going to force you to migrate to DB2 to do data warehousing.

To be honest, IBM is not in the position to force any customer to migrate to DB2. Customers pay a lot of money for their Informix licenses to IBM. We all have seen the "outstanding" success of trying to convince Informix customers to migrate to DB2 and the sad result: Those customers deliver now their money into the pockets of Oracle and Microsoft.

As most of you probably know, Informix already has a fantastic datawarehouse engine named XPS: eXtended Parallel Server. A the time of the IBM Informix takeover around 2001, XPS has been far superior in comparision to IBM's own offering DB2 EEE. However the plans of the former IBM management lead to the foreseeable death of XPS. Now we see a reincarnation of XPS in IDS. I think this is good thing. The great functionality of IDS combined with some power features from XPS is a promising mix. For example the superior IDS replication technology and the new Informix Warehouse feature are probably an excellent combination for performing realtime datawarehousing.

With the introduction of the Informix Warehouse Feature, IBM makes clear that is has two enterprise class data servers: DB2 and IDS !

The spiky arrowhead is ready to take off. Now it is up to IBM marketing to draw the bow and bring the spiky arrowhead on it's journey to hurt the competition. There are already a few press releases out, but it will be interesting to see if IBM is really willing to do create product awareness for IDS. Starting a clever advertising campaign that positions IDS as scalable cluster database for high end OLTP as well as realtime datawarehousing would make IDS attractive to new as well as existing customers.

IBM you are doing great things on the technical side with IDS. But you would be able to create a much greater payoff of your technical investments, if you would start advertising the excellent capabilities of IDS instead of wasting the earned IDS money in a meaningless Smarter Planet campaign !