The release of the new Informix Warehouse Feature was the first step to further extend the capabilities of IDS to serve as a datawarehouse engine. Traditionally this area was the domain of XPS (eXtended Parallel Server) and Red Brick.

In his new letter to the Informix community, Ambuj Goyal, General Manager IBM Information Management, says:

For our customers who have invested in IBM Red Brick and IBM XPS, we recognize that you have reliable
solutions now and IBM will continue to support your investment. If in the future you wish to upgrade, IBM will
be adding many of the features you have come to rely on in Red Brick and XPS into the Informix Warehouse
Roadmap.

You can read the complete letter from Mr. Goyal here:

• Ambuj Goyal: Letter to the Informix Community

Now it is official that IDS will be the successor of XPS and Red Brick. IBM will take certain features from XPS and Red Brick and build them into IDS. This is great news for existing XPS and Red Brick customers as well as existing and new customers of IDS that wish to build their datawarehouse on this superior data server. The IDS MACH11 technology offers a great opportunity to build some really innovative datawarehouse solutions on top of IDS.

But if you think about this official statement it is more than just the announcement that IDS will soon be an interesting foundation for a data warehouse solution. It is also IBM's confession that the old strategy (migrating Informix customers to DB2) from the first years after the Informix takeover (2001) has entirely failed. Now IBM has two emancipated data servers: DB2 and IDS. I see this as a great advantage for customers as they are now able to choose the IBM data server that meets their unique requirements best. And, regardless of their decision for one of those data servers, customers can be assured that their choice is a strategic product for IBM that will be further significantly enhanced and supported for many many years. I wouldn't bet a single Euro that this is the case with Oracle and MySQL :-)

BTW, watch for the upcoming IDS fixpak 11.50.xC5. AFAIK it will contain some really interesting enhancements and should be available soon. More on this here on The Informix Zone.