I am a regular reader of the various Informix forums. I follow closely any commentary that suggests that Informix has no future in the IBM portfolio or the competitive database market. I’ve been a part of the Informix team since 1993 and have had the mission to lead the Informix business since the assets were acquired by IBM back in 2001. Our goal has been and continues to be to grow the Informix business. We are constantly evaluating the market and making decisions regarding where we believe we can best leverage the Informix portfolio. We align our investments so that we are best prepared to realize growth in these spaces.
Versions 11.50 and 11.70 have been widely adopted. Our Flexible Grid technology is proving to be an asset for both scale out as well as availability while dramatically simplifying administration and the In memory columnar Warehouse (Query) Accelerator adoption has grown rapidly.
I am happy to make either myself or another member of the team available to discuss the Informix commitment with you and your team.
I hope you are all enjoying the Olympics.
Sean Durity
Jul 30, 2012 @ 11:23:51
I would love to see Informix as a viable and growing platform. From my perspective one of the largest hurdles is third party applications. Nothing our company evaluates ever has Informix as the primary database option. We even have trouble with IBM products that use Informix at times.
Keesee
Jul 31, 2012 @ 12:49:14
Hi Sean.
Thanks for your comment. We’re constantly working with new IBM teams looking to either add support for Informix or embed it. Most recently we have been partnering with Netezza on some development items. Please let me or someone on the team know specific issues that you run into.
John Carlson
Aug 03, 2012 @ 19:55:36
I have worked with Informix for almost 18 years. While I am impressed with the reports of how bugs and regression testing occur in Informix products, I have seen a steady decline in the number of third-party vendors who support Informix products. As a result, I feel that the market for Informix has dropped considerably, as the perception is that no one seriously supports it.
Doug Dailey
Aug 09, 2012 @ 01:37:35
As Jerry mentioned, we are making progress with respect to IBM middleware. We recently worked with the SPSS team to ensure compatibility. We are now certified on their Client/Server Modeler and Statistics Data Pack using our client SDK kit. This is one recent example and we have others that we are actively working and queued up. If you have any specific software, either IBM Middleware or 3rd party that you rely upon, let us know and we can investigate.
Malcolm Weallans
Aug 09, 2012 @ 05:14:54
I have worked with Informix products for 25 years. I saw Informix grow and decline in that time. I have worked for much of that time in the 3rd party channel. In the 1980s when I joined Informix the accent was heavily on Informix-4GL, and Informix-SQL, and the new kid on the block was Informix-Turbo. At that time I worked in support and the vast majority of the customers that I worked with were application developers. They chose Informix because it had the best development tools, the engine was secondary.
The success of Informix-Turbo merely added to the reasons why 3rd party companies chose Informix to work with.
But during the 1990s Informix chose to invest heavily in Informix Dynamic Server at the expense of Informix-4GL with the result that Informix-4GL could not maintain its position in the market place for development tools.
In parallel the other database engines were growing. Many of the features of the Informix Dynamic Server were only needed for large applications and clusters of servers.
Leading up to year 2000 many of the application development companies were faced with difficult choices. Applications needed to be re-developed to cope with Y2K. But by then Informix development tools were lagging behind in the industry and the relative cost of modern development tools and environments caused the application development companies to look elsewhere for modern development tools. And these companies found it difficult to justify the expense of a state-of-the-art database engine when all they really needed was to have a basic database engine. So Informix lost its position in the application development market. And with that it lost the engine business as well.
I am currently working for an application development company. In the 1980s we started using Informix because of the power of Informix-4GL to provide extensions to an Informix based accounting system. In fact we still have Informix-4GL applications running in a number of sites. But as time moves on more and more of this work is moving to other development environments and tools. And quite naturally the Informix based accounting system has progressed and was available on a choice of database platforms many years ago. New versions of the previously Informix based accounting system have a better front-end that Informix tools can provide so they have steadily migrated to Microsoft based development and consequently to Microsoft SQL Server.
Where Informix goes from here is a very tricky question. It is not as simple as saying “Informox needs better application development tools”. We must admit that Informix has lost out in that market and cannot afford the large investment that would be necessary to compete. That leaves the engine and connectivity. Informix has a very advanced connectivity and database architecture that is primarily UNIX based and little is heard of the Windows database products, despite the fact that they have been available for about 20 years. They are too expensive in the Windows arena as they require specialist database administrator skills whereas the SQL Server product is almost as powerful and the skills are easier to acquire.
In my very humble opinion it is going to be a very tough job to restore Informix in the market place. I would even go so far as to suggest that the name Informix is one of the biggest challenges. Application development companies often feel let down by Informix history and will not even consider Informix any more. They need a new database server that is as simple to administer as Informix on a variety of platforms, but primarily in the Windows arena. They need to package this product in such a way that it is a cheap platform to develop on which can be extended into large systems and clusters if necessary with no application change. And they need to market this so aggressively that every application developer will want to work with it.
I’m afraid that the 25 years of working with Informix has taken its toll on me and I am nearing retirement. My current employer is only keeping me on to support a dwindling of Informix applications and servers. The company’s long term intention is to concentrate on the Microsoft Windows market, and it will take some very significant marketing before that decision will be changed.
Jerry Keesee talks about his blog post on Informix future and IOD 2012 | Louis Informix Diary
Oct 08, 2012 @ 03:04:17