If my company has 10 employees who use Informix, do we count as one user or ten? Now, if I'm a reseller of an embedded product that sells 1,000 units am I one or 1,000? What did Informix mean when it said it had 100,000 users in 2001? Did IBM use the same definition when it said it has 20,000 Informix users today?

Today, CBR ran a revised story in which IBM's Bernie Spang explained what the IBM spokesperson had meant by 20,000 users--turns out the number was referring to International Informix User Group members.

But let's forget about counts and get to some facts. As I told the reporter, from every indication I've seen, the size of the Informix community is now larger than it was prior to the 2001 IBM acquisition. This is evident in both members of the IIUG, attendance at IIUG sponsored events around the world, and IIUG Web site traffic (the site is getting a record number of hits--1.1 million hits a month compared with less than 400,000 hits a month back in 2001).

I have seen the membership of the International Informix Users Group more than double since the 2001 IBM acquisition. The number of unique companies that have joined IIUG has also doubled in this same time frame.

If there's no definition of what counts as a user, articles like the one in Computer Business Review are virtually meaningless. The IIUG today has almost 20,000 members. By our count, less than 25% of the world's Informix customers are members. From that measure alone, the original article's numbers are totally incorrect.

The article also talks about "migrating" Informix customers to DB2. The original path back in 2001 was for Informix and DB2 to merge. This is also old news and no Informix customers have been asked or prompted to migrate to DB2 or any other database from IBM in more than four years.

IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) is the OLTP database of choice from IBM. In fact, I would dare for others to compare the speed and reliability of the product with any other database on the market in the same space. I personally have seen Informix up and running on servers for a few years without a reboot. Some systems run without DBAs at all or less than a dozen DBAs for thousands of instances. I was recently talking to one user who actually hired her first DBA to support 70,000 users--and the DBA was bored as the product just runs. I can also talk about the large online company that replaced 700 single processor "windows" database servers with seven dual processor Linux boxes running IDS.

Beyond the numbers of users, the quality of the customers and what they are doing reflects the health of the product. IBM quotes that eight of the top 10 American retailers use Informix. In the U.S., the 9-1-1 telephone system is almost all on Informix. Let's not forget that VISA credit card transactions are all done through Informix. The IBM worldwide security system used by 300,000+ employees is run on Informix. Seven or eight of largest hotel chains use Informix for their hotel reservations systems

So 20,000 users? I think not. Are there 100,000? Well, maybe unique customers. Now as for users.... every person in the United States is affected by Informix each and every day whether we know it or not.

Someone needs to get their facts correct before writing articles like this.

Stuart Litel
President
International Informix Users Group
www.iiug.org
e-mail: www.iiug.org/president