Many DB2 users I talk to have seen provocative print ads from our competitors and asked why IBM don’t create ads like those. For various reasons, IBM won’t ever create those kind of ads. They simply don’t gel with our mission. Isolating and exploiting individual speeds-and-feeds, and doing so out of context, is not what IBM is about.
If you are interested in learning what we are about, you need look no further than our senior leadership. Listen to them talk. Listen to the IBM earnings calls. It’s all about client value. And this focus on providing client value starts at the top of our organization and pervades throughout our business. What do I mean by client value? Well, it’s about helping our clients accomplish their goals, and providing them with good value for their IT investment. One of the best ways to be successful is to enable your clients to be successful. By helping our clients to achieve or exceed their goals, and by providing enduring value, IBM has created a business that has seen many competitors come-and-go over the years.
You can see this approach reflected in our new advertising campaign. I include an image showing the two-page ads below. Yesterday, these appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News. They will appear in magazines like Business Week, Forbes, Fortune and Information Week in the weeks to come. Here is the main paragraph of the ad…
What exactly does a benchmark mean? For the last five years, IBM DB2® has spent more time
at the top of three of the industry’s leading performance benchmarks than Oracle and Microsoft
combined*. But is that the best way to think about the possibilities of technology? What really
matters isn’t some abstract measure of performance, it’s what companies actually do with that
performance. For instance, Globe Telecom is using a service delivery platform from IBM to
increase their sales by 112%. EuResist is using an integrated analytics solution to predict the
most effective drug combinations for individuals with HIV, with 78% accuracy. And CAIXA
Econômica Federal, one of the largest banks in Latin America, is using a service oriented
architecture to slash infrastructure acquisition costs by over $330 million. On a smarter planet,
these are the benchmarks that matter.
What’s interesting is the claim about DB2 being on the top of TPC-C charts.
Maybe that’s why IBM is afraid to do an IDS (Informix Dynamic Server) TPC-C benchmark.
For the past 10 years We’ve heard excuse after excuse. Along with the lack of advertising of products just the brand. Now we see your blog post.
What does IBM fear? That IDS is really a much better TPC-C platform? Nothing new here.
That IBM’s S&D team is incapable of making a value added proposition based on either DB2 or IDS in to a customer? No surprise there. (And yes, I know IBM’s S&D division very well, along with the pillar reps and SSRs.
So while you trumpet DB2 , remember that IBM could have done a lot better by working out an effective marketing and sales message.
Someone once told me that Informix doesn’t have users, it has fans. After spending time with quite a few people in the Informix community, I can only agree. It is a first class piece of database software.
The whole point of this ad is that a generic industry benchmark like TPC-C is not the true measure of database software. What really matters are the business results that users of that database software are enjoying. I’m happy that IBM corporate marketing chose DB2 success stories to make this point. I’m sure they could easily have chosen any of a number of software products with similar success stories, including Informix.