Best Regards,
Nancy Kopp Program Director, Data Warehouse Solutions, IBM

Again, please keep in mind that the intention was not to necessarily rock-the-technology-world with a ground-breaking set of technology announcements. It was to show in a very real way that our focus is on providing compelling business value to a diverse set of clients (from multiple continents), and to encourage everyone at the the event to openly and candidly discuss these topics.

Given that I wasn’t invited to the event (let alone prebriefed), I only had the press releases to comment on. (I’m sure space and attention are limited to the knowledgeable and influential database technology analysts.)

But congrats to you for getting .005% or so of Oracle’s user base to successfully and easily convert to DB2. It’s a start!

The event was intended to:

1) Reinforce that IBM has been successfully developing integrated hardware/software systems for decades.

2) Announce the latest set of integrated systems. While these sytems are not necessarily ground-breaking from a new technology point-of-view, they do make it easier for clients to deploy systems, make it less expensive, make it easier to get support, etc. So there are tangible benefits for clients. The event really highlighted business value, rather than technology.

3) Highlight the fact that IBM’s approach is fundamentally different from the Oracle one-size-fits-all Exadata approach.

4) Show some of the cool work around workload-optimized systems that is happening in IBM Research.

5) Let clients tell their own story about why they switched from Oracle to DB2, and what their experiences have been.

On this last point… we didn’t want to be another vendor making loud and baseless claims. Instead, we let our client and partner panels tell their own stories. And this is where the meat of the event lay. In the stories that evolved as the audience at the event asked their questions about why those clients left Oracle, about their migration experience, and about the benefits they are now seeing.

The actual presentations evidently were a whole lot of me-too, showing that IBM can run Oracle applications and/or can exploit bundled hardware configurations. In a few cases they showed that new IBM equipment ran things faster than old non-IBM equipment, or something like that.

The press releases — i.e. the marketing messages — were worse than that.

CAM

Just searching for #ibmsmartsys on twitter I quickly stumble upon Noel from Forrester.
http://twitter.com/nyuhanna

Now I don’t know who sees whom as how important or relevant in this world of opinion making.
But I’m told he ain’t a pushover.

Again, I’m just a techy who thinks what he does is far from lame. It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of IBM marketing.

Cheers
Serge

A strong majority of his comments on my blogs are very helpful.

Among the press and analysts I most respect, IBM is a joke for its habit of announcing the same thing multiple times and claiming each reiteration is noteworthy.

Other vendors do that too, but IBM is one of the worst offenders.

Anyhow, the press releases talked a lot about ecology, performance, and so on, without persuasive details, plus partner financing. The latter is surely newsworthy for the partners. Otherwise, I didn’t see much substance.