A few days ago, IBM introduced Informix v11.7, code named “Panther”. I will not cover the technical details of this version, plenty of our friends already spoke about it  and a lot more.

I wanted to highlight the changes going in the sales and marketing within IBM and why the best Informix release will be even better.

Although I am an IT engineer (read technician), I now run a company of over 15 people. You need to open a little bit your mind on “other” subjects such as sales, marketing and human resources… I skipped finance as you may have noticed .

GreenIvory builds rock-solid, feature-rich, technology-based products. Both MashupXFeed and VoiceObserver are technology masterpieces, but this is not why we manage to sell them. It was hard for a technology savvy guy like me to understand that. Now that I got the message (and hopefully apply it), I am shocked by companies not applying those basic rules to promote their products.

This has been the case for a while with IBM Informix. They always had a great team of engineers and they always managed to build great products… but until recently, they were still selling like in the 80s, when the company was created: “our engine supports 32K rows, theirs is limited to 16K”, “we are limited to 128 peta-bytes database, theirs can go to whatever size”. Of course, as it’s IBM, they don’t mention the “others”, but you get the example.

Things are changing and IBM sales and marketing is now more efficient. I see the efforts from worldwide team to promote this great database engine. I still don’t know what I can officially speak of, but the future looks promising on this side too.