Friends and those who could be... I've had more than a few years to think about the double-edged "value proposition" that "extended relational database" systems offer.
Few of us actively immersed in developing and /or using "extended relational databases" can complain of their efficacy, reliability or supportability. Unfortunately the fact that they are economical to buy, economical to support and have low horsepower requirements did little to make the average IBM salesperson promote either uniVerse or uniData to prospective clients, especially when they were focused on acheiving sales quotas and six figure bonus awards. It's a brutal fact, that selling U2 and it's accompanying light-weight hardware requirements wasn't even a consideration in the minds of salespeople accustomed to selling big iron and full-time consulting to DB2 and Informix shops. Consider for a moment, the IBM salesman who sold a few DB2 systems in a year, along with heavyweight iron and easily made quota and a very nice bonus, thank-you. Big systems command big bucks and make a big imprint at the boardroom where everyone from the president on down knew that a sizeable investment was being made with IBM. One or two full-time IBM techs become "site-specialists" and were added to the company payroll. The CEO gets bragging rights at the golf course and the country club for making a 7+ million dollar investment. That's not bad. That's good, it keeps the economy moving. If the IBM salesperson were to however concentrate on selling "value priced" universe or unidata solutions where a few hundred users can be supported on pint sized hardware and the quotation comes in at possibly 8% of the cost of the DB2 solution, what happens? No one at the board level takes notice. No one gets bragging rights for a $560k investment as no one at "the club" would believe a system could be bought that cheaply. Since no IBM techs were added to the company payroll, and no big-iron was purchased, the IBM salesman would have to work very hard for a very long time and sell a record setting quantity of cheap PC's and uv licenses to every mom and pop shop and 10 cent store to make the monthly quotas. If you were a salesman who had to meet a monthly quota, what would you sell? It's an unfortunate fact of business (and life too), that cheap rarely garners respect (and that applies for most "walks" of life). I hope that Rocket Software finds an appropriate niche with their purchase of uniVerse and uniData. Looking forward, the logical direction that I see for Rocket Software, is marketing big-ticket applications that take advantage of extended relational (multi-dimensional) database solutions to achieve superb results for their customers, and earn far greater profit margins for themselves than most pick vendors ever envisioned - except for Ted Sabarese :-). Regards Lee Bacall Binary Star Development Corporation www.binarystar.com _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list [email protected] http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
