Janet Perna's Letter to IIUG
ENews, March 3rd, 2003

Dear IIUG Membership:

As we enter 2003, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your support last year and give you an update on the progress we have made with the Informix products in 2002. Overall, IBM Data Management revenue grew double-digits last year despite a difficult economy. This growth was fueled by new applications such as Enterprise Content Management and Business Intelligence, as well as growth in our core database business. We continued to ship enhancements to the Informix database products and we shipped a new version of DB2 Universal Database which contained a number of Informix compatibility features. You can learn more about these releases by visiting http://www.ibm.com/software/data/informix. These new product releases included:

• Informix I-SQL v7.31
• Informix 4GL v7.31
• XPS v8.4
• Red Brick v6.2
• IBM Informix Geodetic DataBlade Module v3.11
• OnLine Extended Edition v5.2
• IBM Informix Spatial DataBlade Module v8.20.

Marketing was also busy last year as we launched a number of marketing tactics targeted at Informix customers and partners. Here is a recap of a few of them:

• The Informix eNewsletter, which has over 3000 subscribers
• E-mail notes from senior Data Management executives, sent to over 80,000 people worldwide
• The InfoBahn Road Show, which touched over 2,600 people in over 26 countries worldwide
• Telephone follow-up on XPS, Red Brick and IDS customers to inform them of the new releases available
• Various Webcasts, some hosted by the IIUG, others by IBM
• The first combined DM technical conference, incorporating Informix into the Data Management family.

With 2002 behind us, we are at work continuing to enhance our products in support of your business requirements. IDS 9.4 is on track to shipping March. Version 9.4 focuses on performance, scalability, availability, SQL compatibility and security. This release is designed to help IDS 7 customers upgrade to IDS 9 and take advantage of the new feature functionality. Beta customer reports have been extremely positive. Webcasts are planned for early March to educate customers and partners on the new functionality being offered in IDS v9.4. We'll ship a new release of Red Brick later this year as well.

In addition to new product releases, we'll continue to execute marketing tactics in support of our Informix products. Here are a few of the activities you can expect in 2003:

• Additional InfoBahn Road Shows
• Regular e-mail communications
• An integrated road map of how the Informix technology fits into the DB2 product family
• Informix Business Partner Forums

Once again, thank you for your support over the last year -- and I'm confident that by working together, 2003 will be even better.

Janet Perna
General Manager, Data Management
IBM Software Group