IBM To Unleash Cheetah, The Next Informix IDS Release

Neil Truby, principal at Ardenta, a London-based IBM partner, concurs. "A lot of the online gaming companies here rely on IDS and see no reason to move away. IDS delivers very high throughput and availability," he noted.

The BBC and ITV television networks in the U.K. are also IDS users. "The attraction for them is also the high availability and throughput and also IDS' ability to help them deliver more and more content [and] image documents," he said.

When IBM bought Informix for $1.0 billion in the spring of 2001, Informix claimed 100,000 database customers, 35,000 of which were on IDS. Krishna said that number sounds about right now given that IBM is in active contact with 20,000 IDS customers.

Informix also fielded Red Brick for datamart applications and Cloudscape, a Java database that IBM subsequently embedded into some of its own products and open-sourced as Derby. IBM still offers Red Brick Warehouse as well.

Still, IDS gets nowhere near the ink or attention of IBM's DB2 database which, like IDS itself, runs on all the major operating systems. IBM maintains that the IDS customer base may not be huge, but it is deep, devoted and loyal, contentions both Truby and Flannery backed up.

Frank Cullen, principal at Blackstone & Cullen, an Atlanta-based database specialist who concentrates on Microsoft SQL Server work, says he rarely sees IDS in competitive bids.

"There used to be pockets of IDS out there but we haven't seen them in a few years," Cullen said. However, the SQL Server power base remains mostly in smaller businesses and in departments of large companies.