Positioning
IBM has several database products with capabilities which overlap in some areas. Informix is often compared to IBM's other major database product, DB2, which is offered on the mainframe Z series platform as well as on Unix and Linux. Speculation that IBM would combine Informix with DB2, or with other database products has proven to be unfounded.
IBM has instead continued to expand the variety of database products they offer, through the acquisition of SolidDB, an in-memory database, and Netezza a data warehouse appliance. They have described their approach to the market as providing "workload optimized systems".
Informix is generally considered to be optimized for environments with very low or no database administration, including use as an embedded database. It has a long track record of supporting very high transaction rates and providing uptime characteristics needed for mission critical applications such as manufacturing lines and reservation systems. Informix has been widely deployed in the retail sector, where the low administration overhead makes it useful as an in-store deployment.
Read more about this topic: IBM Informix
Famous quotes containing the word positioning:
“Genius differs from talent not by the amount of original thoughts, but by making the latter fertile and by positioning them properly, in other words, by integrating everything into a whole, whereas talent produces only fragments, no matter how beautiful.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)