When IBM teamed up with perpetual startup, ANTs Software, to try and steal customers of our Adaptive Server Enterprise database, it reminded me of a popular children’s story. I know it’s a stretch; stay with me.
Based on an Aesop’s Fable, The Ant and the Elephant tells the story of an ant who gets stranded in the middle of a fast-flowing river and is saved by an elephant. After the elephant gets trapped in a ravine, the ant returns the favor.
There are some parallels between that story and IBM and ANTs. IBM had $104 billion in revenue last year. Lou Gerstner’s book about his tenure as CEO of IBM was titled Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?
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A little over a year ago, I covered the RS Customer Advisory Board meeting in New York City. It was an interesting discussion overall, but lately I have been reminded of how quickly technology changes and obsoletes entire architectures. One of the customers at that meeting stated that their company had a policy that all DR implementations would be based on disk replication provided by SAN vendors. He went on to state they planned to continue to use RS for migrations to ASE 15 as well as replicating into Sybase IQ. At the time I heard this, I couldn’t help but think despite the risks and downtimes that such a strategy exposed them to, there were a lot of customers implementing this same strategy – and due to recession could well understand why such an architecture would be considered reasonable to customers as it protected more than the DBMS.

Times change….oh, too quickly. Now, I am wondering if this strategy will be even around in 5 years.

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