Oracle response to IBM's $1 billion buy of Informix: good read.

Free migration tools! and you might actually come out better by buying Sybase, then getting the 50% discount to convert to Oracle... hmmm.

Oracle's response

As a result of IBM's purchase of Informix, Oracle has decided to accelerate by a week its
announcement of an Informix migration program, Oracle officials said Tuesday.

Last week, Oracle announced a Sybase migration program; on Monday, Oracle announced a DB2 migration
program. In all cases, Oracle is making migration tools available for download. At the same time,
it is offering customers of its competitors' databases a rebate amounting to 50 percent of the
price they spent for Informix, Sybase or IBM databases, said Bob Shimp, senior director of database
marketing for Oracle.

Oracle also has instituted over the past few months similar migration programs for Microsoft SQL
Server and MySQL, he said. To date, the largest number of migration-code downloads are for SQL
Server, Shimp said.

"IBM will do anything to keep us from getting our database announcements out
on our schedule,"
joked Shimp.

Shimp, expectedly, pooh-poohed the benefits to IBM of its Informix purchase.

"IBM bought a whole bunch of problems, which they will spend most of their
time reconciling, rather
than on being able to integrate the technologies," Shimp claimed.

Shimp said Oracle is anticipating the uncertainties created by the IBM-Informix deal will
accelerate the pace of customers looking to migrate away from Informix to Oracle.

Shimp said that IBM will now be forced to manage eight different source trees: three DB2 source
trees and five Informix database ones. (Note: Informix owns a number of different database products
it has obtained through acquisition, including products from Red Brick, Illustra and others.)

IBM and Informix, predictably, had a different take on the effects of the purchase.

Additional reporting by Sonia R. Lelii of eWEEK

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