Jerry,

During the SWG dog and pony show one of the messages made by the head Chicago Exec was how proud he was as an IBM shareholder and that it would be a good idea to hold on to that IBM stock.

An interesting message and its inappropriateness says a lot.

The fact that the 'blue stack' was DB2 centric, says a lot too.

The fact that they did a very poor job of addressing Hadoop and how IBM's technologies complement it..

At best this dog and pony show showed IBM's attempt of tying hardware and SWG together since Steve owns both.

On the good news for IBM... there looked to be about 40 people where the bulk of those attending were IBMers. A couple of large customers where there but they didn't appear to be technical so they would probably buy in to thefluff.

But here's the message you now need to counter...
If you're running IDS, what database should I move to?
You know the customer list.
You know what happened with SAP.

You also know or should suspect what happens when a customer no longer trusts their vendor.

I predict that when Sam leaves, the shite will hit the fan and the house of cards that IBM built will crumble.
If Mills was smart, he may want to take a bow and not inherit Sam's mess.Now with Moffat gone... who's on the short list?

But hey, what do I know?
Its not like I haven't tormented CEOs and their crew in the past!

L8r

-G