IBM Marketing: Moving Full Speed Ahead!

The IBM Marketing machine is accelerating the rollout of our technology with the “Simple Database Consolidation” roadshow. IBM is targeting senior executives in major North American cities to promote our database consolidation technology. The venues are baseball stadiums where there is usually a series of presentations followed by some networking activities and a baseball game. This is certainly a significant investment from IBM.

Last Wednesday April, 20 was in Wrigley Field, Chicago. The day started at 9 AM, with presentations on the value of leveraging SQL Skin (ANTs) to migrate to DB2. Speakers included Noel Yuhanna from Forrester Research, Barrett Boston from IBM, Bernie O’Conner from Anixter, and Tom Holdener from BJC Healthcare.

The highlight of the day was customers learning first-hand how to leverage ANTs Software to rehost applications on IBM DB2 without having to rewrite code. Customers and IBM execs were also excited to walk on the field during batting practice, and watch the 11^th inning Chicago Cubs victory from the IBM luxury suite with Hall of Famer Ernie Banks.

Some key customer learning of the presentations:

• Independent Analyst Forrester Research called this the “next generation of migration”. This will become the defacto standard” of the industry. In his view, ANTs migrated 98% of applications without any change. Instead of 6 months, things would be migrated “in hours”.
• In addition to the huge cost savings, another benefit is that companies often have “code freezes” during migration periods. In other words, during a 6-month window new features cannot be rolled out, holding up progress within the company. With ANTs, if you reduce this 6-month window to hours or days then you give the company months of time for application updates and progress.
• Barrett Boston, and IBM Exectuive, said he prefers the term “Application Enablement” to better describe what ANTs is doing over the term “migration” which is how things used to be done.
• One of the presenting customers was thrilled with his ANTs experience, and may be flying to Los Angeles to speak again at our next event. He said ANTs migrated 93% right away, and 5% more was no big deal.
• Tom Holdener from BJC Healthcare made a video that was shown. It was a very strong and positive video.

Thanks to our board member Ari Kaplan, currently with the Chicago Cubs organization, who spent several hours mingling and making sure everyone was taken care of.

Regards,

Joe.

 

PS:Below are some pictures from the event.

IBM and customers on the field during batter practice:

The presentation at the United Club, Wrigley Field:

 

Here are customers and the IBM team and on their way down to the field:

 

Comments

[Brad]

Glad to hear IBM is back marketing the SQL Skin Joe. Great idea for leading into summer!

[Tim]

Joe, glad to see that ANTs and IBM is moving "full steam ahead".

In you March shareholder letter, you mentioned a three month pause, which probably also delayed any new customer signings. Now that it appears that is behind us, will we be seeing some new customer announcements soon?

Go ANTs!