IBM's Bob Picciano kicks off IDUG 2006 conference in Tampa

Robert J. Picciano, VP of Information Management Sales at IBM, delivered an optimistic keynote address today at the 2006 IDUG/IIUG North America conference in Tampa, FL. Here are some of the happy numbers he mentioned during his talk:

• 150+ IBM products use IBM Cloudscape as their embedded SQL database


• 2x growth of XML database investment over SQL databases industrywide


• $1B committed by IBM toward various new software investments


• 40% of all corporate data is stored as XML (at least temporarily)


• 150 business partners participated in the Viper closed beta


• 1.5x to 8.7x performance improvement realized in tests of Viper's compression features


• 70% of data management costs are for storage, which bodes well for Viper compression


• 19% of all respondents in a March 2006 Gartner survey intend to move to DB2 in the immediate future


• 35000 copies of DB2 Express-C have been downloaded from IBM's site


• 10000 copies of the PHP driver for DB2 have been downloaded

Informix (also referred to as IBM IDS) is still going strong, with solid market penetration in the retail sector and the US 911 phone system, among others. Picciano also introduced Arvind Krishna, a long-time IBMer who would be moving into the position held by Picciano prior to his recent promotion.

I thought I should also mention that IDUG is keeping a conference blog as well.