Today marks the 10th anniversary of Informix as part of IBM. While IBM has purchased many software companies since 2001, Informix represents the only other major DBMS (besides DB2) in IBM's Data Management portfolio. Informix has had a proud tradition of innovations, as seen in the attached diagram.
Starting with the Dynamic Scalable architecture which dates back to the early 1990's where multi-threading was inherent and features such as Data Fragmentation came as early as the late 1990's. Beyond that, the product included key replication features for Enterprise Replication (ER), High Availability Data Replication (HDR) leading up to the release of Flexible Grid in 11.70. That release also includes significant warehousing capabilities by completing the "Arrowhead" project that was started prior to the IBM acquisition. With the recent addition of the Informix Warehouse Accelerator, Informix now provides a highly performant, highly reliable database platform for OLTP and Business Analytics workloads with minimal administration.
We have also seen a resurgence of interest in the Extensibility features that have been part of the product since its acquisition of Illustra. The Time-Series capabilities has now found tremendous popularity in the Smart-Metering market resulting in wide acceptance within the Energy & Utilities industry segment. And with the thousands of customers running on 4GL, the recent release of Informix Genero is providing them with new ways to modernize their application environments.