Informix at VendorRate

If you follow some Informix blogs, groups or sites, you probably already know that Informix earned Top Customer Satisfaction Score on VendorRate survey in Q3. If you're into press releases you can learn more at Business Wire. If you prefer to check the report directly you can find it here.

Informix received the maximum score achieved by any vendor (91) and was rated by more than 120 organizations accordingly to the study. "O"ther RDBMS vendor got 81. The rating covers several aspects (Recommend, Integrity, Communication, Timeliness, Usability, Reliability, Customer Service, Budget, Expertise and Effectiveness). Informix got 9 in all of them except for Reliability (10) and Budget (8).

This rating reflects customer opinions. They are not marketing, although they're probably be used for marketing... I can't say I'm surprised. We all know that Informix customers are loyal, and they're loyal simply because they know they're using a solid product.

Obviously, we tend to compare "our" goods with the competition. And to be honest, we can't say the competition looks bad. As expected, a vendor who has the largest market share is well rated in general... But being a curious fellow I decided to dig a bit deeper... And if you follow me you can also check interesting points:

• In the small companies category Informix is even better positioned. The direct competitor gets a lower rating than in the general rating. It doesn't even show on the table.
  This is not surprising considering the ease of administration and low total cost of ownership (TCO) of Informix
• Informix continues to achieve top score in the medium size companies. In this category, the second RDBMS place doesn't belong to the biggest competitor
• In the large enterprise category Informix still scores top ratings. The biggest competitor is in a close second place

This can lead to the conclusion that Informix is terribly good in all kinds of organizations. it simply does it's job, and you can count on top class vendor support.

Then, and just for fun, I decided to dig even deeper... I noticed that VendorRate was at the biggest competitor conference and issued a report based on data collected there.
Looking at this report we can also find very interesting (if not amusing) points:

• Informix was rated exceptional by the attendees (page 5)
• Informix was rated 2 points (93) above the quarterly VendorRate ratings (91) (page 10)

So, if people using our competition loves us, why shouldn't we?!