IBM Annual Report: Good News for DB2 DBAs

I sometimes enjoy reading through the annual reports of companies like IBM (that is, companies whose products I use "on the job"), so I thought maybe readers of my blog might enjoy that, too. With that in mind, IBM's annual report for 2006 is now up and available online.

What nuggets of information did I find in it? Well, I have to admit, I have not scoured it from front to back (and I probably won't), but I did try to track down the status of DB2 within the company. DB2 falls within IBM's Information Management brand, in their Middleware software segment. The annual report tells me that the Middleware software segment is doing better than the overall software category within IBM:

• The Middleware segment grew to $13.891 billion in 2006 from $12.552 billion in 2005. And that represents year over year growth of 10.7%.
• IBM's entire software portfolio posted revenue of $18.161 in 2006 versus $16.83 billion in 2005, representing a year over year growth of 7.9%.

OK, but what about DB2? The best I can do is all of Information Management, which include DB2, as well as IMS and Informix, and all of the data management tools that IBM sells. These products posted a 14% gain in 2006 over 2005. Nice...

In terms of hardware, though, IBM saw a slide in that market segment. The company posted revenue of $21.97 billion in 2006 down from the $23.857 billion posted in 2005. This is a 7.9% drop in annual revenue for hardware. But, you may well ask, we care about the mainframe more than those other platforms, how did it do?

It did well, my friends. Of the four major computer brands sold by IBM, the z series boxes (that is, the mainframes) did the best. System z was up 7.8% over 2005. Its closest competitor was System x (UNIX servers) which was up 3.7%. Bad news for the other two computing platforms: System i (that is, the AS/400s) was down 15% and System p (Windows servers) was down 1.1%.

So, if you are my kinda people - that is, DBAs working on DB2 for z/OS - then IBM's annual report contains good news all around. The DBMS business is healthy and so is the mainframe business.