How to maximise the value and ROI of your IBM Informix database

The value of IBM Informix  

Informix databases collect and store enormous amounts of data, and their resilience through vast real-time data transactions has made them a vital system for many of the world’s leading businesses over the past 30 years.  

Whether you’re a retailer, financial institution, a manufacturing enterprise or any other organisation using Informix, you’re supported by one of the most capable databases around. Informix databases underpin high-volume databases, such as online gaming and sports betting websites, or retail and e-commerce platforms.

IBM Informix is known for being a particularly performant, versatile, and scalable database. If you’re an Informix user, you’ve likely had the system in place for at least a decade, and it’s still serving you today with speed and low latency through extremely high-volume transactions.

Should you consider moving away from Informix?  

In addition to those benefits, many businesses continue to use Informix because of the sheer importance of its role within their IT estate.  

With Informix playing such a crucial role in critical – often customer-facing – business processes, implementing Informix databases, or migrating away from them, is no small undertaking.

Still, some clients do ask us about the possibility of moving away from Informix and migrating to a different platform. With new, arguably more agile databases being released, it’s an understandable question to ask. However, in most cases, this is something we strongly advise against.  

Why?  

Since most organisations with an Informix database have had it for a very long time, it’s a very high-risk task to replace it. For instance, you may have 20 years’ worth of data, software development, integrations, and customer-facing processes running on an Informix database.

Switching that off to migrate everything to a new platform brings an extremely high risk of down-time, complications, and lost revenue.  

Overcoming common challenges with Informix  

As with any technology, there are some challenges which you may have faced with the Informix.  

• Informix’s power, age, and design make it a complex system to work with. Consequently, good database administrators (DBAs) who capable of managing Informix effectively are becoming increasingly hard to come by.  
• Informix licensing is a specialist skill. This requires personnel who are well versed in the nuances of the Informix system itself, as well as the licensing rules that dictate license optimisation and cost reductions.  

1. Cost-efficient management and maintenance  

Managing and maintaining your Informix database is a bit of a double-edged sword.  

Its complexity prevents the average DBA from working with it. This means you need experienced experts, which are rare, and that rarity makes them expensive. Of course, Informix is also often a mission-critical system, so those (expensive) employees need to be on-call 24/7 in case anything goes wrong.  

24/7 management and maintenance can’t be done by just one person, so most organisations need a team of at least three to keep this up. The reality is that most DBAs are likely to share duties across multiple databases, but even this assumes you have been able to find three DBAs who are capable of working with Informix. Such skilled employees are extremely hard to come by these days and we expect that these skills will become even rarer in future.  

Many times, in recent years, we’ve seen businesses lose their Informix specialists and find it impossible to replace them, leaving them at severe risk of damaging down-time and losses of revenue.  

For these reasons, the most cost-efficient way to manage and maintain your Informix database is to work with an external managed service provider who can deliver specialists on-call 24/7, without the costs or other implications of employing anyone full-time.

Partners who can offer Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) technology can also manage your Informix database with always-on, intelligent automation and predictive analytics, whether it’s hosted in a private cloud, like the Claranet cloud, in the public cloud, or self-hosted within your own infrastructure.  

Since many organisations struggle to find the specialist talent (along with the requisite budget) to manage their Informix database, they choose a helpful MSPs who can offer DBaaS, to significantly reduce costs and remove much of the hassle.  

2. Minimising licensing costs  

While Informix stands out for its power and capabilities, the licensing costs can be somewhat difficult to understand. Very few databases like Informix come with public-facing pricing catalogues, so you may not have even been aware of how much your Informix database cost you when you procured it.  

That’s not to say Informix is particularly expensive. In many cases, it’s not. But if your licenses aren’t being managed carefully, you could be paying more than you need to.  

Once again, Informix is such a unique and specific system that you ideally need specialists to manage these licenses for you, particularly if you want to minimise your spending. This involves monitoring the database’s usage and keeping your licensing provisions up-to-date on a regular basis.  

Some organisations who don’t manage this may become liable to fines from IBM, as is common with systems like these.  

Informix usage must comply with IBM’s terms of service. If your usage or licenses fall outside these terms, IBM will likely conduct an audit. Failing that audit could lead to your organisation receiving a fine.

Unlike SaaS products, which are architected and designed so the number of users cannot exceed the maximum number of licences, it’s possible to exceed the maximum number of users with Informix, or use your database in a way which breaks compliance.  

It should be a priority to achieve and maintain effective licence provisioning (ELP) with Informix, to ensure you remain compliant with IBM’s terms of service. This is another challenge that requires dedicated, system-specific skills.   

Maximising the value and ROI of your Informix database

It’s crucial for businesses to gain as much ROI from IT systems as possible, reducing costs and minimising the risk of losing business continuity. This is perhaps more important than ever today, with such fierce competition raging across every industry, and an increasingly volatile financial climate.  

To briefly recap, if you want to maximise the value and ROI of your Informix database, you need to:  

• Ensure it’s being managed and maintained in a reliable, expert, yet cost-efficient way
• Ensure your usage and licensing are effectively provisioned, while remaining compliant  

The best way to achieve both those goals is to work with an experienced external partner who can provide Informix-specific expertise alongside DBaaS capabilities, available 24/7, at the fraction of the cost of a full-time team.  

This allows you to fill the skills gaps around your Informix database, while improving ROI and removing unnecessary costs, stress, and complexity. With the support of a specialist team of Informix experts, you can focus on your business, without worrying about your mission-critical data-driven processes. 

Claranet has a highly skilled team of Informix specialists who can provide on-call expertise 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.  

Our intelligent, automated DBaaS management allows us to be proactive, rather than reactive, preventing any down-time or over-spending before it occurs. That also includes daily health checks and a wealth of additional value-added services.  

And we’re one of a small handful of IT service providers able to work directly with Informix licenses.  

To learn more about how we could help you maximise the value and ROI of your Informix database, get in touch with our team.