Dear Colleages and Friends,

Friday 8/13 is my final official day at IBM.  After much deliberation, I have decided to retire from IBM to spend more time with my family, pay better attention to my health, and pursue some new adventures.  After a short vacation, it will be a shock to have no office, no commute, no email, no SameTime, no teleconferences and no paycheck!

DataStage and Information Server have been an incredible roller-coaster ride.  As an architect in an industry where products come and go in mere days, I count myself very fortunate to have been in the right time and place with a good idea.  To have built a product that has not only lasted and grown for 14 years, but is still growing stronger and more relevant, is rare and something of which we can all be proud.

It is said that "Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration".  I am delighted to have shared both with you.  All the acquisitions and mergers along the way brought together not only technologies and markets, but especially all of you.  It takes a team to succeed, with many diverse skills all working together toward the same goal.  It is no small thanks to our leadership and senior management over the years that we established and maintained the "ruthless focus" needed for success.

To the original DataStage developers in Milton Keynes/UK, I remain in awe.  In a mere six months in 1996 you turned a vision in a slide deck, a "paper prototype" and a document into a professional game-changing product.  You defined the words "focus" and "productivity".  I salute Dave Meeks who wrote the first serious Data Stage jobs and kept us honest.  To the whole Milton Keynes UK crew, you have kept up the momentum through all these years through the many twists and turns.  

One of my favorite anecdotes is when an early rev of DataStage was shown at a trade show.  An IT developer dragged his boss over and exclaimed "See, this is exactly what we need!"  After watching the demo, the boss promptly pulled out his American Express black card to buy one on the spot, forcing Rodger Morrill to scramble to figure out how to get the credit card transaction approved.  DataStage and Information Server are just that kind of product, as evidenced by the huge crowds at our IOD demo centers.

To my fellow original core Information Server architects, , I say that, despite many challenges, our vision was and continues to be right on.  The family architecture was intended to enable continual incorporation of new capabilities, and to deliver the cumulative value of lots of creativity and effort, and that remains essential.  To architects who have joined the team, I encourage you to let that successful vision continue to guide your work.

To folks in the field, development may have built the tools but you delivered the value.  A good architecture enables others to add their creativity and value to improve the whole.  The things you have done with the product that we never anticipated continue to amaze me.  

To IBM I say "Ascential was an excellent acquisition".  It strengthened a great product family, enabled it to reach many more customers, brought many more talented people and technologies into the family, and sustained its strength as the industry's top information integration product family.  Your premiere leadership role in the industry and your ability to bring a wealth of technology to bear to solve the world's problems is unmatched and awesome, and I am pleased that DataStage and Information Server became a big part of that.  I am thoroughly impressed with the "Smarter Planet" initiative, not least because it demands exactly what we do best.  DataStage and Information Server deserve to continue to be the consolidating and unifying environment for IBM's information capabilities.

To our old and new competitors, I salute you.  You kept us on our toes and kept the bar high.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery:  it has been heartening to watch you continually follow our lead and play catch-up.

To my colleagues, I say that DataStage and Information Server, despite their longevity, have ever increasing value in a world where information volume, variety and velocity continue to explode, and where information has become a strategic business asset.  Even as the challenges and the shapes of solutions evolve, data integration is a forever problem that will fuel continued growth and relevance of the best product family and technology in the market.  

To the Information Server leadership team, our recent strategy summit confirmed for me that I leave DataStage and Information Server in exceptionally capable hands to continue and grow in value and relevance.  Take good care of my baby (sob, sniff).

To each of you I have worked with, thank you.  I have learned something from you and I hope you believe I listened to you.  Watching my sons' sports adventures, I learned that although individual stars can win individual games, it takes a team to win championships.  You have many more championship seasons to come.

Well, it has been a great, once-in-a-lifetime adventure, which you will get to continue.  With pride in our successes, and much anticipation and excitement, I put on my backpack, pick up my walking stick, and head out to explore some new passions.

I leave you with my favorite Stephen Covey principle:  "Seek first to understand, then to be understood."  Only by listening to each other can we succeed as a team.

Long Live DataStage!