Customer acceptance of new IMS versions is the best measure of its strategic value. In 2003, the IMS workload, as measured in the millions of instructions per second (MIPS) capacity of IMS systems, increased 67.9% on our latest versions. At the end of 2003, there was almost three times more work being done on our latest versions, Version 7 and Version 8, than on older versions, Versions 5 and Version 6, worldwide. Overall, in 2003, MIPS of IMS systems grew almost 20%. By midyear, IMS Version 7 surpassed IMS Version 6 as the most popular version, measured by number of licenses.

Overall, the growth of net new IMS licenses remained positive, fueled largely by expansions required because of mergers and acquisitions among existing customers (in the Americas and Europe) and the selection of IMS for new zSeries® footprints (predominantly by emerging opportunities in Asia). It is noteworthy that customers showed continued confidence in the future of IMS, during the years 2001-2003, when much of the rest of the IT industry was showing a downturn and retrenchment.

Who Uses IMS

Over 90 percent of the top world-wide companies in the following industries use IMS to run their daily operations:

• Manufacturing
• Finance
• Banking
• Retailing
• Aerospace
• Communications
• Government
• Insurance
• High technology
• Health Care

The following quote is an example of how one analyst¹ views IMS:

• A 35-year-old hierarchical database and transaction processing system is currently growing faster than the world's most popular relational database system. Pretty funny, huh?

  Actually, IMS is not forging new ground with innovative marketing or customer-acquisition strategies. It's more the other way around--it's keeping the same old customer base, but the base is growing, a lot. IMS and the mainframes it runs on underpin the vast majority of banks and banking transactions worldwide. And the banking world is growing. China alone may provide more growth in the next few years than the rest of world has in the last decade, and it is certainly not the only Pacific Rim country modernizing its banking system. Combine that kind of geographic growth with advances in online banking in the developed world and it's no wonder mainframes, especially IBM's newer zSeries machines, and IMS are growing. They're the only products capable of keeping up.

IMS is still a viable, even unmatched, platform to implement very large online transaction processing (OLTP) systems and, in combination with Web Application Server technology, it is the foundation for a new generation of Web-based, high-workload applications.

Here are some interesting facts about how IMS is used.

IMS manages a large percentage of the world's corporate data

• Over 95% of Fortune 1000 companies use IMS.
• IMS manages over 15 million gigabytes of production data.
• $2.5 trillion (in US dollars) per day is transferred through IMS by one customer.

IMS processes over 50 billion transactions per day

• IMS serves over 200 million users every day.
• IMS processes over 100 million transactions per day for one customer.
• IMS processes over 120 million transactions per day (7 million per hour) for another customer.
• IMS can process 21 000 transactions per second (over 1 billion² per day) using IMS data sharing and shared queues.
• A single IMS has processed over 6000 transactions per second over a single TCP/IP connection.

Related Reading: To learn more about the industries and customers that use IMS, visit the IMS Web site at www.ibm.com/ims, and click "Featured Customer", "IMS Newsletter", or "Overview".