In today's WSJ - comments?
Informix Revamps Databases
With Approach to Multimedia
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
To tweak its much-larger rival, Informix Corp. regularly buys billboards on the freeway running beside Oracle Corp. headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif. One ad shows Oracle's glass office towers in a rear-view mirror.
"You just passed Redwood Shores, and so did we," the slogan reads.
That message, mere chutzpah for most of Informix's history, suddenly reflects a grain of truth. Informix is making good on a promise to deliver a major change in database technology, the fruits of a $400 million acquisition one year ago that was widely regarded as a dangerous gamble. Informix's so-called "Universal Server" software, to be formally unveiled Tuesday, represents a radical approach to the daunting task of managing pictures, video, sounds and other information besides words and numbers.
Many companies are plowing the same field. But at the moment, many analysts believe that Informix, based in Menlo Park, Calif., has won bragging rights over Oracle and others in what could become one of the most lucrative niches of the software business.
"This is a race to own the future," said Daniel Kusnetzky, an analyst with International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass., market-research company. "Informix is 12 to 18 months ahead of anybody else at the moment." Adds Phillip E. White, Informix's chief executive officer: "This stuff is going to change the way people think."
Databases store and retrieve records such as customer accounts and inventories, and manage transactions such as automatic teller machine withdrawals, airline reservations and telephone sales. The most widely used variety, called relational databases, are adept at matching pairs of files, such as a person's name with an account number. Oracle dominates, with nearly 44% of the $2.4 billion market in 1995 for the most popular variety of relational database, IDC's Mr. Kusnetzky estimates, compared with 16.9% for Sybase Inc. and 15.5% for Informix.
Multimedia Opportunities
But the push toward multimedia is creating new opportunities. The World Wide Web, in particular, is accelerating demand among companies to display images of consumer products for sale over the Internet, and to add pictures and sounds to information they store for internal use. Some companies already sell specialized programs to store Web pages and video images. But the industry's Holy Grail is to combine those complex types of data with the huge repositories of text and numbers contained in relational databases.
That's why Mr. White paid $400 million for Illustra Information Technologies Inc. The Oakland, Calif., startup, though it had less than $10 million in sales, combined relational database technology with another concept for storing data in interchangeable chunks called objects. This "object-relational" approach, as it's called, makes it easier for other companies to make software components for particular types of data that plug into the central database, like a blade snaps into a razor; Illustra called these components "datablades."
Mr. White vowed to merge the Illustra technology with the Informix relational database by the end of this year, a job that Oracle chief executive officer Lawrence Ellison once labeled "technically impossible and absurd." Yet Informix has already shipped test versions of the merged product to more than 30 companies, and expects to ship the first version of the finished program by Dec. 30.
About 50 datablades will be ready about that time, Mr. White predicts, with hundreds more on the way for handling documents, Web pages and various images. A company with a relational database of employee addresses, for example, could combine that information with computerized maps to plan car-pool routes or plan new corporate facilities. Excalibur Technologies Corp., Vienna, Va., says it is developing a datablade for indexing pictures of human faces, allowing users to search by characteristics such as size and shape of the nose or mouth, or use the technology to control access to a room.
"We think this should have a real impact on the market," says Matt Koll, president of Personal Library Software Inc., a Rockville, Md., company making a datablade for searching through text. "They've made a big deal about being on schedule."
On-Time Delivery
Informix's on-time delivery, unusual among major software suppliers lately, makes a telling contrast with Oracle. Mr. Ellison has been talking about object-relational technologies since 1993, when Oracle delivered its current database line and announced a successor called Oracle8. After repeatedly missing shipment dates, Oracle8 isn't now expected until mid-1997.
But Oracle has moved on several fronts to steal Informix's thunder. It used the name "Universal Server" for the current version of its own database. It even bought rights to the trademark, triggering a brief legal tussle. The two sides recently reached a settlement that allows both to use the name.
More recently, Oracle adopted its own technology that allows add-ons for Oracle8 called "data cartridges." Mark Jarvis, the company's vice president for server marketing, claims that Informix's approach could cause dangerous reliability problems for customers. A faulty datablade could cause entire database to fail, unlike the Oracle scheme, he says.
International Business Machines Corp. is already selling a database similar to Informix's without much impact, raising questions about how eager customers really are. "Quite honestly, the market is not screaming for object-relational technology today," Mr. Jarvis says.
Companies testing the Informix Universal Server are cautiously optimistic about the product. CS First Boston Inc., the CS Holding AG unit, expects to use the product for a global repository of the brokerage firm's research reports, says Michelle Kildunne, a director of its fixed-income trading. Sabre Decision Technologies, an AMR Corp. affiliate in Fort Worth, Texas, is evaluating the Informix software for a huge data warehouse of American Airlines planning and scheduling information -- quite a change for a company that mainly uses Oracle software now.
"With us being a big Oracle shop, you can be confident that Informix would have to have some substantial advantage before we would make that switch," says Brad Jensen, a Sabre vice president.
Matt McKenzie, an industry analyst at the market research firm Seybold Publications, contends the Informix technology is causing Oracle to rely on "vaporware" announcements -- announcements of dazzling, soon-to-come new products that are in reality a long way from being available -- to try to slow customers' purchasing decisions. "Oracle8 is still way behind," he says. "They will be beaten on like gongs if they don't get on with it."
Mr. White, for his part, is missing no opportunity to fire back at Oracle. "We are going to put our pedal to the metal and force them to actually ship a product," he gloats. "We have them right where we want them." |
