Hi Joel,
Here's the latest about IFMX:
An Interview with Phil White of Informix -- by Rod Newing, The Financial Times,
Wednesday October 2, 1996
DATABASE WAR DECLARED
Informix, a leading database systems vendor, has spent $400m on Illustra,
a $5m turnover company. Informix aims to win a technical lead over competitors
by extending its relational database to incorporate objects. Phil White, Chief
Executive of Informix, outlines his strategy.
His aim is audacious: "We want to take the contents of filing cabinets, e-mail
machines, voice machines, PCs and so on and put them all into one place on
a database server box," says Mr White.
"When we do, there will be a paradigm shift in the way people think about
managing information and utilising it to run their businesses and improve
productivity. We will transform the industry with a dramatic and compelling
change."
Informix re-invented itself in 1994 and had a record year in 1995. Now
it intends to re-invent itself again using object relational technology.
The World Wide Web is driving new information types and content, which
is the real rationale for the merger with Illustra.
Illustra's object relational content management system will be integrated
into Informix's core parallel database technology to create the Informix
Universal Server.
"Object databases have had little success because they are difficult to
migrate to, and have poor performance," explains Mr White. Illustra's
object relational design gives us a technology lead, because other database
vendors will have to re-architect their products to compete with us. At
Informix, we now have the two greatest database architects in the world.
Mike Saranga who designed MVS and DB2 when he was at IBM and Michael
Stonebreaker, who designed both Ingres and Illustra."
He adds:"We have the scaleability and performance of the relational database
and extend it with the ability to add unstructured and new types of data.
Only about 15% of data in day-to-day operations is numbers and characters.
The rest is voice, image, graphics, and so on.
The extension of the relational database to cover these is a simple but
elegant solution called DataBlades."
A DataBlade is a software module which supports a particular type of data.
It can be written by Informix, third parties or by users.
ESRI is writing a geographic mapping Datablade and Verity is producing a
text Datablade. Consultants can write industry-specific DataBlades.
Mr White expects that there will be a hundred different choices by the end
of 1996 --and 1,000 later.
"Whereas our competitors want customers to use a separate database for
each type, we can add pictures, images and text to users existing applications
without them being re-architected. This will make users more productive," he says.
A bigger opportunity which Mr White anticipates is that incorporating rich
formats into a data warehouse will provide organisations with the ability
to 'mine' their unstructured data.
"We were coming up against Illustra in the market place, not IBM, Oracle or
Sybase," explains Mr White. "People liked Illustra, but it wasn't scaleable.
Companies such as Silicon Graphics wanted our scaleability and strategy.
Our potential customers liked both products and asked us to get together.
I bought the company when I could get used to the idea of paying $400m for
a $5m-turnover company.
"When we announced it, the analysts estimated that we had an 18-20 month lead.
If it is only half that, it is still a lifetime in this industry. The
investment is worth it for the lead it will give us," he says.
"Informix Universal Server will be with some customers in the third quarter,
but when it ships in the fourth quarter we will change the industry.
"Larry Ellison [CEO of Oracle Software] says you can't put a boat and a
plane together, but we had the best brains in the industry looking at it for
a year before we went with Illustra.
"We don't believe anybody can extend their products without 're-architecting'
them. Ellison is putting four separate products together, which Stonebreaker
describes as three warts and a bandaid."
Mr White is cautious about the latest industry fashion, the network computer
--"Ellison and everybody else wants a lightweight client, but the $500
personal computer (with hard and floppy disks) has made it lose its impetus,"
he says.
"When I was at Wyse, we built a diskless PC, but people wanted to store data
and applications locally. In selected applications, the network computer will
be of great benefit. However, with more users accessing richer data we should
benefit as much, if not more, than Oracle."
Mr White, who recently received the 'Legend in Leadership' award from the
Nasdaq stock Market and the Center for Leadership and Career Studies, has
identified a much more ionteresting potential client for databases. He
became interested in smartcards two years ago and carries one in his pocket
all the time --"I realised that it gave us the opportunity to program data on
to a card securely. It could be the next client. We have a consortium with
Gemplus and Hewlett Packard to build a personal information card."
Gemplus is a leader in smartcard production, manufacturing 55 million a month;
Hewlett Packard is providing security and Informix is contributing CQL, a
card query language, which is a class library based on a subset of Informix's
development language.
Fifty people are working on the project and six pilot projects are being launched.
The cards will be a store of preferences for services such as car hire, hotels
and air travel. The cards, when used, will be linked to Informix databases on
servers. This will provide a new opportunity for Informix to expand the market
for Universal Server. Peoplesoft is building applications for universities and
want a smartcard for parking, security, cafeteria.
In the IT industry, technical superiority has frequently failed to translate to
market leadership. Informix must communicate its marketing message clearly and
strongly if it is to benefit from the technological lead which it believes Illustra
has given it. The key to this will be Informix's partners, whom Mr White believes
have the ability to add value to their applications which will give him an
advantage in 1997.
However, he has no doubts about his ability to do this: "Informix will be the biggest
database vendor in the world in five years and the preferred supplier for users
of database technology."
copyright 1996 - The Financial Times.
Regards,
Gustave. |
