To: Mark Finger who wrote (11039 ) 6/14/1998 1:14:00 AM From: Howard Armstrong Read Replies (2) | Respond to
Here is an explanation of the Informix product line: "Informix Dynamic Server" is the version 7.3 relational database product. It's a nice product, but MSFT and IBM have driven prices and margins down for RDBMS, and ORCL remains the market leader. "Universal Data Option" is what used to be called Informix-Universal Server 9.0. It is actually a different version of the database server, not an add-on.(It is marketed as an add-on to copy Oracle's product marketing strategy.) There are a few datablades available for it (geospatial, text, images), but the 3rd-party datablade program has stagnated for over a year due to a lack of sales of this product. There is a version of Universal Data Option for NT, but the original datablade/Illustra stuff was designed for UNIX. "Extended Parallel Option" looks like the old XPS 8.0 product ... again, a completely different version of the server that runs on massively parallel machines like the IBM SP and the Sequent NUMA. The market for massively parallel machines never materialized, and therefore sales of XPS never materialized either. "Advanced Decision Support Option" is the old Stanford Technology Metacube product (an OLAP product acquired by IFMX in 1995) along with what looks to be decision support indexing capability. "Informix Dynamic 4GL" is actually an idea tried by IFMX 5 years ago ... to have old 4GL programs run on PCs. The product was called Informix-4GL/GX 5 years ago, and this "new" product looks like the marketing of a 3rd-party compiler. They've given up completely on Informix-NewEra. Once again, I ask how IFMX will recover when they've had no successful new products for 5 years???!!! ... and they keep re-stating earnings !!????
