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Technology Stocks : IFMX - Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MJ who wrote (12056)	10/15/1998 12:27:00 PM
From: Howard Armstrong	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14631

"Like tying together two one-legged men and expecting to get a dancer like Fred Astaire." - Phil White, former IFMX CEO, 1994 (after the SYBS-Powersoft merger). RedBrick has interesting and fast indexing technology to make queries to large databases (data warehouses) faster. However, the product is tremendously lacking in features and functionality compared to other RDBMS like ORCL and IFMX. Using parallel query, ORCL and IFMX can get performance close enough to RedBrick, without sacrificing features. Also, the data warehouse market did not take off as expected. This is why RedBrick's share price is below $2. IFMX has been trying to create data warehouse indexing technology in-house and has clearly failed. They also tried to add object features to their database, and failed at that too. (hence they purchased Illustra, and are trying to buy RedBrick.) Adding RedBrick index technology to the Informix product would be a lengthy and expensive process. It would make IFMX faster than ORCL on certain queries, but the performance difference would not be enough to beat the ORCL juggernaut. It does nothing to help IFMX win deals involving transaction processing (e.g. SAP deals, order processing, sales force automation, accounting, manufacturing, etc etc etc.). Don't expect this merger to add much to IFMX sales. Although profitable (for now), IFMX sales are declining at a 20% clip, making large enterprise sales difficult if not impossible. Companies don't want to make a big investment on a company that is falling off. Since the deal was made just 2 weeks before IFMX announces Q3 numbers, and the deal was based on the Oct 7 share price, I wonder what to expect from those numbers .... An act of despiration from two companies with nothing to lose.