truggling after a disastrous first quarter, Informix Corp. at its annual user group meeting last week in San Francisco bolstered its product development strategy and tapped a new CEO to realign the company.
Phil White, who maintains his role of chairman, relinquished his CEO title to Bob Finocchio, former president of 3Com Corp.'s enterprise systems businesses. Finocchio has a tough job ahead. "Bob's supposed to do for us exactly what he did for 3Com," says White. "[3Com] is a multibillion-dollar business, with good infrastructure, good management, predictable growth. Those are the things we need here."
Finocchio says his first priority will be to improve Informix's internal operations to make the company's performance "more predictable." Other priorities, in order, will be to establish financial stability, articulate a market strategy, fill vacancies in the management team, and build on existing partnerships.
Core Plans
Key to Informix's turnaround are pla
ns to refocus attention on its core database, Online Dynamic Server; bolster sales of its Universal Server object-oriented database by providing migration tools; and ship NT versions of Universal Server and Online XPS, a parallel database (IW, July 21, p. 28). "One year ago, we thought NT was the enemy," says White. "Now we think it is an opportunity."
Brett Bachman, general manager of Informix's enterprise products business unit, expects 15% of the company's revenue to come from NT products by the end of 1998.
Informix users hope the company can get back on track. "They have to shake things up," says Eric Priebe, senior engineer for Radiix Inc., a network integrator in Ann Arbor, Mich. "They're doing what they have to do after concentrating too much on the growth path."
Despite lackluster sales of Informix's Universal Server, which began shipping in December, White asserts that demand will grow with help from vendors pursuing object-oriented computing. "We couldn't change the industry, but we thi
nk Intel will," says White. With Intel making the desktop multimedia-ready with its MMX technology, the prevalence of video and other new data types will prompt a need for products like Universal Server, White says.
But Frank Gillett, analyst for the Hurwitz Group Inc. in Newton, Mass., says "MMX technology will benefit Universal Server sales but that will take a few years. In the meantime, Informix will have to stand on its own."
The company is signing up partners for the multimedia database. Informix says 42 DataBlades, or database extensions, are in development for the NT version of Universal Server. This will let users build an object warehouse of video, audio, mapping, graphics, and other data types.
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truggling after a disastrous first quarter, Informix Corp. at its annual user group meeting last week in San Francisco bolstered its product development strategy and tapped a new CEO to realign the company.
