Informix spin-off allows expertise to flourish

By ADAM GIFFORD

Former Informix New Zealand manager James Rae says the database company's decision to split off its applications business into a different company is already paying off.

Mr Rae has just moved to Sydney to run the Australasian operations of the new company, Ascential Software.

"It's opened up the rest of the world for us. As Informix Corporation, the market saw us as a database company and any solutions we had were seen as Informix-centric," Mr Rae said.

Informix's general manager for Australia and New Zealand, Mike McKee, said staff were welcoming the return to being "the database company."

"We focus on the technology, so we are selling to IT people. Solutions are a different sale. You are dealing more with the business side, and different skills are required," Mr McKee said.

Many of Informix's database sales are driven by what application developers choose to write on, but Mr McKee said Informix was picking up business because of the way it was able to embed spatial data in a database.

Its Red Brick technology, which is designed for business analytics and data warehousing, is performing strongly.

Ascential's flagship products are DataStage, a tool which allows companies to suck data out of any database, and Media360, a web content management system.

Its business intelligence tools include i.Decide Web Success, which can collect, analyse and store legacy and internet data and is used for fast analysis of who is visiting an organisation's sites.

Mr Rae said Ascential already had non-Informix customers, including Carter Holt Harvey, which used DataStage to extract data from its SAP system, running on an Oracle database.

With 1500 customers worldwide and a similar number of staff, including 500 developers, Mr Rae said, Ascential is "a start-up with a kick start."

In its fourth quarter ended December 31, Ascential Software reported a 16 per cent increase in licence revenue to $US33.7 million ($82.5 million).

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