Informix Corp continued its determined up-hill struggle yesterday, raking in a $19m profit for the third quarter as sales shot up 24%, to $93m, from the year ago period. At 10 cents a share, the results beat Wall Street expectations by 4 cents, according to First Call. This is the second consecutive profitable quarter for the Menlo Park, California-based company that has struggled to compete against rivals Oracle Corp and IBM Corp. Revenues rose 23% to $185.2m from the $150.2m posted in the year-ago quarter, and increased 6% from the $174.2m recorded in the prior quarter. Although the company did not give a specific breakdown for individual segments, chief executive, Bob Finocchio said the third quarter results represented a significant stride in executing our plans to expand our data warehousing division. He said the market was entering a phase of broad adoption and that there was increasing demand for the software across all vertical segments. As for the its web content division, Finocchio said the customer base is still small today but that the market for industrial strength web sites is beginning to emerge. Perhaps most significantly, license revenue growth, a closely watched measure of profitability in the software sector, rose 24% to $96.3m from a year ago and 12% from the second quarter. And service revenue grew 22% from the third quarter of 1997 to $88.9m; a slight increase from the prior quarter’s $88.2m. While Finocchio said he was pleased with the overall results he admitted that Informix still had a lot of work to do. He added that the company’s priority would be to continue to grow the license base from here on in.
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