Informix Corp continued on the road to recovery yesterday, beating expectations by two cents a share for its second quarter, and reporting licensing revenue up 19% and service revenue up 18% compared to the same period last year. Still suffering from the disastrous accounting missteps of a few years ago which almost brought it to its knees, the database company ended up posting a loss of $79.5m for the quarter, due to a $97m charge for the settling of lawsuits arising from those problems. The cloud about our financial condition has been lifted said newly appointed president and CEO Jean-Yves Dexmeir, who took over from Bob Finocchio last Friday. He claimed the figures were evidence of a pretty healthy market.
Excluding the charge, Informix said it would have seen income of $17.5m, or $0.09 a share, compared with $12.3m $0.07 a share last year. Analysts surveyed by First Call had been predicting a $0.07 a share for this quarter. Revenue was up 19% to $206.8m from $174.2m last year. The quarter represented Informix’s sixth consecutive operating profit. Overall licensing revenue totaled $102.3m compared to $86m last year, and service revenue was $104.5m, up from $88.2m last year. Growth was strong in all geographic areas, though the US, accounting for $99.6m in revenue, saw the strongest growth rates of 24%. Europe ($67m) was up 17%, Asia-Pacific ($236m) up 11% and Latin America ($16.6m) was up 10%.
Informix is hoping to continue its recovery by moving into faster growing areas of the market. It has now made its i.Sell turnkey e-commerce software generally available, added new features to the Red Brick data mart technology it acquired last year, and expanded its relationships with partners in areas such as business intelligence and retail management. Business intelligence will be a key focus for the next phase of growth, said Dexmeir.
Currently holding its user group meeting in San Diego, Informix is in the process of unveiling Internet Foundation 2000, its alternative to Oracle Corp’s Oracle 8i internet database. It claims the product has been built from the ground up to meet the requirements of the internet, will be faster than competing products, and will require fewer costly consultants to get it running. Under development for the last three years, the product is Informix’s latest attempt to offer a fully functional object database that can also support high levels of transactions. Previous attempts, following the company’s acquisition of Illustra Information Technologies Inc in 1996, failed to make it to market.
Also being previewed at the user event this week is Yellowstone, Informix’s enterprise data warehousing engine, currently in its beta testing stage. Yellowstone is a new version of Informix’s extended parallel data engine, tightly integrated with its existing Decision Frontier set of data warehousing tools.
