Hewlett-Packard Co is moving in apparently mysterious ways at the moment making a little investment here and a little investment there, and the latest company in the computer industry to feel its benevolence is Informix Software Inc (CI No 1,606). Hewlett-Packard has agreed to buy up to 10% of Informix to cement a five-year agreement for joint development, marketing and sales of faster versions of Informix software and Hewlett-Packard hardware, particularly in the fields of software engineering and transaction processing. Now why it should choose to do this so hot on the heels of taking an indirect stake in Ingres via its 10% investment in Ask Computer Systems Inc appears puzzling. One thing is clear, however, and that is that from the Informix point of view it all makes perfect sense: the company has been endeavouring to address the weakness of functionality in its application development environment for a long time.
HyperScript
From its inception Informix had been a back-end database company, until that is it acquired Innovative Software Inc in 1988. Innovative had been very successful in developing office automation products for MS-DOS under the brand name SmartWare and Informix wanted front-end desktop applications. The acquisition was canny because development work was under way at Innovative on the Wingz software. Originally the idea was that the HyperScript technology used to develop the Wingz spreadsheet would be used to build other Wingz modules such as a word processor, but this has been put on hold at the moment. This is partly because SmartWare continues to be so popular, holding around 40% of the microcomputer office automation market in the UK. Another reason is that HyperScript is, says UK managing director Malcolm Padina, better employed in building new graphical front end tools for the Informix database. It is, however, the database and associated tools that is the focus of Informix’s attention and will be the backbone of its future growth. Ten years ago Informix developed the sort of database that suited the likely requirements of the Unix market. At that time it was strategic to set up partnerships with high end value-added resellers and sell the database or parts of it via third parties, which often bundled, say, the standard file system or the transaction processing engine with their products. This worked well enough to secure Informix around 40% of the European market share for Unix databases. But over the past 18 months or so the market for Unix has begun to change. As it has become more commercially acceptable, the Unix operating environment is being used for bigger, mission critical tasks and this has led to a need to influence more corporate buying. Consequently, Informix also now has a sales force targeting large corporate customers, sitting alongside its value-added resellers, distributors and its OEM channel. The change in the Unix market has also necessitated a change in the database product.
By Katy Ring
Until recently a Unix sale was aimed at the small business that required an eight to 16-user system. Padina admits that nowadays sales are still geared for a similar style system at, say, a departmental level in a large corporation. But the high end sales are beginning to come through – Informix has had successes with DHL for a parcel tracking system, with Hyatt hotels supplying a reservation system, and, in the UK, with Vernons Pools – in each of these the Unix system is replacing the mainframe and the database is being asked to cope with up to a 1,000 terminal transaction processing environment. Until the middle of last year such customers could only have considered going to Oracle Corp or Ingres Corp because the Informix Standard Engine could not cope with more than around 40 users. Since that time Informix has launched its Online Engine, which is capable of handling around 300 terminals, and has installed 100 or so of these engines so far. Which will be a relief to Hewlett as the Informix database has sold particularly well on its boxes but sales were restricted by the number of
users the database could support (CI No 1,477). Informix is particularly proud of the ability to cope with the demands of multi-media applications via 2Gb BLOBs – Basic Large Objects – as these were designed into Online from the beginning. However, while it can store these objects, such as for example, a photo or scanned text, Informix doesn’t offer tools to edit them in the database, although software partners such as Plexus do offer such tools. Online has been criticised for not supporting referential integrity, two-phase commit, triggers and so on, but marketing director Informix 4GL is considered key, but the company has lacked a lower CASE tool or code generator for a while. This was remedied in a stop-gap way through a compatibility deal with Learmonth & Burchett Management Systems Plc for Automate Plus. However, subsequently, Informix has licensed Systematica Ltd’s Virtual Software Factory to develop its own lower CASE tools, although the Automate deal still stands. It is because of Informix’ perceived weakness in the software engineering market that the Hewlett-Packard investment appeared surprising as it was ostensibly to promote this area that the two companies decided to cement a closer relationship. However, unlike the other major hardware players Hewlett is turning its back on vast areas of the software market and is concentrating on shipping as many Precision Architecture boxes as possible. While the likes of IBM and DEC are developing life cycle software strategies to encourage users to buy more of their hardware, Hewlett is keeping up its avowed intention of an open systems strategy, which it has always maintained precludes attempting to lock people in through software. OpenCase projectHowever, no self-respecting computer vendor would allow IBM and DEC a clear run, so Hewlett has to ensure that there is a viable third-party life cycle software alternative for open systems. This appears to be where the Informix OpenCase strategy fits in along with Hewlett’s stake in the company. The OpenCase project is intended to provide developers with an open environment for managing the life-cycle of large-scale Unix and MS-DOS applications. A key component of this environment will be the OpenCase-ToolBus, based on SoftBench technology from Hewlett, which will form a software backplane linking different development tools at different stages in the life cycle. The OpenCase architecture will be published, so that anyone can ensure that their products plug into the ToolBus. Furthermore, as part of the strategy Informix is developing its own repository based on IRDS that will interface to Hewlett-Packard’s SoftBench. Sources in the US suggest that Hewlett has now withdrawn from a project to develop its own Unix repository and that this was a factor prompting the investment in Informix – a third party that could develop and market a far more credible repository for the open system software life cycle than a hardware company.
