Following the release of NetDoubler for Windows NT, Asante Technologies Inc has announced that its network acceleration software product now supports all of the major server systems. The San Jose, California-based company first launched NetDoubler for AppleShare servers in May 1996 and released the first Unix version last autumn. Designed to enhance the performance and speed of file transactions, Asante claims that the NT version will speed up file connections with the server by four times, at a rate of 4Mb per second. The company says that NetDoubler for EtherShare achieves rates of 5Mb per second. Supporting versions 3.5. and 4.0 of NT, NetDoubler runs on any Pentium, Pentium Pro or Digital Equipment Corp Alpha server. The Pentium version has a price tag of $500 which includes two client licenses, and the Alpha version, with five client licences costs $1,300. As predicted here early in January (CI No 3,074) Informix Software Inc has acquired Centerview Software Inc, a database application development software house based in San Francisco, for an undisclosed sum. It will acquire 100% of the outstanding stock of Centerview in a cash transaction that will be accounted for as a purchase business combination. Centerview’s 13 employees will be relocated to Informix’s Menlo Park-based headquarters. The company’s flagship product is DataWindow, once known as Choreo, which enables Visual Basic users to get access to database tables in Informix, Oracle and other relational databases, something that Sybase Inc achieved from its acquisition of Powersoft Inc and Oracle Corp through its own PowerObjects tool. Despite having the shine taken off of it by Java, the Visual Basic market is still too large to ignore. Informix says that as a result of the acquisition, it expects to write off approximately $7m of in-process research and development in the first quarter of 1997 – but refused to comment further about why it made the acquisition. The company has been strangely quiet about its tools strategy of late, with New Era taking a back seat in the publicity stakes to the Illustra Datablades technology and Informix’s Universal Server – so quiet that rivals Oracle said that it was beginning to think Informix was no longer in the tools market at all. Informix did say it would reveal more details about the products that will include the Centerview technology in the spring.
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