Computer Associates was in New York this week to show off its object database Jasmine, but the company still refused to be drawn on actual sales of the product. CA launched Jasmine in December last year but at the six month count(CI No 3,408), sales of the product were only between 100 and 200 units. We don’t put out any figures, CA’s VP of information management marketing, Dan LeClair told ComputerWire, all I can say is that we’re selling actively all around the world. Instead, he stuck by earlier comments that CA had set itself a target of generating $1bn in revenues Jasmine over five years. But analysts and industry pundits remain skeptical. One Gartner Group analyst predicts Jasmine’s contribution to CA’s revenue stream will not exceed $70m by the year 2002. Further, he says Jasmine will not transform CA into the ranks of the serious players that will ultimately supply the software infrastructure for the next generation of applications. He blames the CA’s awkward marketing efforts as one factor holding back Jasmine’s growth. CA can’t decide whether Jasmine should be positioned as a DBMS solution for managing multimedia data types, as a DBMS solution for deploying object-orientated applications, as a DBMS for the internet, as an authoring tool for multimedia content, or as all four, the analyst said. He claimed that as a result, there is little to help an organization decide the most optimum usage of Jasmine. He concluded that CA will eventually target Jasmine more toward the management of multimedia data types and less aggressively toward object-oriented development. Yet LeClair remains convinced that CA is the only major company to offer a complete solution and said Jasmine will be as important to CA as Unicenter, which draws in nearly the half the company’s revenues. He added that other vendors including Oracle Corp, IBM Corp and Informix Corp had a flawed approach to their strategy: rather than offer a pure, object-oriented solution, they prefer to tag the technology into their existing relational database engines, which slows down performance. He said that the next version of Jasmine will be launched by the end of the year. It will focus, among other things, on providing better integration with third party development tools such as those from Symantec, IBM, Inprise and Sun. It will also offer improved usability features and new extensions to the database, he said.
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