The bright lights are really shining for Information Builders Inc, which lives in the heart of the theatre district in Fun City, right there at 1,250 Broadway, in Manhattan’s Times Square. As well as its enviable deals with Amdahl Corp on the parallel server being put together with Oracle Corp, and its deal with Microsoft Corp on Windows NT, the $227m-a-year company has landed a deal that is crucial to IBM Corp’s query server hopes – but oddly, hardly anybody seems to have been told about it. On the day of the launch of the parallel servers, a single-slug item appeared on the Dow Jones & Co news wire saying that Information Builders is supplying under licence the PSQL software that enables IBM’s DB2 relational database on the mainframe to access and find data on the query server; it also enables personal computers on networks to access data on the query server – but that appears to be the only mention on the agreement – the word is that IBM’s lawyers are trying to keep the lid on the story.
