New York-based Information Builders Inc will announce a new product and marketing strategy in September in a move to offer more commercially available products. It will introduce support for a greater variety of operating systems including Digital Equipment Corp’s Alpha AXP OSF/1, IBM Corp’s OS/2 and Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT systems and launch an object-oriented graphical user interface builder. The firm also plans to restructure its indirect sales channel programme. In the past, the firm has concentrated on a small volume, high price tag strategy. It hasn’t been too successful and it’s been difficult getting our message across to users. But we’re changing direction. We plan to focus on our growth areas, Unix and client-server, and the addition of NT will hopefully attract new business from the traditional personal computer markets, says Information Builders UK marketing director Peter Junker. Focus, Information Builder’s proprietary language, and EDA/SQL, its middleware for accessing different databases, will both support DEC OSF/1 and Windows NT. They’ll be available in client and server versions. The company has also developed an object-based graphical user interface builder, as yet unnamed, that will act as a front-end to Focus and be available separately as a shrinkwrapped product. Information Builders says the product is on par with PowerSoft Inc’s PowerBuilder offering. A Unix version of EDA/SmartMode, the firm’s expert software system that predicts resource usage of requests sent to a EDA/SQL server, will also be released in September.
