Informix Software Inc has signed a strategic partnership deal with Lucent Technologies Inc’s Inferno Network Software Solutions Group, with the intention of selling and marketing Inferno 1.1- based systems for Smart Phones and Set Top boxes. The combination of Inferno – the distributed networked operating system developed by the same AT&T Bell Labs team which originally developed Unix – and Informix’s Universal Server database, can deliver data ranging from web pages to images, video, sound and spatial data, said the two partners. It’s a way of incorporating the latest applications and rich data types into small devices. Inferno 1.1 support for Universal Server is available immediately, and the two plan to joint market the system worldwide. Telecommunications companies are the initial targets. They want to write applications once and have them run anywhere, said Informix chief technical officer Michael Stonebraker. The entire Inferno operating system, including applications, can run in around 1Mb memory, making it suitable for a range of small devices on the network.
