Informix Corp has introduced a new Enterprise Licence Programme that will allow customers of its Wingz spreadsheet and its MS-DOS-based SmartWare II office suite to take out a single enterprise-wide licence for the products on workstations throughout an organisation. The company hopes the move will simplify its licensing strategy as it moves the Wingz spreadsheet into multiple environments. The recently introduced WIngz-Datalink technology now also enables Wingz users to access Informix SQL databases from any of the supported systems. And industry sources say that a Unix-based version of SmartWare is currently being considered following demand from users. One of the first to sign up is Liberty Mutual Insurance of Boston, Massachusetts, which is planning to implement Wingz on Macintosh, OS/2 and Ultrix-based systems. Enterprise licence fees are user-based, with categories ranging from 1 to 250 (it says zero to 250, but we don’t know of too many no-user systems now that batch-only machines are largely a thing of the past), 251 to 500, 501 to 1,000, 1,001 to 2,500 and 2,501 or more users – regardless of system – but the deal is currently limited to US users only.
