As part a restructuring plan following its horrible first quarter, Informix Software Inc is shedding 460 jobs – 200 of them in Europe – which will reduce total headcount to around 4,140 from 4,600 at the end of last quarter. Chairman and chief executive Phil White told a group of customers at the opening of its latest demonstration center in New York yesterday that the company was now functionally back to where it was in 1995, though it’s not clear whether he meant from a financial, personnel or product point of view. White told an earlier meeting of financial analysts that he’s working towards securing a credit line with banks to facilitate a return to profitability by the end of the company’s fourth financial quarter at the end of the calendar year and reorganizing his sales teams so that deals are closed in the first couple of months of each quarter and not all bundled up in the last few days. Brokerages, including Morgan Stanley & Co Inc, don’t forecast a return to modest growth until mid-1998. The European positions are being eliminated by attrition and layoffs, the company said.
Enterprise NT is four years out
So why did Informix do so badly in its first quarter when it lost slightly over $140m? White says a sign hanging in his office reads ‘Always take the customer’s point of view.’ And we didn’t. He says the company went out and asked customers if they wanted unstructured data types [Universal Server] and got the sales force selling it. The industry bought it, but we forgot about our mainline, relational [database] business. Going on the offensive, White claims that based on beta customers his company has spoken to that in many instances Oracle 8 does not parallelize. Where is does, it doesn’t support object- relational. Yesterday Informix opened a $5m demonstration center – another of its information superstores – in New York City’s World Trade Center to court the financial community and their vertical application suppliers. Customers can test the Informix database and various hardware platforms using their own data and applications. The hardware companies balked at supporting the 30 superstores in Informix’s original plan and there are now 11 of a planned 14 centers on stream. Although Informix claims to have put a huge effort into developing high-performance Windows NT- based versions of its products, White says that Windows NT is not an enterprise opportunity yet. It will take seven years to get there and it’s three years in. The company has gotten Electronic Data Systems Inc to begin selling Informix database products to its customers and to use it internally. In return, Informix has handed the operation of its entire TeleBusiness telemarketing operation, in Lenexa, Kansas, to EDS. Commodity trading and risk management ISV Open Link Financial Inc says it will put its Open Link Enterprise, trading, portfolio and risk management up on Universal Server.
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