Informix has just failed to crack the billion dollar barrier, with the database and tools vendor finishing its fiscal 1996 with revenues of $939.3m, up 32% from 1995’s $714.2m. Net income, however, stayed essentially flat year on year, at $97.8m this year and $97.6m last full fiscal. All revenue figures have been restated to take account of Informix’s November 1995 acquisition of object-relational database vendor Illustra, a deal which completed in the first quarter of 1996 and which has been accounted for as a pooling of interests. Informix has been able to absorb a $5.9m hit for the full year as merger related costs, and was able to report profits in all four quarters, a good reflection of the generally strong financial story. In the fourth quarter Informix revenue increased 23%, from $219.4m to $270.8m, with net income declining slightly, by 4%, from 1995’s $35.9m to $34.1m in the last three months of 1996. The company finished the year with cash and investments not much greater than 1995’s $262m, at $268m. By region, Informix saw its highest increase in Europe, with a 37% jump to $369.5m, while North America increased by 30% to $392.1m, and rest of world went up 25% to $177.7m. The figures do not suggest any particularly strong sales of its much-touted Universal Server object-relational database, which only went to full availability in December. And while revenues for the combined Informix-Illustra company went up nearly a third in 1996, it has to be pointed out that this is still less than the 1995 growth rate of 51% for Informix alone. But with core database license revenues growing 48% over 1995, the figures firmly establish Informix as the company Oracle must be worrying about instead of Sybase these days.
