Informix Corp began briefing its customers and partners about its next generation Centaur data engine last week at its Menlo Park headquarters. Informix began the beta program for Centaur last December, and in January promised to ship it by mid-year. It now says Centaur is expected to ship in the third quarter of 1999. However, Informix says the project is both on schedule and on target. The beta test program included companies from the telecommunications, retail and financial services industries.
Centaur, says Informix, has been built from the ground up to meet the requirements of the internet and will be used as the underlying engine for Informix’s planned set of pre-built e- commerce applications. These are expected to include a combination of analytical software, content management, database and fixed price implementation services applications focused on the sell rather than buy side of e-commerce. Last month, Informix went to the ART Technology Group for its Enterprise Java Beans-based merchant, storefront and job application server software, which it will sell under an OEM arrangement.
Combining support for both Java and Microsoft Corp’s COM+ object component models, Centaur is Informix’s attempt to combine the performance of its current Dynamic Server product with its object-relational technology – a role originally allocated for its Universal Server until that product was moved out of the spotlight at the end of 1997. Universal Server was based on technology Informix acquired along with Illustra last year (CI No 2,820). It was later repositioned as an extension to the Dynamic Server database to support SQL-3 and the integration of new data types and index methods, and not as a new object-relational database per se.
Informix now sees an additional role for such a database in the more recently emerging web application server market, and says Centaur will support scalable internet application development and deployment for e-commerce and media asset management applications. It will offer component compatibility across all tiers regardless of application servers or choice of development methodology, the company says. It’s also the first step towards what Informix calls a smart data federation of interoperable data engines that will eventually help with the task of integrating transaction systems with decision support.
