Computer Associates Inc is approaching the six month anniversary of the launch of its object database Jasmine, but actual stand- alone sales of its much vaunted product have so far been minimal. CA has set itself a target of generating $1bn in revenues from Jasmine over five years, and when the offering finally arrived after much delay in December (CI No 3,309) the company was waxing lyrical about what a great product it had developed, despite the fact it is basically an advanced version of Fujitsu Ltd’s ODB-II object database (CI No 2,844). But in the first quarter of its availability, CA has sold only between 100 and 200 units of the database. Most of those sales have come from the indirect channel and not its own internationally present direct sales force. CA’s vice president of information management marketing, Dan Clelair says the company is still on course to hit the $1bn target, but admits that a lot of people looking to develop their document and workflow management procedures with the help of a database will look to an out-of-the-box-product. CA has managed to ship 150,000 copies of the developer version of Jasmine, although this will not be generating the company any revenue in the short term, since it is available free. In spite of appearances so far, Clelair is confident that those companies looking to develop their own applications, using object-based tools, will want to use an object-based database. CA is adamant that Jasmine has no real direct competition, although Oracle Corp’s Oracle8 database throws a small spanner in the works. Clelair says Jasmine’s main strength is its multimedia capability, which he believes will be particularly useful to companies looking to develop internal intranet applications. Other companies in the object space seem to think the introduction of Jasmine and the high profile marketing CA has been doing for it, will be beneficial to competitors as well. In March, Object Design Inc told Computergram that such awareness could only bring good to the object market as a whole, with one big name boosting the performance of smaller companies (CI No 3,372). Still, it looks like CA has got a lot of work to do in the next four or so years, to achieve its ambitious targets for Jasmine, and much will depend on how many of the 150,000 developers that have taken the free developer software actually turn out significant systems built around Jasmine.

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