Informix aims high with Arrowhead database

Informix Software plans to develop a database server, called Arrowhead, that it claims will include the best elements of its existing products.

The announcement at its annual US user conference follows the recent spin off of Informix's applications business. The company stressed that it would continue to upgrade and support its complicated product range.

Informix expects to roll out general availability versions of Arrowhead in the second quarter of 2001. The database is based on the company's existing Extended Parallel Server (XPS) product, which is aimed at clustered and Numa servers.

The initial release of Arrowhead will provide data warehouse and online transaction processing (OLTP) features. Later versions will support symmetric multiprocessing and analytical technologies, as well as Informix's Datablade software that manages unstructured data such as audio, video and text. Those functions are expected to be available in Arrowhead in 2002.

Richard Wozniak, Informix's executive director of product marketing, said: "Arrowhead will scale from one processor to the largest cluster, and will be driven into markets such as OLTP and high-end ecommerce applications."

Despite its plans for Arrowhead, Wozniak said the server would not replace Informix's portfolio of databases, which numbers about seven.

Some analysts believe part of the reason why Informix has lost market share to rivals Oracle and IBM is because of its extended number of database servers, but Wozniak said the company would only stop selling products if there was no customer demand.

The strategy contradicts comments made to vnunet.com in August by senior vice-president Pete Fiore, who admitted there were too many products and that some will go. Fiore now heads Informix's applications business, which will be renamed next week.

But yesterday Informix president Jim Foy dismissed Fiore's comments. He told vnunet.com: "We've created the impression that we've got databases coming out of ours ears, and this is really not the situation."

Foy admitted that in the past Informix had confused the market by renaming many of its products, but said it was not about to abandon its customer base.

Some of Informix's products include Informix Dynamic Server, Foundation 2000, which features the Datablade technology, its Red Brick analytics engine and XPS. The company will also continue to support Cisam, its C libraries Standard Edition that features an SQL interface to Cisam, and its Online 5 client server database.