Informix announces apps business strategy

The applications side of Informix, which will officially be spun-off early next year, has unveiled a range of products under its new name, Informix Business Solutions (IBS).

The announcement is part of a plan by the database vendor to split itself into two companies: a database developer and an ebusiness software supplier. The name will be changed again, however, when the unit is floated sometime in the first quarter of 2001.

Informix said its goal is to integrate its many products and target specific sectors such as telecoms, financial services and retail.

Among the new products is Axielle, a set of portal services that will be aimed at the company's target sectors. It combines information from third-party reporting tools with unstructured data from sources such as Microsoft Word and Excel, as well as multimedia graphics formats.

Anne Blanchard, director of product marketing at the company, said: "Banks have a large number of reporting tools from different vendors but there is no integration between them. Also, portal vendors don't understand data warehousing or have such a rich data infrastructure as ours."

IBS also launched iDecide Web Success, a product which enables businesses to analyse their websites. According to the company, the product can examine sites that get as many as 100 million hits a day, providing information on numbers of visitors, how many were new, the pages they visited and how long they stayed. Reports are not in real time, however, and are usually available within two days.

Another application, IDecide Telco Success, enables wireless operators to build data marts that can analyse information such as customer retention rates. Versions for the retail and financial services sectors are expected within the next six months.

The company is also working on integrating iDecide Web Success with iSell, an ecommerce application aimed at getting traditional retailers to sell products on the web as well as analyse the performance of their websites.

IBS is intending to integrate iSell with Media 360, a broadcast media application allowing websites to include videos as part of the online sales process.

The products are expected to be available by the end of the year.