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Informix in battle to avoid stock exchange delisting

By Stuart Lauchlan in Silicon Valley

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Financially stricken database supplier Informix won a vote of confidence from a technology market analyst this week only days before it faces the humiliation of a delisting from the US Nasdaq stock exchange.

On Thursday the company will meet with Nasdaq authorities in a bid to avoid deslisting after failing to file its second quarter financial report. Informix is currently restating its financial results for the past two years after discovering massive irregularities that are likely to result in heavy losses rather than the profits that were originally reported.

But technology market analyst Michael Murphy does not believe that Nasdaq will go as far as delisting the troubled supplier. He predicted that either Informix will produce its revised results and submit the required documentation to the Securities and Exchange Commission or it will win a breathing space by explaining its need for more time to put its house in order.

Murphy went further, predicting that Informix stock, currently trading at around $7, will top $18 by next April. "After the [amended financial] report is out I don't see any negatives for Informix," he claimed. "They have a better product than Oracle."

But some Informix investors were taking Murphy's advice with a pinch of salt. "His best buy recommendations can be used as an excellent contrarian indicator," claimed one.

Whatever the outcome of Thursday's Nasdaq hearing, the overhaul of Informix is continuing, with the appointment this week of a new vice president of North American field operations, Wes Raffel. He will be responsible for all channels business, as well as assuming global responsibility for channel strategy. Raffel has previously worked for 3Com in sales and marketing and been acting CEO of network security firm Assurenet Pathways.

Meanwhile Informix is expected to slash the price of its controversial object-relational database Universal Server in a bid to kickstart the sales cycle. Poor take-up of the new database since its launch last December was one of the reasons blamed for the company's recent losses.

The company is believed to have decided to unbundle a number of add-on functional components - or datablades - and ship a core product for an asking price of around $1,500, $1,000 less than the current release.

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