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Informix rebuilds ranks, names CFO

The database software company snags Howard Bain, former CFO at Symantec, as its new executive vice president, finance, and chief financial officer.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
Continuing to rebuild its executive ranks, Informix has named a new chief financial officer.

The Menlo Park, California-based database software company snagged Howard Bain, 52, former CFO at software developer Symantec, as its new executive vice president, finance, and chief financial officer.

He replaces Jean-Yves Dexmier, who is now responsible for Informix's global sales as executive vice president of field operations. Prior to joining Informix, Dexmier was chief financial officer for several companies including Octel and Thomson Consumer Electronics.

In his new role, Bain, a 25-year veteran of corporate finance, will continue steering the company toward a comeback that began in October, when Informix reported a larger-than-expected third-quarter profit and a 23-percent increase in revenues. The company also reported that its software license revenue grew 24 percent in the most recent quarter compared with the same period last year, and that its services revenue jumped 22 percent.

Informix is still recovering from executive turnover and a series of tumultuous financial setbacks in recent years and last year moved to form two new business units to focus on growing data warehousing and e-commerce markets. That move was intended to supplement sales of its database server software.

On its new path, Informix last month completed its acquisition of Red Brick Systems, a data warehousing provider. Through the deal, Red Brick products will be integrated into the Informix Decision Frontier line of data warehousing products.

The company's stock was trading this morning at $10.37 a share, down 18 cents.