Informix teams up with Netscape, HP

Informix announced today that it has joined an existing partnership of Hewlett-Packard and Netscape Communications to market intranet application development tools to businesses.

Informix is the first database maker to join the enterprise workforce collaboration initiative, a marketing and technology alliance announced by HP and Netscape in May. The partnership will allow the three companies to jointly offer consulting, sales, and training to businesses building Internet and intranet applications atop HP's OpenMail messaging and OpenView network management software, Netscape's Web browser, server, and development tool software, and now Informix's relational databases.

Pricing for alliance services will vary from company to company, said Brett Bachman, Informix's general manager for workgroup solutions.

Informix and Netscape already jointly market and sell two software bundles. A $295 package is composed of Informix-Online Workgroup Server, Netscape FastTrack Server, and Netscape Navigator Gold. A $499 desktop development kit, called Informix-Online Workstation for Intranet, includes a workstation version of the Online database, along with FastTrack Server and Navigator.

Informix's Universal Server--due to be unveiled in September and designed to store complex and multimedia data types, along with relational data--will be added into the various bundles later this year.

More than its competitors Oracle and Sybase, Informix is trying to forge technology alliances to develop new products, instead of developing all technology in-house.

This week the company will also announce a tighter relationship with NCR to jointly market and sell the Informix-OnLine Extended Parallel Server (OnLine XPS) database on NCR's parallel processing hardware. The two companies will market the products as high-end tools for building online transaction-processing applications.

Also to be announced is a more formal relationship with GemPlus to design and sell smart card technology combined with Informix database software and HP's server and encryption technology to build secure Internet and intranet applications for electronic commerce.

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