Informix Moving Further Into Business Intelligence Market

Informix plunged more deeply into the business intelligence market this week with upgrades to both its easy-to-administer Red Brick Decision Server 6.0 and its industrial-strength Extended Parallel Server release 8.3.

Both are intended for data mining and data warehousing, as use of those technologies picks up for analyzing customer data on e-commerce Web sites. First Union Bank has generated a 27 terabyte data warehouse based on Extended Parallel Server, said Charlie Chang, general manager of the business intelligence group at Informix.

"The Internet is pushing people toward managing an increasing amount of detail. We are looking to deliver a set of solutions to exploit the dot.com economy," Chang said.

Red Brick Decision Server 6.0 represents Informix' first major update of the Red Brick product line since acquiring the data warehousing company Red Brick Systems at the end of 1998. Decision Server contains built in facilities and commands for ease of administration and is used for simple, straightforward queries of a data warehouse.

Extended Parallel Server 8.3 is aimed at large, global companies with complex issues to resolve through queries to the data warehouse, said Dan Leighton, product manager at Informix. It has no limit on the size of the databases in the data warehouse, number of users or complexity of queries, Leighton said.

Release 8.3 also performs data loads more quickly than its predecessor system and can perform data conversions more quickly, he said.

Both products are available immediately at prices that depend on size of implementation and consulting services sought.

Informix is also offering customized solution suites for vertical industries, including telecommunications and financial services.