Who wants to be a database vendor?

Following a catastrophic dive in its stock price, the one-time database powerhouse announced this week it is taking steps to "strengthen performance" and "build stockholder value" by firing 10 percent of its staff and moving out of Silicon Valley. Last month, after reporting weak second-quarter earnings, Informix replaced its CEO, who had been at the helm for only a year.

Informix (ifmx), like a number of its database management system rivals, didn't keep pace with changes caused by the e-business boom. Now, somewhat belatedly, it is attempting to do what Oracle Corp. (orcl) and IBM Corp. (ibm) have already done well: reposition itself as a Web infrastructure provider.

In the early- to mid-1990s, a database shined brighter than any other component in a customer's back-end IT infrastructure. Database-management systems were the crown jewels.

Corporate customers agonized over which database to buy. And sometimes, database purchases dictated a company's operating system and other software and hardware decisions.

During the database boom period, a handful of companies -- namely, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, IBM and Computer Associates International Inc. (ca) -- ruled. Sales of database-management systems and related tools fueled huge growth rates.

How times have changed. Just this week:

Informix announced it was cutting 430 jobs and relocating from Menlo Park, Calif., to Westboro, Mass., to cut costs;

Sybase, which has hit its own share of financial bumps, has been struggling to remake itself as an enterprise portal vendor and/or wireless application provider; and

Charles Wang of CA stepped aside as CEO as the company continued its decline. (He remains as chairman.)

The strong who have managed to survive and thrive -- Oracle, IBM and Microsoft (MSFT) -- have done so by reinventing themselves as Web infrastructure providers.

"Customers don't want to hear about the bits and bytes any more," said Microsoft group manager Barry Goffe. "They want to know about the e-business proposition.

"It's not good enough to have a great database," Goffe continued. "You need to have personalization, catalog management, closed-loop analysis modules, supply-chain integration. There are lots of other features that customers want to make sure are layered on top."

Just last week, Microsoft sent its latest database version, SQL Server 2000, to manufacturing. The product will ship commercially this fall.

IBM is capitalizing on the same business-to-e-business shift.

"As companies are transforming their physical processes and replacing them with electronic processes, they are digitizing more and more information. At the same time, companies are linking their back offices to their supply chains to their customers," said Janet Perna, general manager, IBM Data Management Solutions.

Only Oracle, the biggest and best-known database player, remains unafraid to call a database a database.

It calls its 8i product an Internet database. Still, it is putting most of its marketing muscle behind its Oracle Internet Application Server 8i (Oracle iAS) -- a middleware e-business platform.

"The database is more important than ever," said Oracle's director of Internet platform marketing, John Magee.

"It's still the platform where the real battle is. It's where you run your applications and store your unstructured content, like files," he said. "But the database is now the key piece of infrastructure. It's the e-commerce repository."