A new Informix for Europe?

Troubled database giant scales down its operation in bid to retain market presence

'What struck me most these past few months was the tremendous support we got from our customers and our partners. Our customer base and our technology will make sure that Informix survives as an independent company.' This is the view of Jeff Hudson, Informix's vice president of corporate development, as he outlined the ways he hopes to rebuild the database company's European business.

After bad financial results and the admission of financial malpractice, Informix is making a new start, Hudson claimed, with a greater focus on customer service and fewer employees. Among the casualties of the scaling down, as well as the people, will be the object-oriented development tool, New Era.

Informix's recent troubles have been well documented. First, it had to announce heavy losses in two successive quarters, which sent its share price plummeting. It also had to admit that its book-keeping was not really in accordance with generally accepted US accounting practices.

Products had been sold to distributors and resellers and accounted for as revenue before they reached the end customer. Now Informix has to take these revenues out of its books - to the tune of $250m (#156.3m) for 1995 and 1996.

Hudson, though, remains sure the company will weather the storm.

'Our trouble was not with our technology or with our customer support,' he said. 'These are still in place. What we messed up with was sales management. We still have Mike Stonebraker on board, who designed the Universal Server. Mike Saranga, who built the Dynamic Scalable Architecture is still with us, and Jim Hendrickson is still in charge of customer services. Only the sales management side has been reduced.'

Shortly after bringing Bob Finocchio, formerly at 3Com, on board as new chief executive, Phil White - the man who turned Informix around in the late 1980s - left. Other departees include Ken Coulter, responsible for all sales outside the US (and the man who made Informix big in Europe), and European vice president Walter Konigseder.

In a number of other countries, managers vacated their posts. The Swiss operation has been closed down, and other countries lost one-third of their people. What will Informix do to rebuild the organisation in Europe?

'We recently appointed Jean-Paul Minnaro as vice president of European sales. You'll see how he rebuilds the European organisation,' Hudson said.

'For some time, we thought we needed a full-blown management team in place in each European country, with managers for human resources, customers services and marketing,' he said.

'This made our organisation very expensive. It meant that we had teams of 20 people or more, even in small countries. We're taking a new approach to that.'

Most national organisations have already been scaled-down, with a large number of people leaving, especially salespeople.

'I like young aggressive types,' Hudson said. 'We have to look at what is cost effective. In the past, we built up huge sales organisation costs, and we can't afford that any more. Marketing is another field where we will be changing. We've never been good at marketing and we will now spend less on it, but make it more effective and streamlined.'

One of the other changes in the organisation is a stronger focus on the indirect channel, the secret of Informix's past success.

'We were very successful working through a channel of VARs and applications vendors in the early 1990s. For some reason, we abandoned that and set up a stronger direct sales organisation. People buy databases because of the applications they want to run. That is the driving force, be it in a packaged form or in a form the companies want to build them themselves. You will see that we will strengthen our partnerships in the future.'

Product strategy will also change. A lot more attention will be given to customer services and consultancy. Informix has always kept a low profile on services, but Hudson reflected: 'Services have never been a big earner for us. But we notice a trend that customers want to build a long-term relationship with their vendors. Services are an important part of this.'

Hudson also had some bad news for New Era customers: there will be no new versions of the object-oriented development tool.

'You have to be brain dead to think that a database company also needs its own proper tools for the database. Java and Visual Basic have become the standards. We will continue to support the current New Era customers. We encourage users of Informix-4GL to migrate to the industry standards.'

Soothing the New Era customers, however, pales into insignificance beside the other challenges facing Informix. In Europe at least, the message is 'scale down, get back to our roots and rely on channel and service partners'.

? By VNU Newswire.