Informix Corporation

» see informix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Roger Sippl was 25 when he put $200,000 of his own money into Relational Database Systems in 1980 and made himself president of it. The product shipped in 1981 and its name was a contraction of INFORMation on unIX, which tells you exactly what the bet was: that business computing was moving to minicomputers running Unix rather than staying on mainframes running whatever IBM decided. The company took the product's name in august 1986 on its way to going public.

The bet paid for fifteen years. Revenue went from $2.1 million in 1983 to $283 million in 1992 and past $700 million by the middle of the nineties. Phil White arrived as chief executive in early 1989, cut 15 percent of the staff and consolidated a company that had somehow been running two headquarters. By 1995 Informix was the number two relational database vendor, and in that same year it bought Illustra from Michael Stonebraker's group and started arguing for the object relational database, which was a better idea than most of what the industry was excited about at the time.

In april 1997 it announced a first quarter revenue shortfall of about $100 million. That was the visible part. The restatement that followed pulled apart three and a half years of results and removed more than $250 million of sales that had been recorded as closed and were not. White left in july. The company lost $357 million that year and later paid $142 million to settle with its stockholders, and it never got the position back.

I have never run Informix. I have read the name a hundred times in one place only, which is the list of database drivers that a language or a framework ships with, where it sits between Ingres and Interbase, neither of which I have run either. That list is a graveyard sorted alphabetically, and for most of the companies on it the list is the entire monument. Informix is the strange case, because the software is still alive and still sold while the company that made it has been gone for a quarter of a century.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

The Unix bet is why this company mattered. Oracle ran on those machines too, but Informix was built for the boxes that were displacing mainframes rather than ported onto them afterward, and through the late eighties and early nineties it was the default database on Unix hardware in a way that is hard to reconstruct now. Retail chains ran on it, and so did a large amount of the point of sale infrastructure that people used daily without ever seeing a database name.

Sippl left to start other companies and the technical direction moved on without him. Buying Illustra in 1995 brought Michael Stonebraker in, and with him the argument that a database ought to hold images and time series as first class types rather than shoving them into blobs. Red Brick followed the next year for data warehousing, which brought Ralph Kimball along with it. On paper this was the best assembled database engineering team outside Oracle.

~ the cracks ~

The 1997 collapse was not a single bad decision. Sales had been booked against reseller deals that had not actually closed, and revenue from long contracts had been pulled forward into quarters that needed the help. That works until a quarter arrives where the hole is too big to move.

Phil White was indicted in november 2002 on eight federal fraud counts. In november 2003 he pleaded guilty to one count of filing a false registration statement with the SEC. In may 2004 he was sentenced to two months in federal prison and a $10,000 fine, with 300 hours of community service attached. Two months is not much against $250 million, and it is roughly what these cases produced right up until Enron changed the mood of the sentencing.

~ what it became ~

IBM closed on the database business on 1 july 2001 for $1 billion and took about 2,000 employees with it. What remained renamed itself Ascential Software that same day, held on to $481 million of the proceeds and went into data integration with DataStage, up against Informatica. IBM bought Ascential too, in may 2005, for roughly $1.1 billion at $18.50 a share. Anyone who had held the stock since the Informix years came out at $4.62 a share after the reverse split, below where it had been trading before any of this began.

The database itself never died. IBM kept selling it, and in april 2017 handed active development and support to HCL on a fifteen year arrangement, so there are people running HCL Informix in 2026 on a product line that traces back to a Unix minicomputer in 1981. The company is the thing that died. It died on 1 july 2001 and changed its name the same afternoon, which is a tidier exit than most of them manage.

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