Date
2007-06-12
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Baxter, Nick, Participant
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Harrington, Roy, Participant
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Johnson, Luanne, Moderator
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MacDonald, Robert, Participant
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Mahoney, Michael, Historian
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Rawlings, Nicholas, Editor
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Sippl, Roger, Participant
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Computer History Museum
Mountain View, California
40 p.
Description
The founders and principal pioneers at Informix described the history of the company and the development of its products and markets. The key focus was to support Unix platform computers with a high performance, easy to use relational database management systems product. Once they were established in this niche they then faced competition from the other RDBMS vendors who each promoted different aspects of their products. Informix principally marketed through VARs so there was always local support for their clients. Benchmarks became a significant competitive element in responding to RFPs, but a lot of these were just could you check the item as being covered rather than how well that function performed. Although they preferred their own query and reporting language, they were forced to switch to SQL in order to be competitive and they were able to exploit a relationship with SAP which did not want to be locked into only interfacing with Oracle. Informix was successful in the distributed database arena and then acquired a number of companies and products including WingZ.
Category
Transcription
Subject
Johnson, Luanne; Actuate; Altos; AT&T; Baxter, Nick; benchmark; C-ISAM; CP/M; Cromemco; distributed database systems; Finocchio, Bob; Harrington, Roy; Informix Corporation; Ingres Corporation; ISAM; King, Laura; McDonald, Robert; Oracle Corporation; relational database system; SAP; Sippl, Roger; SQL; Sully, Dan; Sybase Corporation; UNIX; VARs; White, Phil; Wingz
Collection Title
Oral history collection
Credit
Software Industry Special Interest Group
