Informix To Buy Ardent Software

The stock deal, disclosed last week, is worth an estimated $880 million, the companies said.

This pact comes a little more than a month after Informix finished its buyout of Cloudscape Inc., an Oakland, Calif.-based company founded by former executives of Informix, Illustra Information Technologies Inc., Oracle Corp. and Sybase Inc.

Informix, a maker of databases and database tools, billed both purchases as providing key parts of the company's i.Economy thrust.

This most recent deal and the previous buyout of Cloudscape show Informix is turning around, analysts said.

The company was rocked two years ago with the departure of Chairman and Chief Executive Phil White after a disastrous third quarter in 1997. Since that time, Robert Finocchio has stepped down as chief executive and president but remains chairman. Jean-Yves Dexmier has taken over as chief executive and president.

Judith Hurwitz, president of The Hurwitz Group, Framingham, Mass., lauded the deal. "Ardent is an interesting company with strong data-warehousing expertise. Informix is trying to re-create itself so it's not a traditional database player because that market is crowded with powers like Oracle, Microsoft [Corp.] and IBM [Corp.]," she said.

Mitch Kramer, an analyst with The Patricia Seybold Group, Boston, said this pact means Informix has put some of its hurdles behind it. The move "indicates that Informix has become whole enough and healthy enough to acquire technology, as opposed to shedding technology, and also establishes them within the data-warehousing market more solidly," he said.

Ardent brings with it tools to provide back-end support for creating data warehouses, Kramer said.

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