Oracle woos Informix clients

Oracle is attempting to capitalise on the financial and technical disarray at Informix by wooing disillusioned users and offering discounts of up to 35 per cent if they migrate to its product line.

As part of a worldwide programme to persuade Informix users to migrate to Oracle 8, customers will not have to pay for the database for three months after the sale. Payments will then be divided into four interest-free instalments.

Nick Gregory, server technology marketing manager at Oracle UK, said the payment programme includes consultancy and migration services, but he insisted that customers will not encounter difficulties in migrating to its database.

'We have extensive experience and have offered tools and migration services for a long time. The difficulty is not the database itself, but the migration of applications. We have a large portfolio of application migration tools,' he said.

Gregory claimed that despite the offer going out last week, Oracle was negotiating with a number of key accounts, some of which are major Informix accounts.

'A whole range of customers are talking to Oracle.

A lot of people have said they wanted to take a fresh look at Oracle 8,' he said.