Informix sweats it out as Nasdaq mulls fate

Analyst positive about database vendor's fate as delisting threatens to follow financial restatement.

Financially stricken database supplier Informix won a vote ofreatens to follow financial restatement. confidence from a technology market analyst this week, only days before it faces the prospect of a delisting from the US Nasdaq stock exchange.

Informix will meet with Nasdaq authorities on 13 November, in a bid to avoid delisting after failing to file its second quarter financial report. Informix is in the process of restating its financial results for the past two years, after discovering massive irregularities that are likely to result in heavy losses rather than the profits that were originally reported (PC Dealer, 27 August).

But technology market analyst Michael Murphy did not believe Nasdaq would go as far as delisting the troubled supplier. He predicted that Informix would either produce its revised results and submit the required documentation to the Securities and Exchange Commission, or win breathing space by explaining the need for more time to put its house in order.

Murphy predicted that Informix stock, trading at around $7, will top $18 by April 1998. 'After the amended financial report is out, I don't see any negatives for Informix,' he claimed. 'Informix has a better product than Oracle.'

Informix' wait comes as it appointed Wes Raffel to the position of vice president of North American field operations. He will be responsible for all channel business as well as assuming global responsibility for channel strategy.

Meanwhile, Informix was expected to slash the price of its object relational database Universal Server, in a bid to kick-start the sales cycle.

Poor takeup of the database since its launch in December 1996 was one of the reasons that were attributed to the supplier's recent losses.