The Bloor Perspective: the Red Hat rumours, Informix's passion for Ardent, and XML stumbles towards standardisation

The market seems to like the idea of Red Hat acquiring Corel - even if this just hearsay at present. Of most interest to Red Hat would be the work carried out by Corel on a distribution of Linux aimed at bringing the open source operating system into the mass PC market.

Until now, Linux has been an environment for the IT professional and the competent PC enthusiast, not for the domestic user. Corel has invested considerable effort into bringing the installation and deployment of Linux within the capabilities of the average PC owner, and it's reputed to have made a very good job of it.

But Corel's revenue, and indeed its customer base, depends on traditional PC operating systems. So we have to ask the question: if Red Hat really does acquire Corel, what will the future for Corel's mainstream products be? Will it be in Red Hat's interest to continue the development and enhancement of Windows-based products when the rest of the organisation is dedicated to replacing Windows with Linux around the globe?

One possible scenario would be for Red Hat to put all of Corel's eggs in the Linux basket and either stabilise or de-prioritise development on other platforms. But this would cause considerable resentment in the existing user base and do no good at all to the short-term revenues from Corel's product sales. So perhaps this potential acquisition is just hearsay, or perhaps Red Hat has a quite different plan for Corel's products. It will be good for both vendors and in particular for Corel's user base to end this speculation quickly by either formalising the offer or denying it.

** Informix buys wisely **

Informix's acquisition of Ardent will put the joint revenue of the organisations comfortably over $1bn. Informix was just approaching this number when it was struck down by financial problems that set back the growth of the company. But Informix has made a commendable recovery that has enabled it to make the acquisitions of Red Brick and more recently the Cloudscape small form factor database - the first DBMS written in 100 per cent pure Java.

The Ardent acquisition makes perfect sense in a number of ways. Ardent brings products that are very much of interest to Informix. Best known of these is the DataStage ETL (Extract Transform Load) product used to build and maintain data-warehouse contents from a wide variety of transactional data sources. It is likely that this will form the foundation for further enhancements moving Informix into the EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) space.

Ardent also has considerable expertise in metadata management. This should give Informix a route into the Web personalisation market - a market which is set grow significantly over the next few years. It will also provide a platform to extend Informix's existing XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) support within the database, giving it a strong presence in the growing supply chain integration market and having other benefits in the management of non-standard data types.

Due to the severe cost-cutting exercise carried out in the wake of Informix's earlier financial problems, the operation is now very lean and cost-effective. Informix has turned itself around, is beginning to exploit its well-regarded technology to generate an operating profit, and is now using that profit to make carefully considered acquisitions.

** XML going off the rails? **

XML is so obviously right that everybody wants to own it. The need to integrate systems internally becomes pretty small stuff in contrast with the rapidly developing need to integrate systems across supply chains and between co-operating organisations of all sorts. XML is simply the right formula at the right time.

As it turns out, there are many vertical industry groups working on their own metadata standards, plus initiatives by vendors - notably Microsoft - to push the standards forwards while ensuring there is a commercial gain component in the equation.

But two standards groups - OASIS (Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and UN/CEFACT (United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and e-Business) - have joined together with end user organisations to create a global standard. The new standards group - ebXML (electronic business XML) aims to provide a global framework for electronic trade through common XML standards. ebXML recognises the importance of the vertical industry groups, but has apparently suggested a moratorium on specific XML standards until the ebXML standard can be put in place.

This is likely to be the stumbling block. While in the past standards groups have moved with all the speed of a glacier - unstoppable but all in good time - today's Web-based standards don't hang around. ebXML's target is to provide an initial offering in about six months with the final framework delivered in mid-2001. A lot will depend on how complete the initial offering is. If it provides a workable subset and incorporates the existing output of vertical industry groups, then we believe that there is a good chance of success. But anything in the 2001 timeframe and beyond is probably going to be too late to catch the wave. The surfers will have moved on already.

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