Informix and CoSORT Partner

Informix Corporation, a technology leader in software infrastructure for the i.Economy, announced a complementary technology partnership with Innovative Routines International Inc (The CoSORT Company), a leading provider of high performance sort and transformation software for data warehousing environments. The partnership calls for direct use of CoSORT technology within the Ardent DataStage Suite on Unix and NT servers as a DataStage plug-in, speeding the overall processing time of large data warehouse and data "Webhouse" volumes.

The partnership accelerates data staging throughput with CoSORT's interface and symmetric multi-processing (SMP) sort engine, while improving ETL (extract, transform, and load) resource usage on busy servers. Ardent DataStage users will be able to assign a specific number of processes (or threads on NT)--as well as the amount of memory consumed per process, shared memory, and overflow disk--used for sorting. CoSORT in turn allows administrators to prioritize sort jobs amid concurrent applications and preserve existing hardware assets.

"The growth of data warehouse and `data Webhouse' volumes have increased user demand for manipulating clickstream data in real time. With CoSORT, Ardent DataStage can optimally manage these volume levels--quickly and effectively sorting, summarizing and analyzing critical business information," according to David Friedland, vice president of CoSORT / IRI Business Development. "Because Ardent and CoSORT both serve organizations in VLDB (very large database) and e-commerce environments, our partnership specifically targets and benefits these joint customers working with high volume operational data stores."

"The decision support marketplace is moving beyond datamarts and into much larger central data warehouses and operational data stores," according to Mikael Wipperfeld, vice president, Informix. "Whole enterprises are capturing and reviewing their data as more users worldwide need to be on line. It is critical that sorting and summarization not become bottlenecks in the ETL analysis cycle. Our initiative with CoSORT helps to address and manage this growing challenge."

About Ardent DataStage

Ardent DataStage provides the enterprise business intelligence infrastructure for more than 1,200 of the world's leading companies--enabling them to turn corporate data into competitive advantage. Companies rely on Ardent DataStage's powerful data integration capabilities to extract, transform and integrate enterprise data into their data warehouses, analytical applications, and eBusiness solutions. Ardent DataStage uniquely addresses enterprise-level business intelligence requirements, including: native support for Web-based, mainframe, relational and ERP data; enterprise-wide business intelligence meta data management; integrated data quality assessment and cleansing; and enterprise-class performance and scalability.

About CoSORT / IRI Inc

CoSORT / IRI is a technology leader in commercial sorting on high-end Unix and Windows NT platforms. The CoSORT package features several end-user and programmer interfaces to a parallel processing sort algorithm in a co-routine architecture. Included are: third party sort replacement and conversion tools; support for more than 100 data and record types; data warehouse ETL, join and report generation functionality; SMP resource configuration and recovery; on-line documentation; and, on-site technical support in more than 30 countries. For more information on The CoSORT Company and its family of data management solutions, call 321-952-9400 or 800-333-SORT, or visit the Web site at www.cosort.com.

About Informix

Informix Software is a technology leader in software infrastructure and solutions for the Internet. Informix brings a focused set of products and services that integrate e-business and business intelligence on an Internet infrastructure. The Company's highly scalable database engines, in addition to its business intelligence, content management and e-commerce solutions, enable customers to succeed in the new economy. For more information, contact the nearest sales office or visit the Web site at www.informix.com.

Contact Informix Corporation, Melora Foley, 650-926-6443, melora.foley@informix.com or CoSORT / IRI Inc, Russell Stuart, 321-952-9400 x241, rstuart@iri.com.