Informix woos Ardent

Database specialists Informix and Ardent have agreed to merge to form what could turn into a very powerful player in the data warehousing industry.

Informix agreed to exchange 3.5 shares of its stock for every Ardent share, in a deal worth $1.3 billion. Ardent's products will continue to be sold separately, but integration work has already started on systems which will better support business intelligence and electronic commerce applications, according to the companies.

Informix had been playing catch-up to its database vendor rivals in support for Internet standards, but Ardent's focus on technologies like the Extensible Markup Language (XML) is expected to help the combined company.

www.informix.com