Sybase Corp’s two main Internet-related news announcements this month hinged on deals with established Internet players Netscape Communication Corp and Verity Inc. Sybase will license, service and support Netscape servers for the Internet and will integrate them with its other Web offerings. But Informix Inc was able to announce just as good a partnership with Netscape last July, if not better, since Netscape said it would use Informix software internally in place of Oracle to build its corporate Web server products, and one has to wonder why Sybase has left what seems such an obvious Internet-business deal so late in the day, comparatively. Not surprisingly, Sybase gets mighty sniffy when this is pointed out, with Dennis McEvoy, president of the Enterprise Business Group, saying that the main difference between the two agreements is that we have the better database. And as scooped by our sister publication Client Server News last week, the latter case involves Sybase integrating Mountain View, California-based Verity’s full text search engine into its evolving object-relational Adaptive Server product, announced at its user group in San Diego in May. Internet search engines are starting to be acknowledged as grown-up applications. The deal is seen as bringing the creation of personalized content-based search facilities closer for users, with a full text search being able to be made across distributed Sybase databases from a single application, or across the Internet. Yet just as in the Netscape deal, Sybase found Informix calling cards all over the desk of its new partner, since Verity has already agreed to help its Illustra Technologies Inc arm create a Verity-enabled DataBlade module for its Illustra object-based Server. This gave McEvoy a prompt to note aloud that all Oracle has in this area are five people in some lab who think they’re better at this than all of Verity. Another part of its renewed assault on all our affections is for Sybase to become a better partner for independent software vendors and value added resellers, and it points to recent close buddiness with emerging Dutch competitor for SAP AG, Baan Co NV and client-server payroll and personnel and financials mavens Peoplesoft Inc as examples of better behaved channel discipline Spear-heading this is Leith Anderson, who was the partner czar at Oracle from 1984 to 1990.
