At the time of the acquisition of Informix by IBM a smaller spin-off company was created, Ascential Software, focused on the information integration and ETL markets.

Founders Roger Sippl and Laura King worked at Cromemco, an early S-100/CP/M company, where they developed a small relational database based on ISAM techniques, as a part of a report-writer software package.

Version 5.00 of Informix OnLine was released at the very end of 1990, and included full distributed transaction support with two-phase commit and stored procedures.

In 1988, Informix purchased Innovative Software, makers of a DOS and Unix-based office system called SmartWare and WingZ, a spreadsheet program for the Apple Macintosh.

WingZ provided a graphical user interface, supported larger, 32768x32768 dimension spreadsheets, and offered programming in a HyperCard-like language known as HyperScript.

In 1994, as part of a collaboration with Sequent Computer Systems, Informix released its version 6.00 database server, which featured its new Dynamic Scalable Architecture, DSA.

Both new versions, V8 (XPS) and V9 (IUS), appeared on the market in 1996, making Informix the first of the "big three" database companies (the others being Oracle and Sybase) to offer built-in O-R support.

[8] Although Informix took a technological lead in the database software market, product releases began to fall behind schedule by late 1996.

Plagued with technical and marketing problems, a new application development product, Informix-NewEra, was soon overshadowed by the emerging Java programming language.

Unhappy with the new direction of the company, XPS lead architect Gary Kelley suddenly resigned and joined arch-rival Oracle Corporation in early 1997, taking 11 of his developers with him.

[9][10][11][12] As part of a formal settlement negotiated between the two companies, the lawsuit was withdrawn and Informix issued a statement retracting their accusations against the former employees.

CEO Phillip White blamed the shortfall on a loss of focus on the core database business while devoting too many resources to object-relational technology.

An excerpt from the September 22, 1998 issue of PC Magazine's article on the top 100 companies that are changing the way you compute: In November 2002, Phillip White, the former CEO of Informix ousted in 1997, was indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with eight counts of securities, wire, and mail fraud.

In a plea bargain thirteen months later, he pleaded guilty to a single count of filing a false registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In May 2004, the Department of Justice announced that White was sentenced to two months in federal prison for securities fraud, with a fine of $10,000, two years of supervised release, and 300 hours of community service.

Walter Königseder, the company's vice president in charge of European operations, was also indicted by a federal grand jury.

The major step was separating the database engine technologies from the recently acquired Ardent Software ETL and Information Integration products.

[25] Informix shareholders approved this deal, which delivered $1 billion in cash to the much smaller remaining company, which intended to focus on the high growth ETL and information integration space, dominated at the time by Informatica.

Ascential Software made use of its large cash holdings from the Informix sale to buy a number of smaller companies with technology.

Shareholders who had held on from the Informix era did not fare so well, after accounting for the reverse split the deal netted them only $4.62 a share, far less than the price before IBM's first acquisition, which had hovered a bit over $7.00 through March 2001.