Hi all,

Poet and Versant will merge. The contract between the
companies is already signed. Both stockholders meetings
still has to accept the deal:
http://biz.yahoo.com/djus/030929/1017000792_2.html

The new company will have 175 employees and a turnover
around USD 30 million.

What do you think of the news?

Will this be good or bad for the acceptance of object
databases?

Kind regards,
Carl
--
Carl Rosenberger
db4o - database for objects - http://www.db4o.com

"Carl Rosenberger" <carl (AT) db4o (DOT) com> wrote


That's a tricky question. On the one hand it is bad because it reduces
the amount of competition in the OODBMS marketplace while on the other
hand there is a chance of an improved suite of tools emerging from the
merger.

This merger may not have much impact on the profile of OODBMSs in
general, as both these vendors have reduced the profile of the OO
technology underlying their solutions in their marketing literature
over the last couple of years anyway. In fact Poet now tag FastObjects
as 'The Invisible Database' on their website [1]. Compare that with
the year 2000 branding: 'POET Object Server Suite'.

Having said that, Cache and Objectivity are still promoted as object
databases on their vendors' sites.

-Janek

[1] This is an accurate description of FastObjects t7, from my
perspective at least. In about 3 years of continual use in a
production evironment FastObjects has never required any unexpected
admin actions despite many schema changes.