Called I.Sell, the product is designed as a one-stop offering for companies that can pay the fixed $600,000 price, Informix said. It includes the Informix database as well as all the software necessary to design an e-commerce website, and can be set up in about 13 weeks.

Informix, which has been charting a turnaround for the last year and a half, is racing to sell products that will capitalise on the mushrooming growth of the internet. According to Forrester Research, the market that I.Sell serves is forecast to surge to $1 billion in 2002 from $100 million in 1998. Moreover, setting up high-volume, complex websites is an onerous process.

"People want web commerce sites but actually constructing one isn't as easy as it looks," said Carolyn DiCenzo,principal analyst at market researcher Dataquest. "Informix has really focused on stabilising the business during the past year and a half and now they're looking for growth."

Wes Raffel, who heads up Menlo Park, Calif.-based Informix's e-commerce efforts, said I.Sell is the only product now available that has all the elements needed for a web commerce site combined in one package. Until now, most websites have built their own e-commerce solutions, he added.

"This is the coming-out party for our division," Raffel said. "This market is obviously fast-growing and we think what we have is really different than what's out there."

No. 2 database software company Oracle Corp is touting its Oracle 8I database as internet-friendly, while International Business Machines Corp, now the No. 1 database company, is aggressively touting its DB2 database and has the world's largest services organisation to set up, run and maintain e-commerce sites for its customers.

But Informix is looking to compete with IBM --which could assemble a similar package from its own offerings -- by selling I.Sell at a fixed price, DiCenzo said. "The fixed price is certainly a differentiator for Informix," she said.

The product costs $600,000 for each two microprocessors. If, for example, a company wants to run a website on a powerful computer that has four microprocessors, then I.Sell would cost $1.2 million.

"Could Oracle or IBM do what we're doing? Sure," Raffel said. "But if they do, we've already beaten them to market."

But there are stumbling blocks. By offering a fixed-price web commerce solution, Informix has to be able to install it on time with few snafus. Otherwise it will lose money.

"They have to be confident they can deliver on this or they won't be in business for very long," DiCenzo said. But she said she doesn't expect Informix would undertake such a risky proposition unless they had worked all, or at least, most of the kinks out.