Informatica: The last enterprise software indie?
Company may be ripe for the picking, but maybe they don't want picking
November 20, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Will Informatica be snapped up like Hyperion, Business Objects and Cognos -- or be the last indie enterprise software vendor standing?
The logic driving the mergers-and-acquisitions mayhem in the enterprise software arena can be contradictory. Some argue that enterprise software's 'maturity' is driving consolidation. Others, citing the business intelligence boom, claim that the potential for 'hockey stick growth' is what made Hyperion Solutions Corp., Business Objects SA and, last week, Cognos Inc. ripe for the plucking.
By either line of reasoning, software vendor Informatica Corp. would likely appear high on any list of buyout targets.
Since 1993, the Redwood City, Calif. company has been providing software to help companies clean, transfer and otherwise manage their data. Its PowerCenter suite has long been one of the most popular Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tools around, with about 4,000 installations at 2,900 companies.
"What Informatica does is undervalued," said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Wellesley, Mass.-based Nucleus Research. www.nucleusresearch.com "Delivering a project is easy. Delivering it full and on-time is harder. People get in over their heads with the complexity of the data. Informatica is really good at minimizing those problems."
"While some people will argue that IT doesn't matter, no one would say data doesn't matter," said Informatica CEO Sohaib Abbasi in an interview earlier this month.
Tough space, but no hidden agendas
Despite its lack of glamour, ETL -- what Informatica calls data integration -- is a tough space. Longtime competitors include IBM, which bought Ascential Software Corp. two years ago, as well as Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. Newer players include Sybase Corp. and SAS Institute Inc., which announced tools in April 2006 to complement its data warehousing software.
Abbasi argues that Informatica has been able to carve out a living by staying ahead technically as well as reassuring customers that they aren't being pushed to migrate.
"We don't have a hidden agenda to promote one database or another," he said. "Our neutrality assures that our customers are never locked into a single vendor."