In another example of the recent stream of vendor M&As, data integration software vendor Informatica has snapped up master data management (MDM) solution vendor Siperian for an estimated US$130 million. This adds to Informatica’s acquisition of complex event processing (CEP) software vendor Agent Logic last September and further extends the vendor’s reach into the world of data management.
The two vendors have been partners for some time and share a number of customers, but Informatica was seemingly keen to benefit from further synergies between their related offerings. The vendor has been aiming to expand its reach beyond its current focus on extract, transform and load (ETL) software for data warehousing into the area of data quality for some time. The acquisition will therefore allow Informatica to “cross sell data integration and data quality products into MDM opportunities”, says Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO of Informatica.
He continues: “The acquisition of Siperian will expand Informatica’s addressable market with an additional high growth, adjacent technology category, MDM infrastructure, and will further strengthen our key strategic partnerships. Informatica Data Integration and Data Quality have a proven track record of enabling successful MDM projects. Together, we will advance Informatica as a leader in this exciting MDM infrastructure category.”
The appeal of Siperian is seemingly in its multi-domain MDM platform, which it currently markets to 15 industry verticals, of which financial services is just one. Current financial services clients of Siperian, which was founded in 2001, include Bank of America and State Street. Although the vendor has not achieved widescale success beyond top tier players in the financial markets as yet, it has been making more of a concerted effort to reach smaller financial services firms by developing partnerships with vendors such as Exeros and Evaxyx to evolve its platform to better support these clients’ needs.
Informatica, for its part, has experienced a fairly good year in terms of revenues. Last week it indicated that it had achieved a 25% increase in software license revenue in the fourth quarter of the year, and a 10% increase in total revenues for the full year 2009. This performance has allowed the vendor to be particularly acquisitive over the last couple of years. In 2009 alone it made three acquisitions: data archiving solution vendor Applimation, CEP vendor Agent Logic and, at the end of the year, Address Doctor, an online service for address validation and correction.
According to Abbasi, the entrance into the MDM space is all part of a wider plan: “We have outlined a roadmap that we will provide more data-centric technologies and more integration-centric technologies over time, and we have executed on that strategy.”
The acquisitions, along with the recent addition of Siperian, should help to boost Informatica’s market standing in comparison to larger rivals SAP, IBM and Oracle. It gives the ETL vendor a data solution rather than just a tool to offer to the market, thus giving it more of a foothold to conduct strategic discussions within firms around EDM. The larger firm may be enabled to make its solution more appealing to the full range of financial services firms out there, along with the 14 other verticals it aims at.
It will also be interesting to see how the acquisition of Siperian impacts Informatica’s current relationships with Microsoft, Oracle, HP and Intel, all of which use the vendor’s ETL tools in their own offerings.
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