IBM acquires middleware vendor Ascential
by Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 4/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
In a deal expected to close Q2 2005, IBM is buying middleware vendor Ascential for $1.1 billion. The purchase adds Ascential's real-time data staging and transformation tools to IBM's data integration portfolio, which boasts unified query, content integration, and business process modeling; and a conventional enterprise application integration broker.
"Ascential has strength in real-time placement, transformation, and data quality," says Janet Perna, who heads IBM's Data Management Solutions group. "It is consistent with our data federation strategy to leave data where it resides." Ascential also gives IBM an otherwise missing link in its competition with Oracle and Microsoft, which are developing their own data extraction, transformation, and loading products.
Both companies are hardly strangers to each other. In April 2001, IBM paid Ascential $1 billion to buy Informix, an information systems management vendor that Ascential previously acquired. The vendors have roughly 300 joint customers to date.
