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May 9, 2002

In this Issue:

Quality Control

Spending Wisely

Meaningful Metrics

Quality Control

Data integration vendors shop for data quality technologies

In Brief

High-level news at a glance

Predicting Performance. Compaq Computer Corp.'s Compaq Global Services branch announced services for monitoring IT infrastructure availability and performance metrics. The new Remote Monitoring and Performance Reporting services provide realtime performance trend reports and alerts via a secure Web portal.

Extending Web Services. Stratify Inc. added support for simple object access protocol and Web services description language to its Stratify Discovery System, which organizes, classifies, and presents unstructured enterprise data. The new support will help organizations incorporate unstructured information into applications.

Java Battle. Sun Microsystems filed a lawsuit against Microsoft in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif. for relief from Microsoft's alleged unfair business practices. One of the remedies Sun requested is that Microsoft be required to distribute the Java plug-in with Windows XP and Internet Explorer.

Red Hat Advances. Red Hat Inc. previewed the beta version of Red Hat Linux Advanced Server at the German CeBIT 2002 conference in March. Scheduled for release in Q2 2002, Advanced Server will be Red Hat's new enterprise platform for mission-critical server deployments supporting secure, high-availability workgroups and e-commerce solutions.

Data quality solutions are increasingly being absorbed into data integration tools. And the most recent example of this phenomenon is Ascential Software Corp.'s latest acquisition — Vality Technology Inc. — for $92 million in cash. Ascential, a data integration company that split from Informix when IBM bought Informix in April 2001, has used a significant portion of its cash from that separation to make two strategic acquisitions in four months.

After buying Torrent Systems Inc. for $46 million cash in November 2001 to make Ascential's DataStage extract-transform-load (ETL) product massively scalable (see News & Analysis, Feb. 1, 2002), Ascential spent twice that much to acquire Vality for its data scrubbing software.

As part of the deal, Vality will drop its partnership with Ascential's chief rival, Informatica Corp., which continues to work with Vality's ever-decreasing data quality competition, such as Trillium Software (now a division of Harte-Hanks Inc.).

Some have speculated that this acquisition may put pressure on Informatica to acquire a data quality company, because Ascential isn't the only vendor to offer integrated ETL and data quality software. SAS Institute Inc. acquired DataFlux Corp. and subsequently launched a marketing initiative called "ETLQ" ("ETL to the power of Q"), which is aimed at selling data quality along with ETL. Computer Associates (CA) also offers ETL and data quality tools. In addition, Sagent Technology Inc. has data quality algorithms integrated with its ETL suite.

However, SAS, CA, Sagent, and Informatica also offer business intelligence and analytic capabilities, and Ascential doesn't. To Ascential's credit, Gartner analysis of the acquisition by Ted Friedman says, "Ascential will become the first leading ETL vendor to have a complete data quality offering within its portfolio." (Emphasis added.)

Financial analysts on the conference call with Ascential expressed concern about the amount Ascential paid to purchase Vality. Ascential executives defended the price by stating they paid three times the expected annual contribution to revenue. Ascential's stock price fell moderately the day of the announcement and continued to fall gradually until press time.

Refer to Intelligent Enterprise's Web-exclusive analyst update, "Data Quality Week," for more insights about this topic.

— Jeanette Burriesci

In this Issue:

Quality Control

Spending Wisely

Meaningful Metrics