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January 1, 2003

Companies to Watch 2003

Intelligence | Integration | Infrastructure | Collaborative Commerce

Integration

by Jeanette Burriesci, Justin Kestelyn, & Michelle M. Young

Budgets for new IT projects may be tight, but back-office integration remains at the top of the short list of priorities. Whether the goal is creating a real-time, unified customer view or simply moving batch data from one place to another, the technologies involved are more strategic than ever.

Acxiom Corp.

Founded: 1969
HQ: Little Rock, Ark.

Acxiom continues to bolster its value proposition by responding to expanding business needs related to consumer intelligence. Its new Patriot Act Solutions help customers comply with the 2001 USA Patriot Act with capabilities such as identity verification. And after two years' development, Personicx was released as a unique consumer household-level segmentation system.

Ascential Software Corp.

Founded: 2001
HQ: Westboro, Mass.

A strong cash position, growth in sales of its core ETL products, joint development with SAP, and a new partnership with Brio Software keep Ascential important in the data integration space. Introduction of the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite adds promising new potential.

Data Junction Corp.

Founded: 1985
HQ: Austin, Texas

Data Junction is a popular vendor among small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs) and department-level projects in large enterprises. The combination of increasing demand for data integration among SMBs and widespread budget pinches work in Data Junction's favor. Meanwhile, through development and partnerships, Data Junction is working to increase support for BI.

DataMirror Corp.

Founded: 1993
HQ: Toronto

DataMirror reorganized this year and announced a new product marketing identity: LiveBusiness. The LiveBusiness line of products supports real-time data handling requirements, arguably a long-term strategy. At the same time, offers targeted to economical solutions for IBM shops demonstrate DataMirror's good tactical survival skills.

Informatica Corp.

Founded: 1993
HQ: Redwood City, Calif.

Informatica may be the information integration market share leader, but this company continues to innovate. In a bold effort to speed analytic app deployments, the company recently modularized its applications into plug-and-play components that sit on top of its PowerCenter ETL platform.

Kalido Group

Founded: 2001
HQ: London

Kalido, which began its existence as a data integration project at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, attracted attention throughout 2002 with its federated, reference data-driven approach to information integration. This year, the technology's potential appeal to customers with highly complex (and expensive) back-office integration problems should help Kalido move beyond core accounts.

Software AG

Founded: 1969
HQ: Darmstadt, Germany

With a profitable first half of 2002, the dominant XML database company maintained its market leadership despite increased competition from Microsoft. And by incorporating support for SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI into Tamino, Software AG hopes to provide the Web services repository of record.

Sonic Software Corp.

Founded: 2001
HQ: Bedford, Mass.

Sonic Software, a unit of Progress Software Corp., earned notice in 2002 for its lightweight, highly open, and relatively affordable approach to internal enterprise integration. With Progress' recent acquisition of XML specialist eXcelon, Sonic will soon bring message transformation capabilities to the table for more complex integration projects.

Sybase Inc.

Founded: 1984
HQ: Dublin, Calif.

With its acquisition of OnePage and the full incorporation of New Era of Networks' integration capabilities, Sybase is well positioned as one of the leaders in the enterprise portal market, and its iAnywhere subsidiary is swiftly emerging as a mobile computing leader.

Tibco Software Inc.

Founded: 1997
HQ: Palo Alto, Calif.

Not content to rely solely on its integration savvy, Tibco has taken a step toward providing more complete enterprise information management solutions by acquiring Praja, a business activity monitoring (BAM) company. This acquisition, in combination with recent activity in the portal space, suggests that Tibco will work hard in 2003 to move up the strategic IT stack.

Trillium Software, a division of Harte-Hanks Inc.

Founded: 1968
HQ: Billerica, Mass.

A strategic approach to information quality is a key differentiator of the intelligent enterprise. Trillium Software System contributes to that goal with reporting functionality that reveals data quality ROI; in 2003, it should piggyback onto a growing number of integration projects.

WebMethods Inc.

Founded: 1996
HQ: Fairfax, Va.

Already well known for smart partnership moves, webMethods is now working with Informatica to promote BAM solutions that combine the webMethods integration platform and enterprise Web services tools with PowerCenter. And the bundling of the JBoss open-source app server with webMethods 6.0 may make the company more of a one-stop shop for enterprise development.