Informatica: The Hunter And The Hunted

On the heels of Informatica's acquisition of Applimation, I asked Adam Wilson, Informatica's vice president of product management and marketing, what he's learned about the art of integrating technology from newly acquired companies.

Informatica describes itself as a vendor of "enterprise data integration software," which in essence means middleware that allows customers to move data from one type of application, data base, or storage device to another without destroying its integrity.

So by its very nature, Informatica touches software from all the major enterprise software vendors, like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft--and more recently, software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors like Salesforce.com.

Informatica has quite a lot of experience on the acquisition front, and recently closed its acquisition of information lifecycle management software vendor Applimation, which occupies a space adjacent to Informatica in the world of data storage and retrieval.

The acquisition was the second for Informatica in the past 12 months; it has also recently acquired Identity Systems, Itemfield, Similarity Systems and Striva.

Wilson told me that pre-existing partnerships or technical cooperation at customer locations can give integration "a six-month head start. You've worked out a lot of the integration before the deal gets done."

That kind of relationship existed between Informatica and Striva and Itemfield respectively, said Wilson, but did not with either Similarity Systems or Applimation. Based on past experience, Wilson estimates it will be a good two quarters before the respective technologies will be properly integrated.

But just as Informatica always seems to be in the market for another technology to complement its arsenal, it is itself seen as a potential target for acquisition by one of the aforementioned huge vendors, allowing them to offer customers a single, unified middleware application to stitch all their data together.

Oracle is seen as one of the more likely suitors -- and why not? Oracle will seemingly buy everything.

Wilson says he's heard more than his share of rumors in the eight-and-a-half years he's been at Informatica because "there's a lot of companies that covet what we do and our customer base."