September 12, 2003 10:00 AM PDT
Software firm Informatica snaps up Striva
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Informatica said it will pay $62 million in cash and stock for Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Striva, a developer of data integration software products. Executives from the companies said they expect the deal to close before the end of 2003, pending regulatory approval.
For the last two years, Redwood City, Calif.-based Informatica has been bundling Striva's mainframe integration technology with its own array of enterprise integration and data-mining software.
The reseller relationship between the two companies and existing integration between their product lines should make it easy to complete the merger from a technology standpoint, said Sanjay Poonen, Informatica's senior vice president of worldwide marketing.
"We know that there is tremendous opportunity in the mainframe integration market, based on the statistics we've seen and growing interest around issues such as disaster recovery," Poonen said. "Beyond the mainframe, Striva brings us increased capabilities in the change data capture space, which is important to data integration functions, similar to hot synch in BlackBerry handhelds." Change data capture is an Informatica technology whereby only the changes made to the operational database are captured and propagated to the data warehouse.
Mainframes, powerful but pricey business computing systems that are under fierce competition from Unix and more recently Windows servers, set the standard for resistance to crashes and the ability to juggle many computing tasks simultaneously. But because mainframes aren't mainstream, advocates have had to work hard to keep them abreast of current computing trends such as Internet technology.
Poonen cited numbers from various researchers that indicate 90 percent of Fortune 1000 companies still use mainframes, and more than 70 percent of corporate data is stored on higher-end "big iron" systems that handle demanding data-processing chores. Striva's customers include American Express, Boeing and FedEx.
Recent firm Giga Information Group reported that mainframe and so-called legacy systems comprise 20 percent of the data integration and data warehousing market.
CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
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