A fresh wave of consolidation is underway in the business intelligence software sector as large vendors plug gaps in their portfolios with acquisitions. The largest disclosed figure in March was Ascential Software's $92 million acquisition of Vality Technology. Ascential was spun out of Informix Software before IBM bought Informix's database business for $1 billion in early 2001. Vality positions itself in the market for data quality assurance – one of the headaches of data management – competing against the likes of Informatica.

The move comes after other product line in-filling by Ascential. In November 2001 the company bought information asset management specialist Torrent Systems, and now with Vality it gets software that uses probabilistic and fuzzy matching technology to prepare data for analysis and reporting. That broadens the Ascential line-up to cover metadata management, data quality and cleansing, and ETL (extraction, transformation and load) technologies in a single offering. Privately held Vality was founded in 1987, and, with more than 500 customers, had revenues of $21.2 million in 2001. The company currently has a marketing deal with Informatica, which will come to an end when the current acquisition is completed in April.

Another key BI deal in recent weeks has been SAS Institute's acquisition of ABC Technologies, a specialist in costing management software. Founded in 1989, ABC has offices in 18 countries, and clients that include Nokia, Compaq, Fidelity Investments and the UN Development Program. A developer of analytic management software, ABC's financial management and scorecarding expertise will be integrated with SAS's strategic performance management technology. This should enable SAS customers to understand aspects of their organisation's performance such as working out the profitability of individual products or customers, and helping companies improve or get rid of unprofitable products.