16 September 2003 The rapid consolidation within the software industry has gained further pace with data warehousing software supplier Informatica and content management system vendor Vignette fleshing out their product lines with the respective purchases of Striva and Intraspect.
Silicon Valley’s Informatica said it is acquiring London-based Striva in a cash and stock deal that valued the company at $62 million.
Striva was founded in 1998 and has prospered in the highly competitive extraction, translation and loading (ETL) software tools market. It can boast a sizeable blue-chip customer list including Alcatel, American Express, HSBC, General Electric, Nestle and Royal &SunAlliance.
Striva’s flagship product is a data extraction package called Detail, which stands for ‘data extraction, translation and intelligent loading’. The company claims that it can access information locked in the most obscure of databases.
Detail runs on a range of platforms including IBM OS/400, OS/390 and MVS, as well as Windows NT/2000, and plugs into a wide variety of databases.
Meanwhile, Vignette said it was paying $20 million in cash and stock for collaborative workspace software vendor Intraspect.
Vignette’s acquisition of Intraspect reflects an evolving strategic emphasis, particularly following on from its $32 million purchase of portal software vendor Epicentric eleven months ago. “The convergence of collaboration with portal, integration and content services is clear,” said Vignette CEO Thomas Hogan.
However, analysts have suggested that Interwoven, Vignette’s closest competitor, has bought more astutely, with its recent purchase of iManage enabling it to make serious in-roads into the market for the kind of collaborative content software used by lawyers and finance houses.
