IBM's £580m acquisition of Ascential Software will give
retailers an IBM Websphere alternative to data integration tools
from SAP and Oracle.
The Ascential products offer managed "master repositories" of
business information, which can be accessed on-demand from back-end
supply chain systems. This provides a single view of suppliers and
customers so firms can make rapid inventory and pricing adjustments
as demand changes.
Ted Friedman, principal analyst at Gartner Research, said, "The
deal will broaden IBM's integration offerings, giving Websphere
Information Integrator needed extraction, transformation and
loading, data quality functionality and further complementing
Websphere's process integration offerings."
Bob Mick, vice-president of emerging technology at manufacturing
analyst ARC Advisory Group, said, "Ascential's strength in
high-speed ETL fills a recognised IBM portfolio weakness, making
this a good fit.
"Both firms pledged continued support for competitive products and
heterogeneous environments, which should minimise user concerns
about long-term support for non-IBM products, such as Oracle
database."
Ascential's main competitors are Informatica and Tibco, although
SAP's Netweaver and Oracle Application server offer data
integration capabilities for the suppliers' own applications.
Microsoft with SQL Server 2005 also offers some data integration.