Briefs

In August, Ascential Software, one of the leading independent extract, transform and load (ETL) vendors in the marketplace, announced its plan to acquire enterprise application integration software (EAI) vendor Mercator Software, in a cash deal valued at $106 million. The combined company will have sales of approximately $250 million and share 3,000 customers. This acquisition expands Ascential�s integration offerings from data integration into application integration, and offers cross-selling opportunities to each company�s customer base. The Mercactor acquisition should provide the financial viability that had many of its customers and prospects concerned.

Ascential has been involved in many acquisitions (and name changes) in the past and in general has an excellent track record. Acquisitions include companies such as Prism (ETL), Vality Technology, Inc. (data cleansing), Metagenix (data profiling) and DoveTail (metadata). The original company was acquired by Informix, had its former management take over control of Informix, sold the database portion to IBM, and then reemerged under the new name Ascential Software in 2001.

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