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TELECOMS AND SOFTWARE NEWS
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Informatica widens net to CEP
Tony Baer, Madan Sheina
Informatica widens net to CEP
Informatica has further expanded its data integration engine with the acquisition of specialized complex event processing (CEP) analysis provider Agent Logic. This will bolster Informatica's businesses, especially in public sector, financial services and healthcare, by adding depth to its name and identity matching capabilities. Although Agent Logic's approach to CEP has been very narrow, Informatica's move reveals how the worlds of CEP and business intelligence (BI) are converging.CEP and BI are converging
Although business intelligence (BI) has been adding near-realtime capabilities that provide current analytic snapshots, its heritage has been historical analysis. Conversely, CEP has been all about the present. CEP enables businesses to close the loop on operational strategies with time-sensitive parsing and analysis of torrents of streaming data coming from RFID sensors, website click streams, transactional flows, geospatial data and other sources.Yet the very fact that CEP encompasses analytics makes it a natural extension of realtime BI. When integrated with related transactional and historical data, CEP can provide the missing 'event' element to make it useful for closed-loop, realtime business decision-making. Informatica's move into the space underscores how CEP and BI are converging.Time to insight is the driving logic behind Informatica's swoop
Acquiring Agent Logic helps Informatica bake high throughput, realtime analytics of unstructured data into its data integration platform through rules-based parsing of unstructured data. Backed in part by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's not-for-profit venture capital arm, Agent Logic's primary market has not surprisingly been the federal government.For Informatica, the acquisition is quite synergistic with previous acquisitions that include:
- Itemfield, which integrates unstructured data
- Identity Systems, which provides identity-matching technology
- AddressDoctor, which provides data cleansing for international addresses.
Agent Logic will enable Informatica's unstructured data cleansing and integration tools to perform their tasks under far more complex, higher-throughput, realtime scenarios. Beyond public sector, the acquisition is also potentially useful for serving financial services firms in performing fraud detection, or for healthcare markets in analyzing patient-care outcomes.Agent Logic gets Informatica awfully close to the applications business Agent Logic is part of Informatica's larger strategy for delivering a one-stop shop for data integration. Informatica plans to integrate the technology with its own data integration platform to support 'event-driven active data integration'. However, parsing and integrating raw streaming data alone lacks the situational business context necessary to perform the task of providing realtime closed-loop operational intelligent execution.Agent Logic's CEP capabilities are specialized for problems requiring highly complex analysis of identity data, an area that is useful only to certain segments of Informatica's customer base. Furthermore, building the rules set requires domain as opposed to data integration knowledge, turning an integration tool into a business solution. As such, leveraging the Agent Logic acquisition brings Informatica awfully close to the applications business. A decade ago the company burnt its fingers trying to enter the analytic applications business, following its acquisition of Influence Systems. Since then it has stuck to its roots in horizontal data integration.Informatica will face a challenge in capitalizing on the Agent Logic acquisition without getting distracted once again into the applications side. As the last major independent data integration player still standing, Informatica must stay focused, given that IBM, Oracle, and SAP are each hungry for its core business. Informatica will have to leverage SIs and consulting partners heavily to make the Agent Logic acquisition successful.The acquisition is a good exit strategy for Agent Logic, and an initial CEP stake in the ground for Informatica Although there are a few independent CEP players left, such as Streambase, Aleri/Coral8, and SeeWhy, the sector is consolidating as middle-tier platform providers such as IBM, Oracle, Tibco and Progress aggressively promote their presence. Among this group, Agent Logic's business was one of the narrowest in the sector. If Informatica can leverage its partner channel successfully, Agent Logic's technology will spread to a much larger audience.For Informatica, there is a still a key missing piece: acquiring capabilities that add time-based SQL parsing of the relational data that remain the core of its business. Agent Logic does not support this increasingly popular CEP approach. As the partial list above indicates, there are still many eligible acquisition candidates.
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