Group 1 has agreed to acquire Sagent for $17 million.

Lanham, Maryland-based Group 1, which develops customer-focused data quality software, said the purchase price for Sagent will be paid through the cancellation of bridge loans (i.e. debt forgiveness), with the remainder paid in cash.

As a concurrent part of the purchase agreement, Group 1 provided Mountain View, California-based Sagent with $5 million in bridge financing, secured by all of Sagent’s assets. Under the terms of the financing, Group 1 has also agreed to lend Sagent an additional $2 million once the deal is approved by its board.

The technical assets acquired include Sagent’s patented enterprise information integration platform, which will likely be marketed as a standalone offering and extract, transformation and load (ETL) technology integrated with Group 1’s core data quality solutions.

Ken Chow, vice president of marketing and product management for Group 1 believes the acquisition will nicely round out the company’s solution suite. We won’t dead end any product lines, but expand them. Sagent’s Data Flow Suite along with its associated modules addresses a key challenge we face in data quality…namely to easily integrate and analyze disparate data systems into our solution, and also report on the underlying data quality processes, said Mr Chow.

Group 1’s move is an interesting reversal from the past, which has seen data integration vendors buying data quality vendors to build up their own platform. In March 2002, Ascential Software bought Vality Technology. Last year, SAS Institute also unveiled its ETLQ (Exponentially Enhance the Power of ETL with Data Quality) initiative, which aligns SAS’ home-grown ETL capabilities with the data cleansing suite acquired from DataFlux way back in June 2000.

As more vendors seek to integrate their data integration platforms further and build up and own a bigger stack to compete against the larger players, all eyes must now be on other best-of-breed data quality vendors such as FirstLogic, Trillium Software, and DataMentors.

Source: Computerwire/Datamonitor

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