Our OEM is unaffected and in fact we just renewed it last month, said Karen Steele, vice president of corporate communications at Redwood City, California-based Informatica. Nevertheless Informatica also seems to be hedging its bets. It recently entered into a parallel OEM deal with Firstlogic rival Harte-Hanks Trillium Software Inc.
Steele believes the OEMs give Informatica customers the two market leaders in name and address cleansing. But data quality is wider than this and also covers data discovery and analysis, something that Steele claims Informatica already provides in its core PowerCenter data integration platform as an option. We’re seeing good traction with our profiling.
If Informatica is still thinking about acquiring a data quality vendor in the future – which Steele asserts the company isn’t right now – then the company is running out of options fast. Most of the leading independent vendors have now been bought, leaving only a handful of smaller independents like including Datanomic Ltd, Similarity Systems Ltd, DataLever Corp, Innovative Systems Inc and Datamentors Inc.
Our strategy is to remain independent and offer customers best of breed for those areas of data quality we don’t ourselves, Steele said.
