According to most press reports, Ascential made an ideal IBM acquisition target. It has around 900 employees, and revenues last year of $271.9 million, up 46% from the year before. Furthermore, IBM has been a reseller of Ascential's technology for about as long as it has been on the market. In fact, the two companies have 550 joint customers, and IBM has accounted for about 10% of Ascential's revenue last year.

Such familiarity can mean a great deal in the software industry, where we have seen many a merger / acquisition "marriage" causing a culture clash and difficult integration. HP and Compaq come to my mind.

Ascential has certainly had an interesting history. Pardon me if I get some of this out of order but here is the gist of their history:

-- First it was VMark. Then it became Ardent Software and it was only an ETL vendor.
-- Informix acquired them and they became a subdivision of that company.
-- Next, IBM bought the Informix and Redbrick assets for $1 billion, leaving the ETL business alone which became Ascential Software. The newly named company also had a fat bank account (approximately $800 million by the end of the deal) with which to go shopping.
-- And shopping they did go. Ascential acquired, in short order, Vality for its data cleansing capabilities, Torrent for its parallel processing infrastructure, Prism Solutions for its mainframe connectivy capability, and probably a few other companies that I can't remember.

Now it seems IBM wanted the whole enchilada.

What this means for our industry remains to be seen but I would keep an eye on Informatica, the largest remainig independent ETL vendor, as a probable acquisition target soon.