Company acquisitions to shake up the market

[vmcburney]

A direct mailing company, Pitney Bowes, has bought First Logic! First Logic is one of the biggest DQ vendors in the US and has OEM agreements with Business Objects and Informatica (and Ab Initio?). Informatica may have seen this coming as they signed a new OEM with Trillium.

Pitney Bowes also bought Group 1 Software earlier this year and it gives them a truck load of data quality software. Looks like they will turn it into a specialised customer and address cleansing tool and detach the other parts of the software such as the matching engine.

This will leave BO in the lurch and they will have to hunt up another data quality partner. This will take away some of the competition for Informatica and Ascential in the data integration market. Looks like the Ascential decision to buy a dq vendor rather then partner with one was a good one.