Informatica: Attunity's best friend?

Guest Commentary
Informatica: Attunity's best friend?
by Philip Howard

You may remember that Informatica bought Striva last autumn.

Striva was a data integration specialist, not just integrating with the leading relational databases, but also with legacy databases of various types. Thus, for example, the product supports access to CA-Datacom, CA-IDMS, Adabas, IMS, VSAM, HP TurboImage and flat files of all sorts. In terms of deployment it uses an agent-based architecture so that while the user interface uses Windows, individual agents can reside on a wide variety of platforms. Further, these agents can read transaction data as it is processed, recognise information that it is looking for, and pull that data out of the processing stream so that it can be transferred elsewhere in real-time. The company's boast used to be that it could make any data source look like a relational table.

The reason why Striva was not well-known was that it was only a few months before its acquisition (and, actually, to coincide with the launch of DB2 Information Integration for which it was a partner) that the company decided to do any general marketing: previously it had concentrated exclusively on technology partnerships and OEM agreements.

This focus had meant that Striva had done well to acquire many of the leading business intelligence and other companies that need connectors as partners. However, understandably, while many of these vendors were happy to OEM Striva's products, they are far less happy to do so with Informatica.

The vendor that seems to be gaining from this position is Attunity. It has already announced a partnership with Cognos and is in discussions with a number of other business intelligence vendors. Attunity is probably the obvious choice if you are looking for an alternative to Striva since it too provides access to legacy data sources and presents them in real-time format, and it too provides change data capture for real-time movement of data.

Attunity was originally an Israeli company that is now based in the United States (though R&D is still done in Israel). In many ways it is a more interesting company than Striva, because it does not just develop and sell data connectivity, it also leverages that capability in higher level products, in particular in Attunity Data Connect, which is a data federation (or EII - enterprise information integration) product, and Attunity Application Connect, which is an EAI (enterprise application integration) product.

Interestingly, Attunity is a major provider of connectivity for companies in the data federation market. For example, MetaMatrix is a partner of Attunity's, even though their products directly compete with one another. Similarly, a number of the newer start-ups in the data federation space are using Attunity connectors. Another partner, which I have discussed in this space in recent months, is Corigin.

How much of this business would Attunity have got if Striva had remained independent? Certainly some of it, but probably not all of it. However, it is the future that is most interesting: Sagent, Embarcadero, Business Objects and Hummingbird, to name just a few, were all companies that have licensed Striva technology. How many of these vendors will be happy to be supplied by Informatica? My guess at the answer to this question is round.

The next question is: how many of these suppliers will move to Attunity? Probably not all, but probably more than any other vendor gets. As I implied in the heading: it looks like Informatica has done Attunity a big favor.

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