Informatica announced the acquisition of AddressDoctor today. Rob Karel of Forrester has an 
excellent blog post on the acquisition as does the 451 group (subscription required)
Since I recently was the VP of Product Marketing for Siperian, I won’t comment or speculate on what this means to my former company. I’ll just point out the public fact that Siperian OEMs AddressDoctor as an optional data quality offering as part of its MDM platform. However, Siperian customers are also free to chose from other data quality vendors such as Trillium, SAP/Business Objects/FirstLogic DQ, IBM QualityStage , Group1 and others. With strong integration in the form of cleanse adapters to data quality vendors of choice, for me, Siperian remains the gold standard for “openness” in the MDM market.
I must applaud Informatica for identifying major components in the MDM lifecycle that were ripe for the picking. Their acquisition of Identity Systems last year for $85M (now Informatica Identity Resolution) and now AddressDoctor (451 group speculates $20M approx. for the transaction), to go with their 2006 acquisition of Similarity Systems for $55M are excellent moves because of the ubiquitous reliance of other major MDM players on these technologies.
Outside of Informatica’s purchases, over the last few years there have been several purchases of supporting MDM products including IBM’s acquisition of Exeros, SAP buying Business Objects, who prior to that bought FirstLogic for $69M in 2006, IBM acquiring Ascential QualityStage and DataStage for $1.1B, D&B acquiring Purisma for $48M. This is a fast moving market and commodity components of the MDM lifecycle are being snapped up by the big boys faster than you can say Master D…
This table of key MDM deals was published by The 451 Group May 2008 in which they speculated that after the Identity Systems acquisition, the next move for Informatica would be a pure MDM player. Not listed below but related deals are the SAP/Business Objects acquisition (It is rumoured that SAP’s new MDM strategy is coming from the BO team), Sun acquiring See Beyond (and now Oracle acquiring Sun which basically gives them ownership of Open Source MDM through Project Mural, Oracle acquiring Siebel in 2005 (giving them Siebel UCM), and Oracle acquiring Hyperion (giving them the Razza technology as well).
Select MDM deals by mega vendors (last 5 years)
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*Official 451 Group estimate. Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase
There seems to be too many cross-linking relationships in a very small pond. Can this stymie innocation and confuse customers even more than they already are in the MDM space?
Aaman, maybe it’s because I’ve been living in the MDM world for the last 4 years, but I think it’s pretty clear to the analysts and to many prospects now learning about MDM who the players are and their relationships. But I agree, it could be clearer, but then where would be the fun in that 🙂
A fantastic article, Ramon. How long can it be until Initiate and/or Siperian are gobbled up? I seem to recall that Informatica is an investor in at least one of those companies. This is going to get interesting – fast.