You released Version 8 of PowerCenter in the spring of this year. What has been the uptake? Who are some of your customers? We are very pleased with the uptake. One of our new features is support for unstructured data. We enable customers to integrate data, not just stored in databases and file systems, but also in Microsoft Office formats and even PDF documents. American Express is using it to integrate Excel data that stores data about members who hold certain branded cards. They want to aggregate that information on members with other member data, meaning they need to draw from Excel spreadsheets as well as more traditional databases.

Another customer is stereo maker, Bose Corp. It is migrating off legacy data sources and toward SAP. Modernization is a big driver for us. Post M&A integration, especially in the financial services and pharmaceutical industry, is also bringing customers. Semex, the second-largest cement manufacturer in Mexico, merged with RMC Group in the U.K. last year. They wanted to reduce the time to integrate systems by six months because it would be worth $100 million to them. Using Informatica, they intend to meet that goal.

What is your on-demand strategy? How do you avoid competing with your existing channel partners? On-demand is complementary and incremental to our partners. We first provided connectivity to Salesforce.com. Then we want to make data integration a feature for other hosted service providers. NetSuite is already one of our partners. We have a long history with Siebel. We are in discussions with them to extend our hosted offering to Siebel-On-Demand as well. Eventually, we plan to offer our platform entirely as a software-as-a-service. This is all to help us go out of the enterprise arena.

There are very few open-source data integration vendors. Why? Given the nature of data integration, you need to have knowledge of a lot of different systems, including very old mainframe computers. This is specialized knowledge that few open-source data integration companies have.

Have you entertained any buyout offers recently? If Ab Initio were sold, would that make you take a buyout offer more seriously? We are singularly focused on data integration and on our sustained execution. Obviously though, because we're a publicly traded company, we take our requirements to keep the perspective of investors in mind very seriously.