But the folks at IBM, not so politely, disagree.
Analysts and users said the truth lies somewhere in the middle, depending on whether an IT organization needs the lighter, all-in-one functionality of Informatica or the heavier but more robust tools of IBM.
"Informatica is more like a Swiss Army Knife, and IBM is more like a toolbox," said Eric Rogge, an analyst at San Mateo, Calif.-based Ventana Research Inc. "If you're going on a hike, you may not want to lug around a heavy toolbox. But if you're building a house, you wouldn't want to use a Swiss Army Knife."
Redwood City, Calif.-based Informatica and IBM's information integration division -- bolstered by its acquisition of Ascential Software Corp. in April for US$1.1 billion -- are locked in a battle for supremacy in the growing global market for data integration software and services. IDC predicts that the market will grow to $13.6 billion in 2008 from $9.6 billion in 2003. Other leading competitors include Lexington, Mass.-based Ab Initio Inc. and Burlington, Mass.-based Sunopsis Inc.
Informatica claims that Version 8 of its flagship PowerCenter software is the first product to offer the ability to "federate" data, or combine historical data from data warehouses with real-time data streaming from transactional systems; the ability to handle unstructured data such as e-mail, Word files and PDFs; grid computing capabilities; "push-down optimization" so that data-transformation processing can be performed more cheaply in the database; and the ability to handle Java templates and transformations.
The company also claims the only truly "integrated platform," said Ivan Chong, vice president of product marketing at Informatica. "Other solutions on the market provide you with a suite of products."
Rogge agreed. "Ascential does have its advantages, but this is a point in Informatica's favor," he said.
Not so, said Mark Register, chief marketing officer at IBM's information integration division. "Informatica's claims are not correct." Register said that apart from the push-down features, which IBM has not seen much demand for, IBM's family of data integration software tops Informatica's featurewise.
"If you dig underneath the covers of [Informatica's] platform, the functionality is either rudimentary or available only from third-party OEM providers," Register said.
IBM is beta-testing a combined version of IBM and Ascential data integration tools in an initiative called Project Hawk. The software is scheduled to be released next year. Informatica's PowerCenter 8 will be available on a limited basis by year's end, and generally available next April at a base price of $140,000. Informatica is planning an on-demand update, code-named Hercules, for 2007.
With its grid and federation capabilities, PowerCenter 8 allows Informatica to cater to midsize and large enterprises that are centralizing increasingly mission-critical, real-time data integration projects, said Philip Russo, an analyst at The Data Warehousing Institute in Seattle.
Take Oak Brook, Ill.-based Ace Hardware Corp. for example. Ace began using Informatica four years ago for basic extract, transform and load (ETL) batch data jobs, said Mark Cothran, data warehouse architect at Ace and a PowerCenter 8 beta tester. Ace runs IBM's DB2 database on an IBM mainframe, supported by an NCR Teradata data warehouse. Today, the 5,000-store co-operative uses PowerCenter to translate orders from an outside e-commerce provider in near real time. Cothran praised PowerCenter 8's support of Java transformations, as well as its grid and push-down features. Despite running predominantly IBM gear, Cothran said he hasn't been approached by IBM to switch to its data integration software.
"I haven't, and I wouldn't," Cothran said.
By contrast, Atique Shah, executive vice president of CRM at Churchill Downs Inc., home of the Kentucky Derby, said he chose Ascential's software a year and a half ago in a vendor bake-off that included Informatica. The Louisville-based company uses Ascential software to integrate "millions and millions of daily transactions" during the racing season from seven horse racetracks and 22 off-track betting locations around the country.
Shah chose Ascential's DataStage because of its ability to "talk to our existing infrastructure." Ascential's support and pricing also figured prominently, as did ease of use. "The learning curve was much shorter than in previous implementations. In two and a half weeks, one of my guys was writing his own scripts, doing his own ETL routines."