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.