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.