Pete's Blog - A Bigger After Life for 29West

News of 29West's acquisition by Informatica broke on Monday morning (thank you for not trying to embargo the news, which most vendors hopelessly bungle). It was a surprise to me and to many people, but one that hasn't been greeted with much debate or discussion. Unlike the NYSE/Wombat acquisition of a couple of years ago, this one looks pretty straightforward, and sensible. So not a whole lot to write about from a news angle, though it's more interesting in the context of Informatica's other acquisitions and how the data management specialist might leverage 29West.

That 29West has new owners is business as usual for its founders, who created and sold earlier messaging companies like WhiteBarn (to Talarian) and Talarian (to Tibco Software) along the way. And any company backed by the likes of Susquehanna Growth Equity was in all probability always headed for an acquisition exit. 29West has done well for itself since it was founded in 2002, and with a significant customer base, it is probably a good time to sell, as competition is increasing and open source is becoming nearly credible - and that means commoditisation.

Informatica has been around since 1993 and it plays in the broad data integration and management space - SOA and B2B applications that are not quite real-time today but could well benefit from moving in that direction. 29West messaging will allow that to happen, and probably without too much in the way of development and deployment woes.

Interestingly, Informatica acquired master data management vendor Siperian back in January, adding to its applicability in the reference data space. It also acquired a small complex event processing vendor, Agent Logic, last September. It's not too hard then to envisage how some 29West turbo power might fit in to Informatica's concept of real-time transaction processing from the front-to-middle-to-back office, as demand for that grows.

29West's brand will live on in the financial markets space, though its technology is going to find its way into other verticals where Informatica has a presence - like telco and government. So the game continues on a bigger playing field, against the likes of IBM, Progress Software and Tibco. Methinks Oracle needs some low latency messaging too - who's got some to sell?