IBM acquires unstructured data specialist

Rethink IT, Oct, 2004

IBM has bought private firm Venetica, which provides enterprise class access to unstructured data (read 'text'). The product set will be integrated into the Information Integration Group of IBM's Information Management business.

The deal can't have been for a lot of money given that Venetica has just 70 employees, and has only 50 customers, mainly in banking, insurance, government and life sciences, and IBM was not revealing the financial details of the deal.

Venetica is obviously thought of as providing one of the missing pieces in IBM's enterprise data integration strategy, selling content integration middleware that provides bidirectional (read-write) access to over 20 leading content repository and workflow systems.

While DB2 has its own IBM read-write links, mostly through ODBC and various proprietary wrappers to other database environments like ancient Adabas and the Computer Associates acquired databases (Ingres, Datacom DB and IDMS) and to Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and Teradata, all of these are about structured information.

In the past IBM would use Websphere MQ for any tricky to and fro data manipulations.

But Venetica can provide bridges out of the box to document management systems such as those provided by Documentum, Filenet, Open Text, Stellent, Hummingbird and Interwoven.

Unstructured data, especially web-held HTML, is among the most troublesome data that an enterprise can deal with. Using Venetica IBM will be able to offer enterprise content integration to access unstructured information such as business documents, still images, digital media and web pages, and integrate them into existing business processes.

In effect, clients will he able to gain real time access to business information that is scattered across the enterprise regardless in what form it is held.

To some extent this is another Sarbanes-Oxley driven acquisition in that it gives more certainty about getting access to unstructured data that might be relevant to financial dealings and reporting within a company.

IBM cited analysts saying that the opportunity for business integration software is expected to exceed $10bn by 2006, with enterprises spending as much as 40% of their annual IT budgets on data integration.

Venetica technology will be integrated into IBM's DB2 Information Integrator family of products.