Informatica To Buy Middleware Vendor Itemfield

software middleware

Pending regulatory approvals, the deal is expected to close by mid-December, according to Informatica.

A privately held company based in San Mateo, Calif., five-year-old Itemfield has 150 customers, including American Airlines, American Express, General Electric and Merrill Lynch. The company's software transforms data for use in standardized environments like service-oriented architecture (SOA) systems. It supports an assortment of structured and unstructured data formats, including HTML, Microsoft Office documents, PDF and various XML standards.

For the past year under an OEM agreement, Informatica has been offering Itemfield's ContentMaster data transformation technology as an option add-on to Informatica's flagship PowerCenter integration platform.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Informatica is particularly interested in Itemfield's technology for "cross-enterprise data exchange" using industry-specific formats like SWIFT for international funds transfers and HL7 for health-care clinical data, said Ivan Chong, Informatica's vice president of product marketing. That's an area of increasing client demand, and Informatica expects to use Itemfield's technology to create new products. The area is also ripe for partner opportunity, he said.

'"We expect that new, OEM-style partnerships with an industry-specific bent would result," Chong said. Acquiring Itemfield's technology will also expend the breadth and depth of Informatica products available to the company's systems integrator partners, he added.

Itemfield has 60 employees, and its research organization is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Informatica is still determining how many Itemfield employees will join the company.