Hearing that analysts had found 60 percent of enterprises still had non-relational information stored on networks, IBM went out and bought up a company that could convert that legacy information.
On Tuesday, Big Blue officials announced the acquisition of Santa Clara, Calif.-based CrossAccess Corp. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Officials expect the acquisition to close by the end of the year.
The 24 employees at CrossAccess will move to IBM’s data management
software group offices when the deal is completed, and immediately
thereafter begin selling the service as an IBM-branded service.
According to Lori Bosio, analysts found that 60 percent of companies
still had non-relational data stored on the company servers from the 1960s
and 1970s. Rather than switching to a relational database — like Oracle
, Microsoft
or even IBM — she
said companies would find it much cheaper to just convert the
information.
“So while competitors will say ‘hey, start from scratch, rip out all
those data stores you have in your environment,’ and store them in an
Oracle database or Microsoft database, we’re saying leave what you have
in its place and we’ll provide you with the software to access it,”
Bosio said.
IBM got its information from a report released recently by IDC, which
found that as much as 40 percent of IT budgets was going towards
business software integration. The research firm expects integration
spending to top $10 billion industry-wide by 2006.
In addition to selling the software as a stand-alone product,
CrossAccess’ technology will be integrated itself into IBM’s DB2
Information Integrator software and sold as a bundled package.
“Businesses today are faced with the challenge to drive more value from
their existing information assets, said Janet Perna, IBM data management
software general manager, in a statement Tuesday. “With the addition of
CrossAccess technology and its expertise in mainframe data access, IBM
is bringing more value to customers faster in helping them leverage
their information across and beyond the enterprise.”