A Reuters article published recently reveals that Informatica’s management wouldn’t exclude selling the company, “if it were in the financial interest of shareholders” according to Informatica’s own CFO, Earl Fry. Even though he declined to say if the company is in talks about a sale, takeover rumors have been inflating recently, even more after the news of Oracle acquiring Hyperion, SAP acquiring Business Objects and IBM acquiring Cognos.

This consolidation of the business intelligence market is highly interesting for Informatica, whose products focus primarily on transforming and loading BI data. But their neutrality with regards to databases, applications, BI tools and hardware platforms “doesn’t preclude anybody acquiring Informatica,” always according to Earl Fry. The message is loud and clear.

Vendor neutrality is very important, and most of Informatica’s clients would not necessarily like for it to be taken over by another player. They know that after IBM bought Ascential, or after Oracle bought Sunopsis, the acquired company has focused more on supporting the acquirer’s products. Independence is a guarantee for the overall performance of the information system, and we at Talend understand that: we are covering both the BI and operation integration markets, and are offering more connectors than any other vendor, open source or proprietary. Performance follows suit.

In any case, Informatica’s shares keep climbing: +17% in the past 3 months. Some signs are clear. Who will make Informatica’s shareholders happy? (Too bad for the clients… no, wait, they can always switch to open source!)

Bertrand