IBM has announced that it has acquired the assets of Exeros, market leaders in data discovery, auditing, and remediation. IBM executives said today that everyone on the Exeros team is also joining IBM, and that the acquisition is already complete.
This deal gives IBM, Exeros, and their customers several different potentially significant functional and market advantages. Knowing more about data and the interdependencies connecting various data elements provides visibility that can affect everything from storage decisions to business analysis and process rules.
This means the Exeros acquisition has implications and potential ripple effects across the entire user enterprise, and across multiple IBM lines of business and solution sets. It also means Exeros technologies can lead directly to more business intelligence and more intelligent businesses, even before IBM's strengts are added to the mix.
Also, Exeros software tends to output information that is consumed by other infrastructure elements, such as data warehouses or MDM hubs. The acquisition gives customers new chances to look at other IBM solutions, while minimizing risks and other challenges related to integration.
So what happens to Exeros' partnerships with actual or potential IBM competitors? Current partners are welcome to consume what will be IBM technology, IBM said. So "co-opetition" continues - but I don't think CA or Informatica or Siperian really has anything with which they can challenge or replace Exeros technologies.
IBM still has work to do to figure out how and where best to integrate Exeros technologies into IBM's ever-evolving offering portfolio. But the initial implications and go-to-market messaging are very promising, and the technological, functional, and operational synergies are significant.
Current customers of both IBM and Exeros should already be working with their vendor partners to begin plotting integration strategies. Customers of either company should plan soon to sit company representatives down and get details from them about what's coming ASAP, focusing specifically on any changes in contract terms, pricing, or offering bundles. (I expect to see on-demand, SaaS-based data discovery, auditing, and remediation solutions from IBM within the next few months, for example -- but maybe that's just me...)
Your comments welcome, of course. Especially if you're an employee or big fan of some of the actual and perceived competition.
I am surprised that Informatica did not acquire them first as they have a strategic alliance Informaica only have a basic Excel mapping utility. Maybe it's because Informatica already has a couple profiling tools and saw too much overlap. CA wont care, they can still import metadata from many profiling tools but the MDM vendors should be concerned in case it gives IBM a lead in bundling MDM software.