Ascential Software Corp.  

508-366-3888

50 Washington Street,
Westborough, MA 01581
www.ascentialsoftware.com

Sales

$186 million

Business Description 
Headquartered in Westborough, Massachusetts since July 2001, Ascential Software Corporation is a leading supplier of enterprise integration solutions to the Global 2000 and other large organizations. We believe that the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite, built upon a highly scalable platform, is the industry's only single vendor solution that addresses the full range of enterprise data integration needs, and turns data into "Intelligent Information" — information that is reliable, relevant, and complete — so organizations can make better-informed business decisions and drive their strategic application initiatives.

Industry Background. Data integration is the means by which organizations understand the data scattered throughout or external to their organization, access it and deliver it, adapted for its intended use, to enterprise applications and data warehouses. Historically, many organizations accomplished this through internal hand-coded programs that would extract data from one or more sources and deliver it to a target system. By the mid-1990s, certain companies, including Ascential, began developing packaged applications that would efficiently accomplish this basic extract, transform and load, or "ETL", function. By accessing data from various disparate sources and delivering it to the applications that require it, business users can leverage those applications to make mission-critical decisions.

Data integration has evolved from earlier ETL functionality to encompass additional functionality, such as expanded connectivity, data profiling, data quality, bi-directional metadata (data about data) management, data transformation and routing and highly scalable parallel processing technology. We believe that some key factors and trends driving demand for packaged data integration solutions include the following:

• Substantial investments in enterprise applications are failing to realize expected return on investment due to inadequately addressed data issues.

•Data volume and data complexity are both expanding at a rapid pace, straining the ability of in-house coding to satisfy demand.

• "Real time" functionality is becoming a much more prevalent requirement, which in-house coding may be ill-equipped to address.

• Many in-house programming organizations do not have adequate time or resources to devote to the creation and maintenance of additional functionality such as data profiling, data quality, bi-directional metadata management and highly-scalable parallel processing technology.
Solution. Our products for automated data profiling, data quality management and cleansing, and data transformation address the needs of organizations that have invested in enterprise applications such as customer relationship management ("CRM"), enterprise resource planning ("ERP"), supply chain management ("SCM"), analytic applications, transactional environments, or data stores such as data warehouses and data marts.

We have combined the functionality of all of our core integration services onto a single enterprise data integration platform that provides end-to-end metadata management. Our integration platform provides definition and history of the data used to drive strategic enterprise applications. It also provides connectivity between virtually any standard data source and any target application, and virtually unlimited scalability and performance through our parallel processing engine. This complete offering is called the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite.

We also offer a full range of consulting, educational and support services to assist our clients through all phases of a project. Based on demonstrated methodologies, these services represent years of accumulated capital in terms of knowledge and experience, gained through many successful engagements across a range of industries and enterprise application requirements.

We support more than 3,000 customers in such industries as insurance, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, consumer goods, retail, telecommunications and government, in all major markets around the world. One of our resellers, IBM, accounted for more than 10% of our revenues in 2002. In 2003, no single customer accounted for more than 10% of our revenue. Termination of our relationship with IBM, if it were to occur, could have a negative impact on our financial results if the revenue is not replaced.

Products. Our products, as described below, are designed to operate as part of the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite, or as stand-alone integration components. Our product functionality includes: automated data profiling to analyze and manage source data content and structure; data quality and cleansing to identify, correct and reconcile inaccurate, misdirected, or redundant data; and data transformation to obtain data from a source, format it as required for its intended purpose, and deliver it to a specified target system. Our products are supported by a comprehensive platform of integration services that delivers end-to-end metadata management, connectivity between virtually any standard data source and any application, and virtually unlimited scalability by virtue of massively-parallel processing technology. These applications may be deployed in any configuration to support event driven or scheduled processing, as well as deployed as enterprise web services that are called on demand by a service-oriented application. This combination of integration products built on a platform of integration services forms the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite.

The Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite offers a comprehensive, modular solution that can expand with business needs or as customer budgets dictate. We believe our customers benefit from the ability to deploy the complete Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite to address the entire enterprise data integration life cycle, or use individual integration products and add other components as needed. This approach allows customers to achieve complete integration through application of the entire Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite, or to realize targeted benefits through application of one or more components of the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite, with the ability to later add the other components to create a single, integrated solution.

Ascential ProfileStage — Source System Discovery

Our Ascential ProfileStage product, acquired originally from Metagenix, Inc. ("Metagenix") on March 31, 2002, and significantly enhanced in our latest version 7.0, is the core data profiling product in the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite. Ascential ProfileStage facilitates understanding of data sources by profiling source data, analyzing column values and structures, and providing target database recommendations, such as primary keys, foreign keys, and table normalizations. Based on this information, Ascential ProfileStage builds a model of the data to facilitate source-to-target mapping and automatically generates integration jobs.

Ascential QualityStage — Data Preparation and Cleansing

Our Ascential QualityStage product, acquired through the acquisition of Vality Technology Incorporated ("Vality") on April 3, 2002, is the core data quality component of Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite. Ascential QualityStage is designed to ensure that strategic systems deliver accurate, complete information to business users seeking a single view of customers, suppliers, and products from across their enterprise. Through a user-friendly graphical interface, Ascential QualityStage provides quality control mechanisms over structured data elements — international names and addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, part numbers and descriptions, suppliers, email addresses and other data — and seeks to determine relationships among them. Based on rigorous statistical principles, Ascential QualityStage's probabilistic matching capabilities are designed to detect duplications (despite anomalous, inconsistent, and missing data values) and reconcile or discard records as appropriate.

Ascential DataStage — Data Transformation and Integration

Ascential DataStage, our data transformation and integration solutions family, is designed to integrate enterprise information across various sources and targets within specified timeframes. Ascential DataStage features a powerful architecture designed to provide developers with increased speed and flexibility in building, deploying and managing their data integration infrastructure across all manner of analytical, operational and transactional environments. With features such as a graphical user interface driven "work as you think" design metaphor, a library of over 300 pre-built transformations, support for job reuse, versioning and sharing, and event-based job scheduling, Ascential DataStage is designed to enable companies to minimize internal resources allocated to development of integration jobs. Additionally, Ascential DataStage incorporates Packaged Application Connectivity Kits ("PACKs") for many popular enterprise applications, including SAP, Siebel, Oracle and PeopleSoft.

Ascential DataStage TX, acquired through the acquisition of Mercator Software, Inc. ("Mercator") on September 12, 2003, extends the transformation capabilities of the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite to support event driven, parsing, validation and transformation of complex, hierarchical data formats. This functionality is essential in many industries that rely on specific document formats such as the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) format to conduct business with customers, financial institutions and partners.

The Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite and its component products are available in standard and enterprise editions. The configuration options of the products enable customers to purchase the functionality they need on a project basis, or deploy the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite as an enterprise standard, scalable to meet the largest data integration requirement. In the enterprise edition, our patented parallel processing technology will automatically reconfigure the solution to take advantage of complex symmetric multiprocessing or massively parallel multiprocessing CPU configurations to significantly increase throughput.

Services. We believe that a highly skilled customer service organization is a key factor in our success in the enterprise data integration software market. While services are not necessary for customers to benefit from our software products, our professional services consultants offer customers the ability to implement their integration projects faster and can often structure implementation to optimize user-defined objectives. In addition to professional service consulting fees, services revenues consist primarily of software maintenance and support fees and customer education fees.

We maintain both field-based and centralized corporate technical staffs to provide a comprehensive range of assistance to customers and resellers. Services include post-sales technical support, consulting, and product education. Consultants and educators provide services to customers to assist in their use of our products and their design and development of applications that utilize our products.

• Customer Care
We also provide customer service via telephone, e-mail exchange and web site access. All of our maintenance customers have access to customer service resources, delivered by service professionals focused on resolution of customer issues.

• Consulting Services
We offer a variety of consulting services to our customers directly and through third-party systems integrators. Consulting services include implementation assistance, project planning and deployment, and systems configuration. Our advanced consulting group is focused on helping customers implement new technologies and product releases. We complement our professional service offerings by working with leading international and regional third-party consulting and systems integration firms to provide customers with a full range of service options.

• Customer Education and Training
We offer comprehensive education and training courses that provide a broad selection of classroom, computer-based certification, and custom education offerings intended to assist customers and resellers to optimally deploy and use our products. Training is also available to value-added resellers, systems integrators and embedded resellers.