Ascential Buys Data-Profiling Software

Ascential Software Corp.'s buying spree continues. The company says it's buying data-profiling software from Metagenix Inc. for $4.5 million. Ascential will use the acquisition to expand its line of data-integration products.

Data profiling is a critical first step for data-integration or warehouse projects. Data-profiling tools study data sources to determine the content and quality of the data before moving it into another database or warehouse. Now a labor-intensive and error-prone process, Metagenix's MetaRecon software automates profiling.

Ascential has been on an acquisition binge recently. Last month, it closed a $92 million deal to buy data-cleansing software vendor Vality Technology Inc. In November, Ascential spent $46 million to buy Torrent Systems, a developer of parallel-processing infrastructure software for building highly scalable data warehouses. Ascential inherited a lot of cash when it was spun off from Informix Corp. last year, following IBM's acquisition of the database vendor.

Because of a pre-existing marketing and technology partnership between Metagenix and Ascential, MetaRecon is already integrated with Ascential's DataStage data extraction, transformation, and loading software, says Jeff Boehm, product marketing executive director. MetaRecon will be sold as a standalone product for about $200,000 or bundled with Ascential's DataStage suite.