Informatica continues to broaden its offerings, in this case by acquisition. Itemfield is a company selling software aimed at translating unstructured (or indeed structured) data into XML. Its technical strength was smart algorithms that could deduce structure from samples of emails, Word documents etc. It is fully built around SOA principles, allowing it to be embedded into other offerings fairly easily.
Founded in 2000, the company had 50 or so employees, half of which were in Israel, where the R&D was based. The company had achieved penetration into some good accounts including GE and American Airlines. Its revenues are not public, but I believe that they were hoping for USD 10M sales in 2007. Interestingly, their typical deal size of about USD 225k was higher than that of Informatica itself. Informatica, which already had a partnership with Itemfield, has paid a quite full price for the company, USD 55M of cash meaning a price/sales ratio of 5.5 on projected future 2007 earnings. A healthy result for the founders, and further demonstration that companies will pay a premium price for sufficiently differentiated technology.
