The company was clearly taken off guard by the move and refused to take calls following the announcement of the deal early Monday morning, eastern standard time.

Informatica hastily issued a brief, but defiant, statement on Monday afternoon, which stated that after jousting with Ascential for top spot in the market for several years it is now once again the one clear leader for companies seeking an independent, pure-play data integration solution.

Karen Steele, vice president of corporate marketing at Redwood City, California-based Informatica, reaffirmed this stance in an interview with ComputerWire yesterday, saying Net, net this [merger] helps us more than it hurts us.

Informatica is certainly viewing Ascential’s acquisition as beneficial. A vendor-specific data integration offering may be favored by those customers needing to standardize on a single software provider, but it will not address the requirements for open, best-of-breed software from a broader marketplace, Informatica’s prepared statement read.

However, much will depend on how IBM’s integration strategy plays out. Steele expects the Ascential brand to come to an end and its technology absorbed into IBM’s infrastructure and middleware stack – notably IBM’s DB2 and WebSphere.

Knowing IBM, Ascential’s technology is clearly going to become an IBM brand, Steele said.

For non-IBM shops or Ascential companies that have an aversion to get drawn into IBM’s universe this is a real concern. Informatica could well be the obvious, if not only, alternative for a true independent data integration platform.

The key of course is how everything gets integrated, which IBM has yet to clearly articulate. We’re all still in the dark with respect to how product integration will play out, Steele said.

For example, there is the issue of how Ascential’s tools will hook into IBM’s DB2 Information Integrator. IBM also has a rather old DB2 Warehouse Manager ETL product which is likely to ditched in favor of the more technically competent Ascential DataStage ETL product.

Steele said: It’ll take time for both IBM and Ascential to sort this out, Steele said, pointing out that Ascential has yet to fully integrate its own data integration suite.

But in the long run integration should not be a sticking point for Ascential customers as there are already multiple integration points with IBM’s DB2 and WebSphere products.

Steele is confident that IBM will continue to remain a strategic partner for Informatica. Senior IBM representatives have already publicly reaffirmed IBM’s openness stance for data integration.

The lion’s share of our business with IBM is via their Business Consulting Services (BCS) group, Steele said. IBM has publicly announced and told us that it is still committed to this partnership to serve existing and new customers, she said.

Steele also pointed out that: BCS likes to position itself as the independent consulting arm of IBM and its solution offerings often competes with IBM products.

However she admitted the writing was on the wall for Informatica’s relationship with IBM’s Software Group. We’ve been in the same boat with IBM before, this time it’s a bit more drastic and we don’t envisage any more opportunities in that group.

Nevertheless many customers and other partners will be keeping a weary eye on how the relationship with IBM will pan out.

Another interesting dynamic is the impact the deal could have on both Ascential and Informatica’s relationships with German business applications giant SAP and PeopleSoft, which is now under Oracle’s wing.

Ascential has forged a much closer (reseller) relationship with SAP than other data integration rivals. But Informatica also boasts it has over 300 SAP customers and its platform is certified to run on top of SAP’s NetWeaver application integration framework.

SAP is an interesting player down the road since they need a [data] integration tool as well, Steele said.

Moreover SAP is pushing its own middleware and application server technologies that compete with IBM’s WebSphere.

It’ll be interesting to see what SAP makes of all this and how closely they’ll stay with Ascential now, Steele asks.

Ascential’s PeopleSoft/Oracle relationship takes a more interesting twist since IBM competes head-to-head with Oracle in the relational database market.

Many industry observers regard IBM’s swoop for Ascential as being a competitive database play. It remains to be seen how Oracle responds since the database giant has made no secret of its desire to beef up its own back-end integration capabilities.

Bill Prentice, manager of technology strategy at SAS Institute Inc, which competes with both Informatica and Ascential for data warehousing dollars, is not surprised by the acquisition. IBM has been gearing up for a database war with Oracle and Microsoft for some time now.

Not surprisingly Steele plays up Informatica’s pure-play credentials as an advantage it can bring to the table when dealing with PeopleSoft/Oracle which competes directly with IBM for database market share.

We’re fully certified to work on PeopleSoft EPM [Enterprise Performance Management] implementations. We now look like a much more neutral play than Ascential does, Steele said.

Of course this raises the possibility of Informatica itself being taken over – with Oracle, SAP, or even Microsoft as potential acquirers.

But much will depend on how willing these companies are to opening up their own databases and application platforms up to competing systems. Oracle’s Warehouse Builder is a respectable tool but it is very specific to their own database, Steele noted.

If this is the case, they will need an independent, open and interoperable solution to manage the complex task of enterprise data integration.

Steele said the complex landscape of heterogeneous IT systems most companies maintain today means the market will continue to need an independent and open enterprise data integration platform. Our independence will benefit enterprise partners like SAP and Teradata.

She added: The larger systems integrators are also looking for best of breed technologies.

Steele claims that firms like Accenture and EDS have already expressed a interest in working more closely with Informatica following Ascential’s buyout.

Steele said Informatica is working on migration paths and special promotions to lure nervous or uncertain Ascential customers onto its platform.