By William Fellows
With the likes of IBM, HP, Hitachi, Neon and BEA looking to assemble full service application integration solutions, data transformation specialist Constellar Corp likes to think of itself as a hot acquisition prospect. Constellar says it is in talks with a number of potential licensees for its Hub 3.0 software – which it claims can be used to load data warehouses, implement Oracle applications, and integrate legacy and message applications – and presumably suitors too, though it declined to name who they might be.
Constellar, which began life in the UK as the SQL Group and claims to have raised more than $30m funding, reckons it and TSI International with its Mercator technology effectively own the data transformation technology market. Other EAI companies provide transport but not transformation, Consteller claims. It says its average sale is coming in at around $250,000.
It is currently building out a number products from its Hub product, including an OEM version it will push towards systems integrators. It is also creating packaged application ‘spokes’ that will plug into the Hub for Oracle, SAP and other enterprise applications. The company says that the idea is to provide plumbing with pre-coded pipes. It can already read data from IBM MQSeries queues as well as via batch transfer. It is also developing a new architecture to enable a company’s business processes to be automatically re-used as rules against the hub and spoke infrastructure. It says it’s all part of its plan to move gradually from providing the pumps and the plumbing to content (application) services.
