IBM Moves to Acquire Initiate Systems

During a conference call today, Arvind Krishna, IBM general manager for information management, said the acquisition of Initiate Systems will extend IBM’s MDM portfolio to include a “registery style” approach to MDM that allows customers to index information in order to keep track of data.

The acquisition of Initiate Systems comes days after Informatica moved to acquire Siperian, another provider of MDM tools.

In general, MDM is moving past being an event to becoming an ongoing data governance process that needs to be coordinated and integrated with a variety of other applications and middleware.

The acquisition of Initiate Systems is IBM’s 30th acquisition in the area of analytics and information management since 2005, which Krishna said represents over $10 billion in investment.