The Week in Review: August 8, 2003

In the news... Research firm Datamonitor recently ranked the top-five enterprise application integration vendors, also known as EAI vendors, in the European market. TIBCO took first ranking with its 51 percent market share. The rest of the top five include webMethods, SeeBeyond, Mercator, and Vitria. Datamonitor also says that the U.K., Germany, and France are spending the most on integration in Europe. In other integration news, integration solutions provider Ascential Software announced this week its plans to acquire Mercator Software, a provider of data transformation and routing solutions. The cash deal is valued at approximately $106 million. The acquisition is expected to result in annualized revenues of approximately $250 million and more than 3,000 customers. Ascential says the addition of Mercator's solutions will help create a total end-to-end integration solution that can handle data systems of any size. Analyst firm JMP Securities says that according to recent research, the enterprise application market is bouncing back, but not as quickly as some might hope. JMP says that license sales will be trending up slowly, following a promising 4.3 percent year-over-year growth in private enterprise application investment in the second quarter of 2003. Sybase and Fujitsu Software have announced a strategic partnership for technology licensing and collaboration initiatives. Under the agreement, Fujitsu Software will market Sybase Content Capture technology as an option to its Interstage Portalworks solution. The add-on module will give end users the ability to create unique targeted portal views of real-time information from multiple sources, the companies say. Executive changes... Siebel Systems has appointed C. Scott Hartz, former CEO of PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consulting, to its board of directors. Salesforce.com has announced that former Siebel vice president Dave Orrico has joined the company as senior vice president and general manager of its American operations. RightNow Technologies announced this week that Peter Dunning has been appointed executive vice president for worldwide field operations. Dunning has held executive roles at Oracle, SAP, and most recently, S1 Corporation. SupportSoft has named John Van Siclen senior vice president of worldwide sales and services. Van Siclen previously served as president and CEO of Interwoven. Pilot Software has appointed Larry Scroggins vice president of business development. Most recently, Scroggins served as senior vice president of business development for Sagent Technology, a provider of enterprise business intelligence solutions. Enkata has appointed Peter Caswell as president and CEO. He joins the company from Advent.