ASCL
Donald has written a very nice entry in his blog on the acquisition of Ascential by IBM.
I personally am thrilled by this news. To my extremely biased eyes, this looks like IBM getting ready for the release of SQL Server 2005 and adjusting their approach to data integration and including a major non-federated component. I hope that this will further lead to making data integration tools accessible (affordable) to a wider audience. We (up here in Redmond) have been pushing for years to make the benefits of BI available to the masses and it is interesting to see the rest of the market following our lead. In the end the real winner in all of this is the customer, and that is what makes me happy !
The impact here on us is not much, except that it validates ($1.1 billion worth of validation !) the approach we have been taking and the investments we are making in developing SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services).