SAN MATEO (04/11/2000) - Hoping to capitalize on the recent trend that has seen virtually every industry develop some semblance of a business-to-business marketplace, Informatica Corp. Monday announced that it is joining forces with PricewaterhouseCoopers to provide BI (business-intelligence) solutions targeted at that space.
The agreement calls for PricewaterhouseCoopers to receive a $30 million equity stake in Informatica in exchange largely for its intellectual property surrounding supply-chain and procurement analytic application software.
The companies also agreed to jointly train more than 300 of PricewaterhouseCoopers' consultants on Informatica Applications, and PricewaterhouseCoopers will dedicate a team of consultants to Informatica.
The goal, said Mike Schroeck, the partner in charge of PricewaterhouseCoopers' global data-warehousing practice, in Rosemont, Ill., is to help customers who are already spending tremendous amounts on developing and implementing their e-business strategies deploy the analytics necessary to support those implementations.
"This is all about bringing together Informatica and with PWC to build some very rich analytic applications, initially focusing on b-to-b [business-to-business] but eventually extending all the way across the value chain to include b-to-c [business-to-consumer] as well," Schroeck said.
Those solutions are expected to be available the third quarter of this year, at which time the two companies will assess new ways in which they can work together. Those, Schroeck said, should include vertically targeted analytic applications and possibly could lead to the companies offering analytics as a service.
"Our expectation is that there are companies out there who would just as soon let companies like Informatica and PricewaterhouseCoopers working together to outsource that functionality," Schroeck said.
Informatica Corp., in Palo Alto, Calif., is at www.informatica.com.