ARDENT BUYS PRISM FOR $42M TO BOOST WAREHOUSING DRIVE.

Ardent Software Inc, the Westborough, Massachusetts-based database and datawarehousing software developer, has made a $42m all stock offer for loss making Prism Solutions Inc, continuing the trend of consolidation prevalent throughout the datawarehousing sector. Ardent (formerly Vmark Systems) says the deal will give it access to Prism's expertise in legacy data extraction, complementing Ardent's own strengths in the Unix and NT environments. Additionally, Prism brings with it a consulting business, its Cobol and Java code-generator, data quality (via its QDB acquisition), customer relationship management (Customer Focus Inc) and vertical industry expertise. Prism also has a valuable data extraction and transformation link to SAP AG's products and is currently working on other application-specific integrations. For its part, Ardent has been building a data warehouse strategy through acquisition, with recent deals including Unidata Inc, O2 Technology and most recently metadata company Dovetail  Software Inc. Each of Prism's shareholders will receive 0.13124 shares in Ardent, a premium of $6.2m over Prism's market capitalization of $35.8m based upon yesterday's closing price of just under $2. The fate of Prism's 312 staff, including chairman and datawarehouse pioneer Jim Ashbrook, was unknown at press time. Prism's Sunnyvale, California headquarters will be retained. Although it is one of the founding companies of the datawarehousing sector, Prism has recently been weathering an expensive product transition. Over the last 18 months, the company has been transforming its Prism Executive Suite into what CEO Warren Weiss calls "a toolset that addresses data quality, extraction and transformation, scheduling, metadata management and warehouse maintenance - all in one integrated suite." Added to which, the suite is now fronted by a single user interface, replacing the various front ends of the old technology. But the transformation has exacted a heavy toll in terms of ongoing losses and a depressed share price. The compa ny lost $19m in the nine months through September and the third quarter saw revenues decline sequentially by 11% to just $12m. With a cash outflow in the quarter of $16m and remaining cash reserves of just $3m, Prism's excellent products but poor liquidity made it an ideal take-over target. For the combined companies, there will be some product overlap in terms of the basic extraction, transformation and loading technologies but Ardent says it will quickly create a single product. An interoperability suite is to be offered immediately. Ardent is now billing itself as the largest database-independent data warehouse company with "several hundred" of its own customers plus the 400 former Prism customers. The acquisition comes just days after Prism's arch rival, Red Brick Systems Inc, was swallowed by Informix Software Inc.