Data management firm Informatica LLC today said that it has acquired partner Compact Solutions LLC, whose software helps enterprises track what happens to business records they keep in internal systems such as mainframes.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is the first Informatica has announced since Chief Executive Amit Walia (pictured) took the helm at the start of the year.

Founded in 1993, Informatica makes software tools for managing data that are used by a sizable portion of the Fortune 500 and thousands of others. The company traded on the Nasdaq until 2015, when the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Permira took it private for $5.3 billion.

The challenge Informatica hopes to address for customers through the Compact Solutions deal has to do with data governance. Large enterprises often need to keep a log of where business records originated, who edited them and what changes were made for various reasons, such as to comply with data laws. But obtaining these details is an often long process that can involve a lot of manual work on the part of a company’s technologists.

Compact Solutions has developed a software product called MetaDex that eases the task. MetaDex can automatically extract metadata details about a file, such as how, and how many times, it was edited, from systems that include databases, mainframes, business intelligence tools and data warehouses.

“These systems often do not provide easily shareable descriptions of internal storage, processes and relationships,” Gaurav Pathak, Informatica’s vice president of product management, explained in a blog post. “As such, they are often referred to as ‘black boxes.’ The metadata that’s buried in these complex systems is critical for a number of strategic use cases and corporate initiatives such as risk and compliance, data governance, managing data analytics, and data lineage.”

Informatica is relaunching Compact Solutions’ MetaDex product under the name Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Scanners. The offering is available as part of Informatica’s Enterprise Data Catalog platform, a kind of App Store for information that can make records accessible to employees via a centralized interface.

Compact Solutions’ technology will increase the utility of the platform. The new metadata extraction features should enable customers to bring information from systems into the Enterprise Data Catalog and expand the range of records that their employees can access centrally, thereby simplifying data projects.  

Walia explained Informatica’s value proposition in a recent interview (below) on SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE. “An enterprise is spread across the globe — it’s so many different data sources available everywhere,” Walia said. Informatica’s platform, the executive added, “allows you to go to one place where you can have full access to all of the data assets.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE