


acquired privately held Torrent Systems Inc. In November 2001, Ascential Software Corp.

In April 2001 IBM acquired Informix and took just the database business leaving the data integration tools to be spun off as an independent software company called Ascential Software. In 1999 Ardent Software was acquired by Informix the database software vendor. VMARK and Unidata merged in October 1997 and renamed themselves to Ardent Software. The product was in alpha testing in October, beta testing in November and was generally available in January 1997. Lee Scheffler presented the DataStage product overview to the board of VMark in June 1996 and it was approved for development. This tag was used to name DataStage and subsequently used in related products QualityStage, ProfileStage, MetaStage and AuditStage. He appointed Lee Scheffler as the architect and conceived the product brand name "Stage" to signify modularity and component-orientation. Peter Weyman was VMark VP of Strategy and identified the ETL market as an opportunity. The first VMark ETL prototype was built by Lee Scheffler in the first half of 1996.
