I have a soft spot in my Rolodex for Purisma. For one thing, their people are smart. Indeed when it comes to the missionary work of master data management, Purisma co-founder Bob Hagenau has been one of the industry's vocal messengers. Bob's legacy with BI firms, most noteably at Acta, which was acquired by Business Objects in 2002, earned him the right to cite the management and integration of customer master data as a major impediment to the goal of using data for strategic and operational decision making.

For another thing, their customers are smart. Dave Frieder, V.P. of IT at XO Communications, tells a great story about using Purisma to manage account and customer hierarchies, delivering a new level of clarity to the business about "who's who in the zoo,"-a phrase I first heard at Purisma.

I got to watch D&B and Purisma together in action this past September. Evan and I headlined a seminar series titled, "New Best Practices in Customer Data Integration." The seminar featured heavy-hitter case studies from Careerbuilder.com and Verizon, then D&B and Purisma strutted their respective stuff, with D&B focusing on its DUNSRight quality process-which includes sophisticated business entity matching and corporate linkages-and Purisma demo-ing its recently released and refreshingly friendly data stewardship dashboard capabilities. The "My Data for D&B Purisma Appliance" solution will likely now be bundled into D&B's end-to-end customer matching and reconciliation process. It's a great new set of tools in the D&B toolbox, particularly for mid-market D&B customers who need to perform the complex tasks of managing their master data within their own firewalls.

The benefits we've seen from the Purisma/D&B partnership are proven, and the acquisition casts established successes in a new light, as represented by Dave Frieder's story in our CDI book last year, in which he explained:

"It's a never-ending battle to reconcile and match your data. Your data might be clean today, but your company is always introducing bad data into its systems. CDI isn't a one-time thing."

Here's a toast to both D&B and Purisma for consummating their longstanding relationship. Cheers, Bob, Pete, Michael, Todd, Pat, Chris, and the rest of the family!

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