Blog: David Loshin

I do not wholly agree with this prediction. Information quality tools are only tools help us to solve our information quality issues. But it is mainly about management and incorporation of these tool into the information quality improvement activities.

From the second site it is true that there are some important data quality acquisitions such as Informatica and Similarity Systems, but I think that other massive acquisition will not happened shortly especially if CRM companies are buying by database technology companies (e.g. Siebel, Oracle).

If we will think about so huge integration that could only one super company exists.

I am sure that everybody interesting in information quality could not focus on data only but also for design, quotas, etc.

I think the reason for many statemens at this area is the rule: "Solve information quality as close to source" that lead in defect prevention activity and so on.

Only Gartner could focuses on other aspects of information (data) quality and only for a tool features.

RDBMS vendors may increase the functionality of their 'built-in' data quality functions (such as Oracle's, which I had an underwhelming presentation on recently). However it is unlikely that an RDBMS vendor will buy out an IQ tool vendor.

IQ Tool vendor M&A activity will continue apace as the "first generation" tools are consumed or have to buy capabilities they currently lack. "Second Generation" tools (such as Informatica Data Quality) will continue to be bolstered either through development of additional functions or the acquisition of products that will compliment the current toolset.

In our diverse platform environments (i personally manage IQ issues in flat-file, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Teradata and sundry ODBC databases) an RDBMS-tied toolset would hamper efficient and effective IQM. If I or my team had to use multiple tools to implement required business rules, checks etc. then frankly we would not be able to deliver projects with our current turn around times and ROI.

For the record my organisation uses Informatica Data Quality and has done since 2002/2003.

Regarding my prediction: I didn't necessarily imply M&A activity - I suggested that infrastructure vendors will be incorporating the same underlying technology used for data quality and cleansing into their offerings. The inference your are supposed to take away is that the technologies used for cleansing are not just valuable in cleansing, and in fact can be applied in other BI and Knowledge Discovery activities that are relevant up and down the stack.

Consider this: Informatica already had parsing and standardization (although slightly different than what is in a product like Trillium) in their product suite before they purchased Similarity; they used it for doing ETL transforms, and not for cleansing. And check out this white paper I wrote for Pervasive (then called Data Junction) in 2001:

http://database.ittoolbox.com/pub/TF021802.pdf

Data Junction had an ETL product, but here we were exploring ways to use it for DQ monitoring.

My belief is that the vendors are now aware of the value that data quality adds to their sales message, and are looking to find ways to integrate that message into their product suite. I'll stand by my prediction - let's check back in 9 months...