The July 25 meeting of BBBT focused on DataFlux. Presenting were
Dan Soceanu, Product Marketing Manager, and
Joe Rademacher, Senior Solutions engineer.
DataFlux is a leading provider of data quality (DQ) tools since 1997. Acquiring by SAS in 2000, they are operated as a separate subsidiary. Their competitors tend to be the high-end DQ vendors, such as IBM, Trillium, Informatica, and SAP Business Objects. The recent Gartner magic quadrant for DQ (6/4/08) moved DataFlux to the highest rating on Completeness of Vision, especially when compared with IBM. Anyone know why?
The business motivation for DataFlux customer is in three areas: risk mitigation, revenue optimization, and cost control. Joe shared that, when they are asked for help, it is usually for a specific problem, rather than a long-term strategy. He used a Data Governance Maturity Model to explain the real world trauma that most corporations go through in their struggle with DQ.
View Maturity Model image hereThe challenge is to respond to immediate biz problems while building infrastructure and especially evolve into a full data governance environment. The approach is to take the core DQ functions and package them into 'accelerators', which are services (SOA) that can be incorporated into other processes. Then, the accelerators form the base for their Master Data Mgt solution that is a complete bungle of data models and cleansing algorithms for products, customers, supplier and so on.
Reflection... DataFlux continues to be well positioned in a biz hot spot having preceived value to low-tech executive. In other words, dirty data costs real money! Their evolution from core DQ to accelerator services to MDM solution illustrates a decade of in-the-trenches experiences with tough customer situations. The challenge will be for DataFlux to evolve the next step into Data Governance (DG). Joe observed that customers usually consider DQ and DG to be separate issues. It seems to me that DQ and DG are tightly intertwined.
