The Business Intelligence Blog

From Informatica Press Release, this is an important win for Informatica.

Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), the leading independent provider of data integration software and services, today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the leaders’ quadrant in the 2008 Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools report.

Ted Friedman and Andreas Bitterer, authors of the report state, “leaders in the market demonstrate strength across a complete range of data quality functionality, including profiling, parsing, standardization, matching, validation and enrichment. They exhibit a clear understanding and vision of where the market is headed, including recognition of noncustomer data quality issues and the delivery of enterprise-level data quality implementations. Leaders have an established market presence, significant size and a multinational presence.”

According to the report, “growth, innovation and volatility (via mergers and acquisitions) continue to shape the market for data quality tools. Investment on the part of buyers and vendors is increasing as organizations recognize the value of these tools in master data management and information governance initiatives.” The complete report, including the quadrant graphic, is available on the Informatica web site at http://www.informatica.com/dq_mq/.

From TDWI Article -

To start down this path, you will obviously need to take a more holistic view of your organization’s information and technology architecture to learn what data is available to your end users. You also need to spend time learning what is missing today from the BI environment. Don’t be surprised if people at first cannot articulate their needs in this arena — most people do not believe current tools can support this analysis!

In conjunction with this internal fact-finding, stay abreast of the evolution of “unstructured” content software and service solutions. Although these concepts have been around for some time, some technological developments have emerged only recently to allow some of the more interesting analysis and integration opportunities in this area.

Finally, keep experimenting! The BI market has grown and matured substantially in the last several years, and this is an exciting new area where we can all stretch and investigate. As famous engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller once quipped, “There is no such thing as a failed experiment — only experiments with unexpected outcomes.”

From the Press Release -

“With unicode, data agnostic and grid enabled computing functionality embedded in its technology Datactics can resolve complex data quality issues emerging as a result of the global nature of businesses. “Being an innovator in the data quality management arena, Datactics’ applications have evolved to incorporate sophisticated functionality that exceeds the requirements of traditional data cleansing,” says Sarah Bearder, Cofounder of Datactics. “Datactics can effectively manage product data in multiple languages and metrics distributed across various computing resources to increase global purchasing leverage and optimize supply chain operations. Foremost the deployment of grid enabled computing means organizations can now manage highly intensive data quality processes by simply adding in-house commodity computers to increase processing speed, which provides a cost effective means of gaining super computing power.”