The Information Difference Company

The Data Quality Market - Spring 2009

The data quality market is very fragmented. There are a number of reasons for this, but one is that many vendors have their origins in the customer name and address matching business, and this varies a great deal from country to country. For example, the UK Royal Mail postal code database covers pretty much every UK address, as does the US Postal Service Zip+4 database for the USA, but the equivalent from the Italian national postal service covers barely half the country, while the Republic of Ireland does not have a national post code system at all. 

Consequently, a network of different information providers have sprung up, and software companies have also adapted to serve the specialist needs of local markets, with different ways of enriching the data found.

By no means is all data quality about customer name and address, and a few companies specialize in product data, which is much less structured and tends to be inherently more complex than address data (a product may have hundreds of attributes, for example). Here, Silver Creek Systems, Inquera and Datactics each take different approaches to this thorny problem area. Other vendors provide broader, general purpose data quality suites. Another more recent trend is towards identity management, with some companies providing solutions that aim to ensure that the person at the other end of a business transaction is really who they claim to be. Despite there being literally dozens of data quality vendors, new ones still pop up. Ataccama is one such recent entrant making solid commercial progress, while DataQualityFirst launched just as this research was being completed.

The Information Difference believes that the data quality market overall is worth around USD 740M, and according to our estimates grew at 17% over the previous twelve month period (this figure is the total associated with software and related services from data quality vendors, and does not include systems integration revenues that are associated with data quality). The pure software license market is around USD 400M.

A few years ago there was a clear distinction between vendors who offer data profiling, merge/matching, enrichment or data quality monitoring. Customers increasingly expect an integrated solution and in response these functional lines are beginning to blur as many vendors have expanded their product coverage to provide broader functionality across the various elements of data quality. They have constructed a more complete suite of offerings, either by building out their own software through acquisitions, or via OEM of other software. There are some notable exceptions to this trend. For example, Exeros (now acquired by IBM) has specialized in data discovery, and Netrics in matching algorithms with software that can be embedded in other applications, while Address Doctor partners with other data quality vendors to provide expanded international address coverage.

One technology trend has been for data quality vendors to embrace SOA standards, which has enabled data quality applications to be embedded into broader business processes, and for this to happen on-line rather than just in batch, which was usually the case in the past. Trillium, for example, reports that over half their deployments are real-time rather than batch.

The major vendors in the data quality market are described using the Landscape diagram that follows (see later for more on how this is derived; note that due to a modification in the methodology this time around—this version includes customer satisfaction feedback—like-for-like comparisons between this chart and previous versions should be treated with caution).

The largest players in terms of market strength (see below) in the data quality arena are SAP, Informatica, Trillium, Experian QAS, IBM and DataFlux. These companies have broad data quality offerings with large numbers of customer deployments. The data quality market is by no means entirely US-centric, with several companies prospering in Europe, including Experian QAS in the UK, Omikron and Uniserv in Germany and Human Inference in the Netherlands.

A 2008 Information Difference study found that 30% of large companies had not deployed any kind of data quality tool, and the take-up even within companies that have some experience is very uneven, so despite the abundance of vendors this is far from a saturated market.

The profile of data quality has increased due to the rapidly escalating interest in master data management, since the quality of data is an inherent part of any master data management initiative. Companies that have set up data governance teams to help with master data issues have logically taken an interest in data quality tools, and this has raised the profile of data quality significantly within many companies. We see more partnerships developing between MDM platform vendors and data quality vendors. Indeed, as some data quality vendors build out data governance offerings within their own software, they are starting to overlap more with the MDM players. We believe that further interlocking of these inherently related markets is certain, both through further extended partnerships and through acquisitions.

Main Vendors

The following lists the contact details of the vendors shown on the Landscape, plus additional vendors who have software that merits attention.

Other vendors of data quality software include:

• Ciant ( www.ciant.com)
• Data Lever ( www.datalever.com)
• Data Mentors ( www.datamentors.com)
• Infosolve ( www.infosolvetech.com)
• Intervera ( www.intervera.com)
• Irion ( www.iriondq.com) (an Italian vendor)
• Ixsight ( www.ixsight.com/)
• MSI ( www.msi.com.au)
• Stalworth ( www.stalworth.com)
• TIQ Solutions ( www.tiq-solutions.com)
• Winpure ( www.winpure.com)
• Wizsoft ( www.wizsoft.com)

Research Methodology
The Information Difference Landscape diagram shows three dimensions of a vendor:

• Market strength
• Technology
• Customer base.

“Market strength” is made up of a weighted set of five factors: revenues, growth, financial strength, geographic scope and partner network. Each of these individual elements is scored, the total producing the “market strength” figure. Similarly “technology” is made up of four factors: “technology breadth” (the coverage of the vendors in various data quality areas as illustrated below), the longevity of the software in the market, analyst perception of the product via briefings, and customer feedback from reference customers, which we surveyed. In each case the scoring is on a scale of 0 (worst) to 6 (best). The highest customer feedback scores in this research were for Melissa Data, Datactics and Omikron.

Vendors were asked to submit answers to various questions via a questionnaire. Those which were larger than a particular size threshold were then interviewed directly by an analyst and reference customers were surveyed to give their experience of the software and vendors.

The technology functions which the vendors were asked about are as shown below. These are drawn from the Information Difference vendor functionality model; if you are interested in more detail on this then please contact The Information Difference.

Functional Areas