As integration complexity increases, DQ becoming more critical for enterprises, META reports
Stamford, CT September 4, 2003 Adoption rates for data quality (DQ) software tools will expand 20 to 30 percent annually during the next three to five years as enterprises contend with increasing data integration challenges, according to a new report from technology research firm META Group.
Managing data quality and consistency across the enterprise is becoming a growing issue for organizations faced with integration issues fueled by initiatives such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and data warehousing, META wrote in its latest "Vendor & Technology Evaluation" report, covering the DQ software tool market. The report evaluates vendors that offer solutions used in the identification and remediation of problems with enterprise information assets.
"Information should be considered part of the IT portfolio, and data quality solutions should be seen as a means to increase the value of that portfolio, in addition to reducing business risk and identifying business opportunity," said Doug Laney, vice president and director with META Group's Technology Research Services, as well as lead author of the report.
Laney said the data quality market would increasingly intersect with the data integration solution, compliance solution, business application and e-commerce market. "However, DQ solutions will mature independently, improving their openness to integration with solutions in these other markets," the analyst added.
META reported that the significant breadth and depth of business rules used as a basis for data quality offerings are considerable barriers to entry, preventing vendors proffering ancillary data management technology from building competitive offerings from scratch. Since several of the leading DQ vendors are already subsidiaries of a parent company, users should not expect much consolidation within the DQ market during the next few years. Instead, niche players will come and go, continuing to chip away at the market by focusing on specific core functionality or introducing related niche capabilities.
The Data Quality Tools report evaluates eight vendors in this market. These vendors offer various technologies for profiling, standardizing, matching, cleansing and enriching data to help ensure its accuracy, completeness and integrity. META's analysis found:
- DQ buyers will demonstrate a preference for market leaders, which continue to be those with the strongest presence-oriented strategies combined with the broadest array of capabilities.
- Leaders have stable, mature products with a deep, expanding knowledgebase of data matching and cleansing business rules. There is not much room for new market leaders to emerge through 2005/06.
- Challengers are mainly characterized by their focus on a narrower scope of capabilities than the leaders. Legitimate challengers are able to offer core capabilities at attractive prices.
- Followers strictly focus on Windows/NT platforms, offer only a small subset of overall DQ capabilities, target small enterprises and price their offerings to slip beneath budget radars.
