Four Reasons to Check out Data Quality Tool Ranking

Gartner released its new Magic Quadrant for Data Quality earlier this month, with SAS/DataFlux, Informatica, Trillium Software, SAP and IBM placing in the leader’s quadrant.

But after talking to data quality consultant and OCDQ blogger Jim Harris earlier this year, I’m not sure it matters. Harris says while you can buy data quality tools as standalone products, that’s not typically what happens, particularly with the vendors that make up the Magic Quadrant.

“If you wanted to buy just the data quality tool, that is actually not easy to do,” Harris said during our interview. “Again, IBM has acquired a lot of companies that used to just offer a data quality tool, but then IBM integrated it into a platform of technology where you can now no longer just buy a data quality tool. You have to buy the entire platform, which at the low end of the price point would be around a quarter of a million dollars.”

It’s not unusual, then, to see data quality tools integrated into storage, applications, MDM, data integration tools, and so forth.

So if that’s the case, why bother?

First, there are vendors that sell pure-play vendors: Ataccama, Datactics, DataMentors, Human Inference, Innovative Systems, RedPoint and Uniserv are all listed as pure-play data quality vendors.

Second, and more importantly, the Magic Quadrant will help you cut through the marketing speak and understand what the vendors’ data quality tools actually do and a bit about how they do it. For that matter, it also provides a clear outline of what a data quality tool will do for you and how it supports data governance.

Third, there’s a long list of data quality solutions that didn’t make the “Magic Quadrant” requirements, but it’s still a good resource for some niche solutions of which you may not have heard.

And finally, it’s free — so why not?

Free Resources for the Week of Aug. 20-24:

Tuesday, Aug. 21, 4 p.m. Database analyst John O’Brien is the featured guest at this week’s Briefing Room. He’ll discuss how certain architectures can support unstructured data or structured data.

Wednesday, Aug. 22, 10 a.m. PDT, “Making Big Data Analytics Pay,” a free GigaOM Pro webinar. The analyst roundtable will discuss T-Mobile’s use Big Data analytics.