For those following the mixed fortunes of the data quality vendors, one of the more interesting recent development has been a company called Exeros. After getting a hefty series B round a year ago, Exeros has just landed a partnership with BI behemoth Business Objects. This is potentially very good news for Exeros. Any BI project involves a significant element of data quality, and so the fit is logical, and Exeros’ cunning “discovery” slant to its marketing will give a fresh-sounding label to the otherwise rather dowdy data quality market. What is curious is that Business Objects already owns not own but two data quality vendors, First Logic and the entertainingly Germanic Fuzzy Informatik (which sounds to me like a Kraftwerk single). The press release was the usual partnership waffle, so it was unclear from this as to exactly how the joint proposition would be brought to market, but it does make you wonder about why Business Objects needs a new tool, unless the existing acquired technology is not doing quite what it was supposed to.
Exeros has been very good in its marketing execution so far, and this partnership is another example of it. As far as I can see there is little reason why other data quality vendors (e.g. Datanomic) could not have latched onto this “discovery” label, which makes an old subject sound new and interesting, as their technology seems to do pretty much the same thing, but they have chosen not to. I am not sure what Exeros’ sales have been like so far, but this partnership is certainly a useful step for them.
5 comments so far
Andy,
thanks for mentioning Exeros in your blog and thanks for the complements to our marketing team. However, credit really goes to our CTO and engineering team because what we are doing isn’t just clever marketing, there is specific value our product provides that doesn’t exist in the Business Objects, Informatica, or IBM product lines. That is why we are working with all of these companies.
Exeros Discovery is not a data quality or profiling tool. It is a data relationship discovery tool. What we do is discover business rules and complex transformations BETWEEN data sources. The output of this is then used to populate metadata repositories with cross system relationship information or used to figure out how to relate an MDM system to some downstream applications or how to consolidate data sources when populated an MDM system.
For example, imagine you have one data base with a column called “Age” with the age of drivers ranging from 16 to 102 and in a second database with a column called “YDF” with values of “y” or “n”. As it turns out, YDF stands for “youthful driver flag” and Exeros Discovery will automatically discover that there is a business rule “If Age
(continued from my previous post)
For example, imagine you have one data base with a column called “Age” with the age of drivers ranging from 16 to 102 and in a second database with a column called “YDF” with values of “y” or “n”. As it turns out, YDF stands for “youthful driver flag” and Exeros Discovery will automatically discover that there is a business rule “If Age
Andy,
it seems as if the blog software is stuck some how on my example. so I am trying one more time and I am taking out the “less than” sign… here goes…
For example, imagine you have one data base with a column called “Age” with the age of drivers ranging from 16 to 102 and in a second database with a column called “YDF” with values of “y” or “n”. As it turns out, YDF stands for “youthful driver flag” and Exeros Discovery will automatically discover that there is a business rule “If Age is LESS THAN 26 then YDF EQUALS “Y” , else “N” “. No other product in the market today can automatically discover this kind of rule or the concatenation, substrings, arithmetic, aggregations or reverse pivots that our Exeros Discovery software finds.
So we are not at all the same as the products you mentioned, which is why we are working with so many of the well known players in the market.
Thanks,
Todd Goldman
VP Marketing and Product Management
I have a couple questions if Todd pays a return visit.
- What is the difference between an Exeros data lineage partner like Business Objects and Data Advantage Group and a data integration partner like IBM and Informatica? I would have thought the integration with Informatica – where Exeros mapper can generate Informatica jobs, was more useful than the data lineage metadata pushed into Business Objects.
- Why are Exeros making single vendor metadata bridges instead of working with a vendor like Meta Integration (MITI) to create a bridge that can be used in a lot of products? It would be cool to import Exeros discovered metadata dinto MITI OEM partners like Ab Initio, SAS, Cognos, MetaMatrix, ErWin and IBM. A bridge that can be used in a dozen products instead of just one.
Vincent,
great questions… Here we go with my best try at answers:
- The reasons for integrating with the metadata partners and the data integration parters was driven specifically by our customers. We have some customers who are interested in using our discovered relationships to populate lineage/metadata repositories for regulatory reporting reasons and we have other customers who want to take the discovered rules to move data using an ETL tool. So integration with ETL or with lineage tools are not more or less usefull than each other, they are just different uses of the same information.
- Why is Exeros making singing vendor metadata bridges rather than integrate with Miti? At the time we did the Informatica integration we did talk to Miti but their solution would not have worked for us because we did not support an XML output. However, we know have both CWM and Exeros XML (which has more information than CWM) so it makes sense to relook at MITI for the reasons you note. Thanks for the suggestion.
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