Data Quality Market to Grow at 30 Percent

CRM, ERM, and data-warehousing initiatives have fueled integration issues as businesses attempt to manage data quality and consistency across entire organizations. According to Doug Laney, vice president and director with Meta Group's technology research services, data quality is very important, and the information should be considered part of the IT portfolio. "Enterprises are starting to understand that data is an asset like their financial or material assets, and that data needs to be managed and given the same sort of treatment as the traditional assets," Laney says. A study released this week by Meta Group, "The Data Quality Tools Evaluation Report," states that data quality--adoption rates are expected to expand 20 to 30 percent annually during the next three to five years. Estimates for the size of the data quality market range from $500 million to just under $1 billion, according to Laney. The growth comes as businesses realize they have collected data and that now they need to have good data to do something meaningful with that information. Meta Group research says that 5 percent of household contact information becomes invalid every month. "The biggest issue with data quality is the completeness of data--holes, gaps, wrong information. If you have garbage in, you'll have garbage out. Companies need to think about data quality," Laney says. In the past data quality has comprised three categories: name, address, identification and matching; standardization; and cleansing. Two new categories are emerging and are likely to experience the most growth over the next three to five years: data enrichment from commercial data sources and data profiling (a technology for analyzing where holes are in data). And while the data quality market will increasingly intersect with data integration solutions, compliance solutions, business applications, and e-commerce, data quality solutions will mature independently, according to Laney. Highlights of the report show that data quality buyers are more likely to purchase from vendors that are market leaders. Meta Group defines those as vendors with the "the strongest presence-oriented strategies, combined with the broadest array of functionality." According to Laney, major players include Trillium Software, First Logic, and Group One. The study showed that vendors attempting to make their way in the market often focus solely on Windows/NT platforms, offer only a small subset of overall data quality capabilities, target small enterprises, and price their offerings to slip beneath budget radars. "Unlike other technology genres, it's not just new functionality that wins the day. It takes years and years to generate and expose a complex set of rules. This technology is not revolutionary, but evolutionary, and that is why it is not easy for upstarts to come in and gain ground," Laney says.