IDC Gives Data Management A Boost

Research analysts usually shy away from markets that have a total sales volume of less than $1 billion because they are simply not big enough to warrant the attention. However IDC, based in Framingham, Mass., is currently researching the size and health of the data management market (with results to be made public this Spring) indicating data management has arrived. With customer wins on the rise, data management vendors are attempting to generate brand awareness by getting face-time with analysts. "Although data management companies have been around for a while, a lot of them have been coming to us over the last six to nine months," says Susan Funke, research manager specializing in information and data management at IDC. Like any new market, one of the issues plaguing data management vendors is customer awareness - customers may not realize how dirty their data really is. "Database administrators are well aware of it. They know it's dirty, but it's a question of how tuned in are they with it," says Funke. What they do not know may hurt them. A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers survey revealed that poor data quality costs global businesses over $1.4 billion a year. One third of companies have been forced to delay or scrap new systems because of faulty data. Already, Funke is seeing the market beginning to segment into several categories, including data quality companies; extract, transform, merge, and load (ETML) vendors - for distributing and combining data among dissimilar databases; and data profiling companies. Some of the emerging leaders in data quality are Vality Technology Inc., Harte-Hanks Inc., Trillium Digital Systems Inc., an Intel Corp. company; Firstlogic Inc.; and Experian. Informatica, she says is leading the way in extraction, transform, and loading (ETL). And, Evoke Software Corp. is leading the way in data profiling, she says. As customer data is often the lifeblood of many companies, Funke says, "I don't see how companies can afford not to invest in data management tools."