SubscribeMicrosoft Buys Zoomix
Posted in Data Quality, News & Announcements by Ivan Chong | |
It's been rumored for a while, but now it is official - Microsoft has announced an agreement to buy a data quality startup company, Zoomix, for the purpose of enhancing SQL Server.
Microsoft plans to add Zoomix's technology to future releases of its SQL Server database, the company said through its public relations firm. Zoomix said its development team will join the SQL Server team at Microsoft's research and development center in Israel.
While this is not a large transaction for Microsoft, the move does underscore the importance of Data Quality. However, this raises an interesting question. Who should you trust to deliver data quality? The people who brought you Vista? the folks who sold you SAP? At first glance, it seems quite convenient to be able to deal with data quality issues in conjunction with specific source systems. However, many IT experts would claim this approach is merely a stop-gap measure. Data must be managed apart from its host systems. Data Quality rules start to truly add value to the business when they span MS SQL Server, and SAP, and Oracle, and etc. etc. It's still a topic of debate. But the discussion has moved beyond the question of "is data quality software useful?" to "where is the most useful place to deliver data quality software?"
Feel free to post your opinions!
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5 Comments, Comment or Ping
Beth
An excellent point, and I agree with your concern. I'm hoping (probably in vain) that Microsoft will choose to keep the technology DBMS-agnostic. But then, I've been known to be overly optimistic before.
On the other hand, if Microsoft emphasizes product attribute standardization / cleansing that may press the rest of the data quality industry to spend more time in this domain. Availability of commonly-understood transformations and rule sets lags here in comparison to the body of work for name/address data.
Jul 16th, 2008
Vincent McBurney
If the product is SOA compliant and delivers data quality services as web services does it really matter what architecture it has under the covers? Does it matter if the repository is SQL Server? The most useful place to deliver data quality is in the front end applications.
Jul 16th, 2008
Ivan Chong
Vincent,
It is quite logical to rely on standards like SOAP based web services to work seamlessly across databases and applications. In the past, Microsoft has put out its own Java and its own ODBC technology which have worked for the most part in supporting cross platform applications. There are edge-cases that cause considerable annoyance. So, there's always that little voice in the back of my mind that questions whether Microsoft is truly motivated to support adoption of other operating systems and other databases besides their own. That's what I'm commenting on in the blog post. Thanks for your comment!
Ivan
Jul 21st, 2008
Ivan Chong
Beth,
I agree that it would be a good thing for the DQ industry to improve the customer's ability to non-customer data (e.g., product data). Besides the existing DQ vendors, what do you think Oracle will do?
Ivan
Jul 21st, 2008
Beth
Hmm…now you've made me curious. My Data Quality background lies within IBM's product suite and lately a bit with SQLServer. I've never dealt with Oracle in this space.
To be blunt, when I was an IBMer I competed against you (Informatica) for data integration sales — Oracle was never in the running.
Time for me to go poke around on Oracle's website….
Jul 21st, 2008
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