Software solutions designed to meet increasingly complex data needs are on an upward trend. The global enterprise Data Management market, which covers Data Quality, processes and standards among other software, is expected to reach $142.67 billion by 2023, according to Research and Markets. Additional research specifically homes in on the global Data Quality tools market, which is set to grow at a CAGR of 16.8 percent during the period 2017-2021.
Among companies in the Data Management space is Innovative Systems, which recently received kudos as a technology leader in The Data Quality Landscape Q1 2018 report from analyst firm The Information Difference. This marks the second year in a row of recognition of the company as a top Data Quality software provider. A survey based on the three dimensions of market strength, technology, and customer base showed that the company ranks among the top five vendors in customer satisfaction.
The report also noted that Innovative Systems’ software offers “the perfect balance for companies looking to achieve better business results with powerful Data Quality tools.”
Solutions in Play
The company’s Synchronos Master Data Management platform for data synchronization and its Enlighten Data Quality tools serve as bases for options that specifically address business needs, including risk and compliance, fraud prevention, customer onboarding, CRM Data Management, mergers and acquisitions, and application migration.
Enlighten, which was introduced last year, takes a business-user-friendly approach to Data Quality, which includes offering more self-service and better data importing tools. It features capabilities including data profiling, discovery and monitoring; data cleansing, matching, enrichment, migration and integration; and real-time Data Quality.
The company’s solutions make it possible to offer a single, integrated view of information across multiple sources of data to help with Analytics, customer experience, digital transformation, and sales data synchronization. This capability is usually deployed for the purpose of getting a single view of particular segments – that is, customers, clients, patients, providers, citizens, households, vendors, employees, or locations.
As an example, one of its customers, a leading European telecom service provider, needed to gain an accurate view of its customers by household. It used Innovative software to profile all of its data across multiple sources, parsing, standardizing, and deduping customer name, address and account data, and adding geocodes to identify the exact location of each customer’s residence or office.
The geocodes, according to Innovative Systems, enabled the telecom provider to append external data such as mobile coverage areas, fiber availability, demographics, and social-economic information to gain a full picture of their customers, and identify new areas of opportunity.
Customers living in the same households, for instance, were accurately identified to provide a consolidated view of each household across multiple lines of business, enabling the provider to identify potential customers for cross-selling and upselling services. It also helped it to use its marketing resources more effectively with tailored offerings and promotions to targeted households and regions where it had limited penetration.
Greater Speed, Lower Cost
To bring all data across multiple sources together in a single view for business initiatives like Analytics, features in Innovative Synchronos and Enlighten contribute to its Instant 360 View, helping users ensure that data is prepared correctly and accurately for use. A full Master Data Management (MDM) implementation that may take longer and cost more may not be necessary to get an integrated and rapid view of data relevant to the business initiative.
Other solutions across Data Management and Analytics disciplines that also aim to provide single views of data can wind up with software bloat, adding more functionality that isn’t essential to addressing the core issue, according to Michael Ott, Senior Vice President at the company.
“We just focus on the real reasons why these types of centralized databases are created in the first place. The priority among business people is the time it takes to get results without sacrificing accuracy. We talk about maintaining 99.5 percent accuracy within a 30-day period.”
The knowledge-based system that underlies Innovative solutions supports rapidly and accurately dealing with processing data. That system dates back to the pre-internet days – in fact, it dates back 50 years – and has processed hundreds of billions of client records and captured the meaning behind words and phrases. “That knowledge base sits on top of our software and acts like a brain,” Ott said. “It’s an advantage because it’s hard to replicate.”
In its Data Quality Landscape Report, The Information Difference discusses the increased “interest in applying the techniques of Machine Learning to Data Quality problems.” As Ott sees it, Innovative’s knowledge base can be thought of as a different way of doing Machine Learning, or as an alternative to it:
“Machine Learning is a hot topic in the last couple of years. But its emphasis is on learning and it takes time for Machine Learning software to get data in place. Contrast that with our approach where the data already is in place. It can still learn but what it learns is an addition to what’s already there.”
In addition to applying software analysis and automation, human intelligence is introduced at the right point to review new data to determine how to categorize it.
Ott said that Innovative’s message to the business people in Analytics, customer experience, and business transformation, and for those dealing with regulations like GDPR, is that they will have what they need to fulfill their requirements in a time-compressed fashion at lower cost.
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