IBM has announced that it has acquired Exeros, the private company that produces Exeros Discovery X-Profiler, the product upon which CA’s Data Profiler is based.
Exeros’ technology automatically uncovers hidden relationships between databases, helping users make sense of disparate data sources much faster than otherwise possible. This capability, which can dramatically reduce the cost of data-intensive projects such as data warehousing and master data management, can help clients generate new levels of intelligence that can identify new market trends and predict business outcomes with more certainty.
For example, a credit card company or airline could use Exeros software to consolidate customer award program information from multiple databases containing millions of client records, down to a single, master view of all customer information without the need for labor-intensive manual mapping of data. By automating the process and validating its accuracy, the company could begin to quickly gain new insights about customers in a matter of days rather than months.
I’m curious as to what this means for the CA Data Profiler product going forward. I was hoping that CA’s efforts to expand upon the ERwin suite, even via third party tools, was a good strategic direction for the recognition that data is a more tangible asset that most IT pros think. I was also hoping to see other modeling tool vendors offer the reduced-scope, reduced-price versions of X-Profile. I don’t think that will happen now.
I’m hoping that the integration of data-instance tools with meta data tools such as ERwin, ER/Studio, and InfoSphere Data Architect continues. I’m also curious about when we’ll see IDA Data Profiler….
