Analyst company IDC has acknowledged Ascential Software`s QualityStage as delivering a unique data matching capability that allows companies to execute successful strategic initiatives such as ERP, CRM, direct marketing campaigns and mergers.
In a new report, IDC commends Ascential`s commitment to a class of technology that the research firm believes will revolutionise the way complex IT problems are approached. Ascential QualityStage is available separately or as a component of the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite.
Data quality is a growing challenge as data volume expands exponentially and spreads across more databases and systems, according to IDC analysts Kathleen and Stephen Hendrick in their new report, "Ascential Introduces QualityStage".
"A clear picture of a customer, product, or buying trend can be practically impossible to ascertain," the analysts state. "This is a significant problem."
Specifically, QualityStage surpasses all competitors in its ability to improve data quality by consolidating customer files and other records scattered across multiple enterprise systems, says IDC. QualityStage is "one of the few products that has the ability to completely reorient the way we think about data integration", IDC says.
QualityStage has continued to evolve to meet the changing needs of business, says the report. "Its ability to provide data investigation, standardisation, matching and survivorship makes it a strong product to address a multitude of needs, from data integration to CRM. QualityStage delivers a scientifically justified methodology, producing an audit trail that can be easily validated and verified by organisations."
Probabilistic matching
The report zeroes in on the key advantage of QualityStage, its probabilistic matching approach. "While the word probability can make IS managers run screaming from the room, IDC believes QualityStage may well be the only justifiable way to address sophisticated matching problems," states the report.
Competing offerings use a decision table methodology governed by vendor-set rules. This technique compromises completeness and accuracy for the sake of manageability, according to IDC. "This contrasts with Ascential QualityStage, which doesn`t stagger under the weight of multiway matches or shy away from adding criteria that generally results in better match results than other approaches," says IDC.
The specific characteristics that IDC says differentiate QualityStage from other offerings include:
1. Frequency analysis, referring to how often a value appears in a field. For example, male or female would appear often in a gender field. A particular string would appear rarely in a tax ID field.
2. Numeric match weight, versus the imprecise A-F matching scale competitors use.
3. Significance, referring to QualityStage`s ability to let companies assign a higher value to a matching field that is more pivotal in the matching process.
Ascential estimates that, conservatively, it can improve match accuracy by 2% to 5% over competing approaches - a huge difference for a company trying to clean up its records.
"The reason that slight increases in matching accuracy matter is that each unmatched record has the potential to taint the integrity of any records to which it should have been directly matched, as well as any records that are subsequently matched to these records," says IDC. "Therefore, since there can be instances where even one unmatched record is responsible for propagating significant errors, a small increase in methodological matching accuracy can drive major positive benefits."
QualityStage will become increasingly valuable as companies grapple with more data. "In fact, the unique attribute of QualityStage that truly sets it apart is its increasing ability to orchestrate better matches as the complexity of data increases," IDC states. "While we understand that this statement runs contrary to the behaviour of virtually every other IT experience, remember that our experience in IT systems to date and our frame of reference has only been with deterministic systems. QualityStage is one of the first and one of the few products that has the ability to completely reorient the way we think about data integration."
QualityStage is a key component of the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite, which combines Ascential`s industry-leading solutions for data profiling, data quality and data transformation on a shared platform of software services for unlimited scalability through parallel processing, management of metadata, any-to-any connectivity and real-time data integration.
"IDC`s evaluation mirrors the experience of Ascential`s customers, including Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Sprint and Premera Blue Cross, who have used QualityStage and its predecessor products to improve the quality of their data," says Julian Field, MD of local Ascential distributor CenterField Software. "QualityStage ensures that strategic business systems contain accurate, complete information on which to base better business decisions.
"And as IDC suggests, QualityStage will continue to emerge as the clear choice in data quality as the volume of data companies contend with continues to grow."
* To view the full report, visit http://www.ascential.com/idc/.
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