For those following the mixed fortunes of the data quality vendors, one of the more interesting recent development has been a company called Exeros. After getting a hefty series B round a year ago, Exeros has just landed a partnership with BI behemoth Business Objects. This is potentially very good news for Exeros. Any BI project involves a significant element of data quality, and so the fit is logical, and Exeros’ cunning “discovery” slant to its marketing will give a fresh-sounding label to the otherwise rather dowdy data quality market. What is curious is that Business Objects already owns not own but two data quality vendors, First Logic and the entertainingly Germanic Fuzzy Informatik (which sounds to me like a Kraftwerk single). The press release was the usual partnership waffle, so it was unclear from this as to exactly how the joint proposition would be brought to market, but it does make you wonder about why Business Objects needs a new tool, unless the existing acquired technology is not doing quite what it was supposed to.
Exeros has been very good in its marketing execution so far, and this partnership is another example of it. As far as I can see there is little reason why other data quality vendors (e.g. Datanomic) could not have latched onto this “discovery” label, which makes an old subject sound new and interesting, as their technology seems to do pretty much the same thing, but they have chosen not to. I am not sure what Exeros’ sales have been like so far, but this partnership is certainly a useful step for them.
