Microsoft generally likes to acquire software companies when they are quite small, with a dozen or two employees. In this way they can assimilate the development staff into Redmond and into the Microsoft way of doing things. An example of this was last week, when they decided to acquire a data quality technology. There are literally dozens of data quality vendors out there, most fairly small, and so there was plenty of choice. They opted for Zoomix, a small Israeli company which I first encountered in 2006, though they were founded in 1999. Zoomix had some quite clever marketing, claiming “self learning” technology as a way of making data profiling in particular more productive. In this way it could be compared to Exeros, although the technology underpinnings are quite different.

In this case the R&D team will move into the Microsoft technology centre already in Israel. This is a logical move by Microsoft, who acquired Stratature in order to give them an MDM capability. This product is currently being retooled under the code-name Bulldog, and a data quality offering to complement this is a natural fit. The timing around Bulldog’s release are unclear at this point, as it is folded into the SQL Server release timeframe.