Informatica Gets Similarity

Informatica this week snatched up privately-held data quality software vendor Similarity Systems in an all cash deal for approximately $55 million.

Dublin, Ireland-based Similarity Systems’ data quality software enables cleansing, matching, monitoring and data profiling capabilities.

Informatica officials said they will integrate Similarity’s data quality software into the Informatica PowerCenter enterprise data integration software.

“Data quality is ranked by our customers as one of their top challenges within their broader data integration projects,” Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO of Informatica, said on a conference call.

“We selected Similarity Systems for their best in class capabilities that will integrate well with our data integration platform to address the requirements of customers.”

Abbasi noted that the scope of data quality software has traditionally been limited to customer contact information, specifically the accuracy of names, addresses and phone numbers within one specific geographic region.

In contrast to that, Similarity software handles customer, product, financial, inventory, pricing and order data among numerous types of enterprise data.

Metrics and reporting are also key components of the Similarity data quality solution, along with content-profiling feature. Unicode compliance within the software enables multi-language support as well.

Informatica expects to integrated the Similarity Systems’ technology into it next major release, PowerCenter 8, which is set for an April 2006 release date.

Informatica launched PowerCenter 7 in 2003 and updated it in 2005 with PowerCenter Advanced Edition, which combines PowerCenter with its PowerAnalyzer business intelligence (BI) applications.