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Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools
 
9 June 2009Ted Friedman, Andreas BittererGartner RAS Core Research Note G00167657 
The data quality tools market continues to grow despite economic conditions, as organizations invest in master datamanagement and information governance. Vendors and buyers are pursuing innovations to improve support forbusiness-facing roles and increase the pervasiveness of data quality controls.
What You Need to Know
This document was revised on 23 June 2009. For more information,see theCorrections pageon gartner.com.
The market for data quality tools continues to enjoy significant growthdespite challenging economic conditions and the general curtailment of ITbudgets. Organizations are aware that data quality competence isfundamental to the success of critical initiatives such as master datamanagement (MDM), information governance, business intelligence (BI) andIT modernization. This awareness has increased the demand for insightabout best practices, organizational structures and technology to supportthe data quality discipline. The vendor landscape has remained fairly stableduring the past twelve months, although a number of new, smaller startupsand specialist providers have emerged. The market remains divided into acluster of leaders with broad functionality, large customer bases and a fairlycomprehensive market vision; and a range of challengers, visionaries andniche players that tend to have limited vision and/or scale. The trend of convergence of the data quality tools market with related markets for dataintegration tools and MDM products continues, as organizations recognizethat they must ensure the quality of the data being delivered in their dataintegration architectures, and the data that persists in their master datarepositories. This is reflected in the vendor landscape, with a rapidlygrowing number of providers competing in more than one of these currentlydiscrete markets.When evaluating offerings in this market, organizations must consider notonly the breadth of functional capabilities (for example, data profiling,parsing, standardization, matching, monitoring and enrichment) relative totheir requirements, but also the degree to which this functionality can bereadily understood, managed and leveraged by non-IT resources. In keepingwith significant trends in data management, business roles such as datastewards will increasingly be responsible for managing the goals, rules,processes and metrics associated with data quality improvement initiatives.Other key considerations include the degree of integration of the range of functional capabilities into a single architecture and product, and theavailable deployment options (traditional on-premises software deployment,hosted solutions and software as a service [SaaS]). Finally, given thecurrent economic and market conditions, buyers must deeply analyzenon-technology characteristics, such as pricing models and total costfootprint, as well as the size, viability and partnerships of the vendors.Use this Magic Quadrant to understand the data quality tools market and
Acronym Key and Glossary Terms
BI
business intelligence
CDQ
Customer Data Quality
ETL
extraction, transformation andloading
ISV
independent software vendor
MDM
master data management
SaaS
software as a service
SI
system integrator
SOA
service-oriented architecture
UDC
Universal Data Cleanse
VAR 
value-added reseller
Vendors Added or Dropped
We review and adjust our inclusion criteria forMagic Quadrants and MarketScopes as marketschange. As a result of these adjustments, themix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant orMarketScope may change over time. A vendorappearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScopeone year and not the next does not necessarilyindicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. This may be a reflection of achange in the market and, therefore, changedevaluation criteria, or a change of focus by avendor.
Evaluation Criteria DefinitionsAbility to ExecuteProduct/Service:
Core goods and servicesoffered by the vendor that compete in/serve thedefined market. This includes currentproduct/service capabilities, quality, feature sets,skills, etc., whether offered natively or throughOEM agreements/partnerships as defined in themarket definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial,Strategy, Organization):
Viability includes anassessment of the overall organization's financialhealth, the financial and practical success of the
 
how Gartner rates the leading vendors and their packaged products in thatmarket. Draw on this research to evaluate vendors based on a customizedset of objective criteria. Gartner advises organizations against simplyselecting vendors in the Leaders quadrant. All selections are buyer-specific,and vendors from the Challengers, Niche Players or Visionaries quadrantscould be better matches for your requirements.
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Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools
Source: Gartner (June 2009) 
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Market Overview
Organizations of all sizes and in all industries are recognizing theimportance of high-quality data and the critical role of data quality ininformation governance and stewardship, driven by broader enterpriseinformation management initiatives. As a result, their interest in the role of tools and technology for data quality improvement continues to grow.Fueled by a market of purpose-built, packaged tools for addressing variousdimensions of the data quality discipline, data quality functionality is readilyavailable from a variety of providers, both large and small. Data qualityfunctionality is also being recognized as a fundamental component of offerings in many related software markets, such as data integration tools,MDM solutions and BI platforms. As a result, an increasing number of partnerships between MDM solution vendors and data quality tools vendorsare occurring, as the desire for stronger matching, standardization andcleansing functionality for MDM grows. In addition, there is an increase inthe usage of data quality tools to support custom-developed MDMarchitectures in many organizations.The vendors in this market offer a broad range of data quality functionality,ranging from data quality analysis, profiling and monitoring, to datacleansing operations such as parsing, standardization and matching,through to data enrichment. Much convergence and integration of technology has occurred, and today vendors offer more functionality withina smaller number of discrete products — most vendors have consolidatedthe bulk of their core data quality functionality into a single data quality
business unit, and the likelihood of the individualbusiness unit to continue investing in theproduct, to continue offering the product and toadvance the state of the art within theorganization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing:
The vendor’scapabilities in all pre-sales activities and thestructure that supports them. This includes dealmanagement, pricing and negotiation, pre-salessupport and the overall effectiveness of thesales channel.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record:
Ability to respond, change direction, be flexibleand achieve competitive success asopportunities develop, competitors act,customer needs evolve and market dynamicschange. This criterion also considers thevendor's history of responsiveness.
Marketing Execution:
The clarity, quality,creativity and efficacy of programs designed todeliver the organization's message to influencethe market, promote the brand and business,increase awareness of the products, andestablish a positive identification with theproduct/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by acombination of publicity, promotional, thoughtleadership, word-of-mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience:
Relationships, productsand services/programs that enable clients to besuccessful with the products evaluated.Specifically, this includes the ways customersreceive technical support or account support.This can also include ancillary tools, customersupport programs (and the quality thereof),availability of user groups, service-levelagreements, etc.
Operations:
The ability of the organization tomeet its goals and commitments. Factors includethe quality of the organizational structureincluding skills, experiences, programs, systemsand other vehicles that enable the organizationto operate effectively and efficiently on anongoing basis.
Completeness of VisionMarket Understanding:
Ability of the vendorto understand buyers' wants and needs and totranslate those into products and services.Vendors that show the highest degree of visionlisten and understand buyers' wants and needs,and can shape or enhance those with theiradded vision.
Marketing Strategy:
A clear, differentiated setof messages consistently communicatedthroughout the organization and externalizedthrough the Web site, advertising, customerprograms and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy:
The strategy for selling productthat uses the appropriate network of direct andindirect sales, marketing, service andcommunication affiliates that extend the scopeand depth of market reach, skills, expertise,technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy:
The vendor'sapproach to product development and deliverythat emphasizes differentiation, functionality,methodology and feature set as they map tocurrent and future requirements.
Business Model:
The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy:
The vendor'sstrategy to direct resources, skills and offeringsto meet the specific needs of individual marketsegments, including verticals.
Innovation:
Direct, related, complementary andsynergistic layouts of resources, expertise orcapital for investment, consolidation, defensiveor pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy:
The vendor's strategyto direct resources, skills and offerings to meetthe specific needs of geographies outside the"home" or native geography, either directly orthrough partners, channels and subsidiaries asappropriate for that geography and market.
 
platform, with data profiling remaining the only major functional componentcommonly sold as a separate product. However, specialized add-oncapabilities (such as global name and address support, application-specificknowledge bases and dashboards for data quality metrics) persist for theircore platforms, and even grow in number, as vendors adapt their packagingand pricing models to suit a wider range of potential buyers.One of the most significant trends in this market is the continued expansionof the tools' capabilities beyond the basic data quality operations of parsing,standardization and matching of structured data assets in a narrow set of data domains (for example, customer data only). Increasingly, both newentrants and longtime competitors are delivering technology with a focus ondata quality analysis, pervasive deployment of data quality controls,ongoing data quality monitoring and the flexibility to address a range of data subject areas.The market for data quality tools is of moderate size (estimated at between$400 million and $500 million at the end of 2008), and during the next fewyears is expected to experience stronger growth than many other softwaremarkets. This is a result of the significant attention that organizations arefocusing on information governance (of which data quality assurance is asignificant component, and for which data quality tools provide support forfacilitating and executing information governance initiatives), and costoptimization (since data quality issues contribute to increased costs anddata quality tools can be leveraged to directly reduce inefficiencies andwaste by improving the productivity of people and the value of informationassets). Much of the innovation continues to come from outside the U.S. Asa result, the veteran data quality tool vendors are being challenged byentrants with a more significant international focus. Many new entrantsfocus on "domain-agnostic" data quality services (stand-alone or embeddedin applications), based on a centrally managed set of business rules.However, with the increasing trend toward embedding data qualitycapabilities in business applications, data integration tools and othersoftware offerings from larger vendors, these small competitors will facesignificant challenges as they attempt to survive and grow.This market comprises a diverse set of vendors approaching the businessopportunity from different directions and backgrounds. Large applicationsand infrastructure technology providers, such as IBM and SAPBusinessObjects, increasingly focus on data quality capabilities ascomplementary to various components of their portfolios. While they selldata quality tools in a stand-alone manner (as individual products), thesetools are increasingly sold as part of a larger transaction involving relatedproducts (such as data integration tools and MDM solutions). Other largetechnology and services providers manage data quality-focused divisionssuch as SAS Institute (with its DataFlux subsidiary), Pitney Bowes (with itsBusiness Insight division) and Harte-Hanks (with its Trillium Softwaredivision). Specialists focused on data integration capabilities, such asInformatica (and other data integration tools vendors not directly positionedon the Data Quality Tools Magic Quadrant) have added data qualitycapabilities to their portfolios, either via acquisitions or organicdevelopment. This reflects the increasing overlap between the markets fordata integration tools and data quality tools. Finally, a large number of pure-play specialist data quality tools vendors, including Datactics,DataLever, DataMentors, Datanomic, Human Inference, Innovative Systems,Netrics and Uniserv (and many others not positioned on the Magic Quadrantbecause they do not meet the inclusion criteria) vie for deals in stand-alonedata quality tools. Many of these specialists are small (with annual revenueof less than $100 million), and may be vulnerable to the challengingeconomic conditions and mounting competitive pressure from the largervendors.
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Market Definition/Description
The data quality tools market comprises vendors that offer stand-alonesoftware products to address the core functional requirements of the dataquality discipline:
Profiling.
The analysis of data to capture statistics (metadata) thatprovide insight into the quality of the data and help to identify dataquality issues.
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