Contact: Brenon Daly, Dennis Callaghan, Krishna Roy
A little more than a year after scrapping its OEM agreement with master data management (MDM) vendor Orchestra Networks, Software AG has picked up its own MDM and data-governance technology. The German company recently reached across the Atlantic for Data Foundations, which we gather was a small purchase of a startup generating less than $10m in sales. Nevertheless, the deal continues the recent consolidation in the MDM market, which has seen fellow big-name buyers such as IBM, Informatica and TIBCO Software make acquisitions here.
A bit of a wonky area of information management, MDM has increasingly become a complementary tool for application integration and business process management software as it helps to make sense of the many different data types that underpin these applications. Further, other rival players have taken a platform-based approach to MDM, combining data-integration and data-quality capabilities into the MDM mix.
We wonder if Software AG will follow suit and enter the MDM platform fray by pairing the Data Foundations buy with another MDM-related purchase. If it looks to do that, we wouldn’t at all be surprised to see Software AG add a data-quality provider to its portfolio. A few names that might be worth a look for the acquisitive German company are Datanomic, DataLever, DataMentors, Datactics, Clavis Technology and Human Inference.