Over the last two year
I've been obsessed with Gartner and their analyses of the Data Quality market. It's not because they're always right in
every aspect, but a lot of times they are, and in addition they are very prominent opinionmakers. And
in all honesty, a huge part of one's personal reasons to do open
source development is to get recognition from your peers.
While leading the
DataCleaner development and other projects at Human Inference, we
definately are paying a lot of attention to what Gartner is saying
about us. Also before I joined Human Inference, Gartner was important
to me. Their mentioning of DataCleaner in their Who's who in Open
Source Data Quality report from 2009 was the initial trigger for
contact to a lot of people, including Winfried van Holland, CEO of
Human Inference. So on a personal level I have a lot to thank Gartner for.
Therefore it is with great
proudness that I see that Human Inference has been promoted to the
visionary quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Data
Quality Tools annual report,
which just came out (get it from Gartner here). That's exactly where I think we deserve
to be.
At the same time I see
they are mentioning DataCleaner specifically as one of the strong
points for Human Inference. This is because of the licensing model
that we lend ourselves to with it, and for the easy-to-use
interface which it provides to data quality professionals.
Additionally our integration with Pentaho Data Integration (read more) and
the application of our cloud data quality platform (read more) are
mentioned as strong points.
This is quite a
recognition since our last review by Gartner. In their 2012 update
for the Who's who in Open Source Data Quality (get it form Gartner here) Gartner
critizised the DataCleaner project on a general negative attitude and
a range of false grounds. In particular, my feeling is that certain
misunderstandings about the integration of DataCleaner with the rest
of Human Inference's offerings caused our Gartner rating to be
undervalued at that time. Hopefully the next update to that report
will reflect their recent, more enlightened view. I should mention
that the two reports are rather independent of each other, so these
are just speculations from my side.
As such the Gartner
reports have shown to be a wonderful source of information about
competing products and market demand. Our current plans for DataCleaner 3 are in deed also influenced by Gartner's (and our own)
description of data monitoring being a key functional area in
the space of data quality tools.
I am deeply grateful for
Gartner's treatment of DataCleaner over time. “You've got to take
the good with the bad” and for me that's been a great way of
continously improving our products. A good reception in the end makes
all the trouble worthwhile.
