iWay Gets Into Big Data

Published: September 20, 2011

by Alex Woodie

iWay Software last week unveiled enhancements to its data management products aimed at helping customers get the most out of their big stores of data.

At the heart of iWay's "big data" push is Data Quality Center, a Java-based tool designed to cleanse, standardize, and validate data as it sits in transactional and analytical applications, and when it's pulled out for use in integration projects and system migrations.

iWay has updated DQC to be able to handle the rigors fixing data quality problems in real time. The company redesigned the tool's database layer and enhanced its matching engine, which improved its performance, capacity, and compatibility with production environments, iWay says.

It's much better to fix data quality problems as it's entered--before the data is stored in transactional or analytical databases--especially considering the huge amounts of data that organizations are storing today, iWay says.

"There's a tendency among businesses now to save as much as they can and worry about quality later," iWay general manager Gregory Dorman states in a press release. "While storage is relatively inexpensive, the amount of time it takes to standardize data, combined with the potential for drawing misleading conclusions, as a result of poor data quality, can prove quite costly."

Also involved in iWay's big data solution are its Data Steward Portal, Master Data Center, and Data Profiler. Data Steward Portal is a tool that extends the core DQC functionality to capture bad data as it's entered into applications, such as ERP systems, and to automatically fix the problems.

Master Data Center is a separate solution that organizations can use to define their standard data structures (such as for customer, contact, and product entities) and to automate associated application workflows. MDC is one source of correct data that could be used by DQC, which also plugs in to third-party data registries.

Data Profiler takes the output from DQC, does additional processing and graphical presentations, and helps customers decide whether the data is ready to be used for business intelligence workloads. iWay announced last week that Data Profiler version 4 supports deployment on smartphones and tablets, providing road warriors better access.

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