Tibco Software Inc. announced Monday the acquisition of Velosel Corp., a buy that moves the company into the MDM (master data management) realm and adds to its capabilities in two vertical industries: retail and consumer product goods.
Velosel, founded about five years ago by Neeraj Gokhale, enables companies to create a master definition of their data that spans across systems, which in turn enables disparate applications to share information. Tibco develops enterprise application integration and business process management software.
Data management—and data cleansing—have become increasingly important capabilities as companies look externally to integrate along the supply chain, and internally to create composite applications based on specific business processes.
Velosel has taken a process-driven approach to MDM, providing capabilities for both process modeling and management, along with data management functionality.
“Defining [master data] is not a data problem but a process problem,” said Gokhale, from Tibcos Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters. “Just getting the data collected and rationalized is not enough. As soon as you do that the data becomes stale. Our application provides a layer of capabilities around automating information processes… As you define and automate processes, the resulting repository is consistent.”
While Tibco has some master data management and process modeling capabilities in its existing products—RFID and supply chain optimization primarily—adding Velosels software to the mix will bring in more specific capabilities that let business users model a process and then keep track of changes, according to Gokhale.
“We have some intellectual property around the behavior of business rules, so an application has the capability to define a process, but on an ongoing basis maintain changes.”
With the transaction between Tibco and Velosel complete, the latter companys software is available now under the product name Tibco Collaborative Information Manager. Tibco plans to announce at the end of this year its extended roadmap for Velosels software that will include integration with portal layers, among other upgrades.
Tibco did not reveal the financial details of the deal.
