Oracle has acquired Silver Creek Systems in a bid to expand its data quality portfolio.
Financial details of the deal were kept under wraps, but Oracle officials said their intent is to enhance product data quality across enterprise applications, including Oracle’s Product Information Management Data Hub, Agile Product Lifestyle Management, Supply Chain Management and Enterprise Resource Planning offerings.
At the center of the deal is Silver Creek’s DataLens product, a semantic-based technology for product data quality management. DataLens is designed to simplify product descriptions commonly found in many industries to help enterprises more accurately manage data.
“Lack of standardized product data continues to be a challenge for many enterprises,” said Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware Product Development, in a statement. “With the addition of Silver Creek, Oracle is extending its industry leading data integration offering with complementary solutions to enhance product data quality and help customers get more accurate and consistent product data for use across their enterprise.”
In a joint blog post, Forrester Research analysts Roy Wildeman and Rob Karel opined that the acquisition presents a number of benefits for Oracle customers, including more seamless integration between the Oracle Product Hub PIM solution and the product data quality software.
“We’ve been critical of Oracle’s data quality strategy in the past, because it has relied so heavily on technology and OEM partnerships to deliver data quality capabilities to its customers that it has remained at risk of external market forces to impact its ability to consistently deliver this capability,” they blogged. “Specifically, aside from its partnership with Silver Creek, Oracle also currently relies on partnerships with Trillium Software and Informatica to support its customer data DQ needs. … Oracle’s acquisition of Silver Creek is an excellent indicator that Oracle has finally decided to become master of its own data quality destiny, which means we would fully expect them to also make an acquisition in the customer data quality arena in 2010.”
Oracle has pledged to honor existing Silver Creek Systems partner contracts for support, professional services and sales until they expire or until further notice.
“Since our inception we have focused on working closely with our customers to solve some of the toughest problems in the data quality world,” said Barbara Mowry, CEO of Silver Creek Systems, in a statement. “By combining with Oracle, we look forward to expanding the scope of our solutions and making them available to a broader audience.”