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TIBCO Software Inc. announced last week the acquisition of Velosel Corp., a buy that moves the company into the master data management realm and adds to its capabilities in two vertical industries: retail and consumer 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, of Palo Alto, Calif., develops EAI (enterprise application integration) and BPM (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, of Santa Clara, Calif., 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. “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 MDM and process modeling capabilities in its existing products—primarily RFID (radio-frequency identification) and supply chain optimization—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,” Gokhale said.
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 years end its extended road map for Velosels software, which will include integration with portal layers, among other upgrades.
TIBCO did not reveal the financial details of the deal.