Innovative Systems
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Analyst Coverage: Andy Hayler
Data quality is not a new subject, and no vendor illustrates this better than Innovative Systems, which was founded in 1968 and has been working in this sector for over five decades. Founded in Pittsburgh but with international offices, including London, Innovative was a pioneer in data and identity validation, with particular strength in the financial services industry.
These days most new customers deploy Innovative’s product “Enlighten” on the cloud e.g. in Azure, but the company still has customers running its software on IBM mainframes. Interestingly, hardly any of these customers have plans to migrate off the mainframe in the coming years, on the basis that the platform is highly reliable.
The Enlighten software offers a full function data quality suite, as you might expect from a company that has been in this business for over fifty years. The key technical differentiator is their knowledge base, built up by processing billions of customer records over many years. This knowledge base has a rich understanding of common customer data record errors and misspellings, not just in English but in a variety of languages and alphabets.
The company is currently seeing a lot of data quality activity in data migration projects, as customers migrate to the cloud or undergo mergers and acquisitions. Another growth area is data enrichment based on precise geographic location. For example, an insurance company might want to know all sorts of aspects of a potential customer’s house for insurance purposes: is it in a flood plain, is it in a high crime area etc. Similarly, companies now need to be able to process customer identification without necessarily having the need to turn up to a bank branch with physical documentation; there was a considerable impetus for improving this on-line validation during the Covid pandemic.
Innovative competes with both the broader data management players such as Informatica and IBM, as well as more targeted niche players. Its considerable track record in data quality is reflected in a client base that consistently record high levels of customer satisfaction in surveys, some of this helped by a very experienced team of professional service staff. If you are considering a data quality solution and want one that has a long-proven track record, then Innovative is one that you should consider.