DQ Global

DQ Global offers a number of different products, all of which are focused on data quality and all of which are targeted at customer data as opposed to say, product information. These offerings are DQ onDemand, DQ Studio, DQ forExcel and DQ Perfect & Merge. The last three of these all leverage DQ onDemand™, which provides a series (see Figure 1) of API-based data quality services, with the option to add more. These services, which will shortly be available on Microsoft Azure, are also available to clients, who can call services on demand.

DQ forExcel is currently in beta testing and provides a data quality toolbox for, as its name suggests, cleansing Excel spreadsheets. It is expected to be generally available in early 2021. DQ Perfect & Merge, which is available in multiple editions, is also currently focused on Microsoft, in this case Microsoft Dynamics, for which it provides de-duplication and cleansing capabilities. The company plans to extend this to other CRM environments starting in 2021.

Fig 1 – API-based services in DQ onDemand

Finally, DQ Studio is a general-purpose data cleansing offering. We describe this as “data cleansing” rather than as “data quality” as it lacks data profiling capability. While data profiling is included in DQ Perfect & Merge  it is only available as a service engagement in conjunction with DQ Studio. We would prefer to see relevant tooling at least available as an option alongside DQ Studio.

Customer Quotes

“Since purchasing DQ Global’s solution our ability to give an efficient service to our clients has increased by about 100%. …The return on Investment was achieved in less than 3 months.”
Abtran

“DQ Global’s dedupe program was already in use when I took this position, and it is hard to imagine working without it. I find it flexible and

DQ Studio, which supports more than 130 source and target connectors, has three modules: DQ on Demand, Batch Matching and Master Record Merge. While the facilities provided by the first of these is illustrated above, the other two modules warrant further description. In the case of Batch Matching this uses fuzzy matching algorithms that support multiple languages, while Master Record Merge is intended to detect the best record from a set of matched records and then to automatically fill relevant data field values. These facilities are underpinned by the appRules engine mentioned previously.

DQ Perfect & Merge has five editions: the Foundation Edition, the Master Edition, the Search Edition, the Cleanse Edition (which provides access to DQ on Demand) and the API Edition (which allows you to access Perfect & Merge capabilities via APIs). Of the first three editions, the Foundation Edition provides essentially the same matching capabilities as in DQ Studio, including a multi-record review screen (see Figure 2). The Master Edition extends this by providing automation, scheduling, audit logging, and record linking, amongst other things. The Search Edition is especially interesting is it supports the real-time checking of incoming records to prevent the addition of new duplicates. This is a significant capability that differentiates DQ Global from competitors. It also supports the tagging of records when duplicates are discovered.

Fig 2 – Multi-record review screen in DQ Perfect & Merge

There are a couple of things that impress us about DQ Global. The first is the real-time matching on new records. The second, which is arguably more significant, is the whole approach implicit in the use of DQ onDemand. We really like the fact that you can call an individual cleansing or other service on demand, and then pay for only what you use (pricing is consumption-based). We are not aware of any other company taking this approach: normally, you have to license or subscribe to everything, rather than individual functions, which should make DQ Global particularly cost-effective.

The close integration with Microsoft Dynamics perhaps explains why we are not aware of plans to port DQ onDemand to cloud platforms other than Microsoft Azure though perhaps this will change as the company adds support for additional CRM environments.

Of course, we should add that DQ Global does not offer cleansing capabilities for unstructured data such as product description fields. The products are targeted squarely at CRM and related environments though there are multiple use cases that the products support, including data integration, data migration, master data management, and so forth.

The Bottom Line

There are lots of data quality products available in the market. If the API-based approach of DQ onDemand, the real-time capabilities of Perfect & Merge and/or the close integration with Microsoft Dynamics are of significance for you, then the company and its products are well worth further investigation.