Silver Creek Systems
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Editor’s note: another installment in an ongoing series where the Hub Designs Blog profiles companies and solutions which are relevant to master data management (MDM).
Company & location: Silver Creek Systems, headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, provides automated data mastering solutions which enable enterprise-wide standardization and integration of product information.
Value proposition: I recently had a briefing with several Silver Creek people. Their core product, DataLens™, applies semantic technology to standardize, enrich, match, repurpose and govern product information. I think of it as data quality for product information on steroids.
The semantic approach makes a lot of sense. I remember from my ERP days how painful dealing with product information can be (requiring endless massaging in Excel or complex SQL queries to extract and reformat it). Silver Creek seems to have an intelligent solution to one of the thorniest issues in MDM.
What point in MDM lifecycle: if your MDM initiative involves product information, you’ll quickly find out that Product MDM is very different from Customer MDM. It’s common for product data to have dozens or even hundreds of required attributes. The hierarchy management requirements for product data are typically more complex. And because a lot of product data is unstructured or semi-structured, you need a specialized parsing engine if you want to automate the standardization of your data.
Relevance to MDM: data quality tools designed for customer information have a hard time handling the widespread variability of product data, its relative lack of structure, the dearth of referential data from third-party sources, the overloading of the “description” field, the classification and categorization requirements and the added complexity in hierarchy management.
As I do more work in the Product MDM area, I’m impressed with Silver Creek Systems and its DataLens solution.
Update on 04/14/09: Silver Creek Systems announced today that its DataLens™ System was named the top Data Quality product by SearchDataManagement.com’s 2008 Products of the Year program. The awards were judged by a team of industry analysts and consultants and presented by the editors of TechTarget’s Enterprise Applications Media Group. For more information, please visit http://www.silvercreeksystems.com/PR_SDMPOY2008/.
