Similarity Systems secures $7 million funding

Dateline: 15 February 2005

Similarity Systems, which develops and markets the leading Data Quality solution ATHANOR, has closed a $7 million (€5.5 million) funding round led by Trinity Venture Capital. Existing investors including Delta Partners and a number of private investors also participated in this Series B investment. Similarity Systems intends to use the funds to further evolve its products and expand its international sales and marketing initiatives.

“The traction we’ve generated from enterprise customers and the world-wide growth in the market for Data Quality solutions have enabled us to mold Similarity Systems into the leading Data Quality company it is today,” said Garry Moroney, chief executive officer, Similarity Systems. “This latest injection of funds provides us with the backing we need to expand sales and business development initiatives in the consumer goods and finance sectors in North America, where we see a massive untapped market for our business-focused Data Quality solution.”

With its unique business-focused approach to solving the pervasive problem of poor Data Quality, Similarity Systems has attracted significant numbers of Global 2000 customers in the USA, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Similarity Systems’ ATHANOR is the only suite of Data Quality products that enables business knowledge workers to take control of enterprise-wide data cleansing initiatives.

ATHANOR profiles, standardizes, cleanses and matches all data types, including customer name and address, product, inventory and materials master data. Coupled with the Similarity Systems Data Quality management methodology (or any other quality management methodology such as Six Sigma), ATHANOR enables organizations to tackle Data Quality one system at a time, with a distributed solution that also provides centralized control, management and reporting to enterprise-wide Data Quality standards.

Poor Data Quality costs businesses vast amounts of money. Defective data leads to breakdowns in the supply chain, poor business decisions and inferior customer relationship management. It also hampers efforts to meet regulatory and compliance responsibilities. By providing solutions to generate, measure and maintain high quality data, Similarity Systems enables data owners to very quickly achieve important benefits, including cost savings, better decision making, improved customer service and more streamlined supply chain management.

Similarity Systems’ ATHANOR is an integrated Data Quality solution that includes profiling, standardizing, matching, cleansing, and data enrichment functionality in one product. ATHANOR is extensively deployed in financial institutions faced with improving Data Quality as part of their regulatory compliance efforts, as well as in consumer goods manufacturers struggling with internal data alignment, global data synchronization and streamlining of supply chains. These organizations have a diversity of data in addition to customer name and address information, including product, material, inventory, asset and vendor data.

ATHANOR offers an easy-to-use workbench environment for managing Data Quality across the enterprise. The product has more than forty configurable Data Quality building blocks or components available on the desktop. The component approach empowers data owners to construct complex Data Quality rules without resorting to low-level coding.

The solution has redefined who tackles Data Quality problems within global organizations, taking them out of the hands of IT departments and enabling business data owners to address data accuracy, completeness and integrity problems across multiple enterprise applications.

The latest edition of the ATHANOR Data Quality solution, version 2.11, is due to ship later this month. ATHANOR 2.11 includes new SAP connectors, enhancing the product’s enterprise applications connectivity, and a new Address Validation component. The Address Validation component offers out-of-the-box address validation for 15 countries including the UK, USA, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, France, Australia, Luxembourg and Singapore as well as geocoding for the USA and UK.

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