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IBM Acquires Exeros: Page 2 of 2

In essence, the value of Exeros lies in its ability to automate and accelerate how businesses understand their data and data relationships, points underscored by two Exeros customer examples described during the analyst call. In the first, a large Midwestern bank that had grown through numerous acquisitions used Exeros' software to identify some 300,000 customers (nearly 30% of the bank's clientele) who had been "overlooked" by the company's marketing organization. Through Exeros' discovery process, the bank was able to include those clients in sales promotions and other revenue-generating efforts.

The second customer, a global truck manufacturer, was attempting to consolidate legacy ERP data contained in 14 customer, 9 vendor and 6 materials data sources and to build new customer, vendor and materials MDM hubs. The Exeros engagement allowed the company to complete in 1 month work that had previously taken 12 months to accomplish. In addition, using the Exeros solution, single data analysts were taking about an hour to address questions that used to take 3+ people several days to answer. Finally, Exeros proactively identified inconsistencies that would have made future consolidations difficult or impossible.

The answer to why IBM bought Exeros was clarified by Arvind Krishna, vice president of IBM's Data Management & Information Management Development, who said that virtually all IBM customers have "heterogeneous information environments," including commercial databases, such as IBM's DB2, Oracle and Microsoft, as well as legacy data sources and those associated with custom or specific business applications like SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle, JD Edwards and Amdocs.

In other words, Exeros offers clear and specific value to IBM's existing enterprise clients and could provide an incentive for new business clients considering the company's data discovery and MDM solutions. That same value proposition also extends to IBM's new Business Analytics Optimization Consulting practice (in the Global Services organization) and the company's network of Analytics Solution Centers, where we expect Exeros will take on a significant role. For Exeros itself, the alliance with IBM should provide access to markets and opportunities that would have been otherwise difficult to fully access.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on predictive analysis. Download the report here (registration required).