DataFlux Comes Under Wing of SAS

By Nick Wakeman, Staff Writer


JUNE 15 ? SAS Institute Inc. of Cary, N.C., has acquired DataFlux Corp. of Raleigh, N.C., a company that makes a data cleaning software that increases the accuracy and usability of corporate databases.


"Poor data quality is one of the leading causes of data warehouse failure, and can compromise business decision-making when those decisions are not made on quality, cleansed data," said Jim Davis, director of product strategy at SAS.


Data cleansing ensures that values in a database are consistent and correctly recorded. The quality of the data in databases is increasingly important as more information-intensive and customer-oriented activities, such as electronic commerce and customer relationship management, grow, SAS officials said.


While DataFlux will operate as a separate unit, its products will be integrated into other SAS software products.


The acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, is part of SAS' effort to boost investment in complementary technologies to accelerate new products to market.


SAS already provides key analytic tools to help in the cleansing and scrubbing data from transactional systems. Now, SAS will extend its offerings with the addition of DataFlux's Blue Fusion technology that helps companies and organizations put data in standardized formats. For example, the U.S. Postal Service uses Blue Fusion to integrate data from outside sources.