IBM's latest acquisition helps enterprises spot 'bad data' at source

As the volume of data continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, organizations often struggle to manage the health and quality of their data sets.

To deal with this IBM has announced that it's acquiring Israel-based Databand.ai, a provider of data observability software that helps organizations fix issues with their data, including errors, pipeline failures and poor quality before it impacts their bottom-line.

Data observability is emerging as a key solution to help data teams and engineers better understand the health of data in their system and automatically identify, troubleshoot and resolve issues, like anomalies, breaking data changes or pipeline failures, in near real-time. According to Gartner, poor data quality costs organizations an average $12.9 million every year. The data observability market therefore looks poised for strong growth.

"Our clients are data-driven enterprises who rely on high-quality, trustworthy data to power their mission-critical processes. When they don't have access to the data they need in any given moment, their business can grind to a halt," says Daniel Hernandez, general manager for data and AI at IBM. "With the addition of Databand.ai, IBM offers the most comprehensive set of observability capabilities for IT across applications, data and machine learning, and is continuing to provide our clients and partners with the technology they need to deliver trustworthy data and AI at scale."

Data observability uses historical trends to compute statistics about data workloads and data pipelines directly at the source, determining if they're working, and pinpointing where any problems might exist. When combined with a full stack observability strategy, it can help IT teams quickly find and resolve issues from infrastructure and applications to data and machine learning systems.

It's also part of a broader data strategy and this acquisition further extends IBM's existing data fabric solution, helping ensure that the most accurate and trustworthy data is being put into the right hands at the right time -- no matter where it resides.

"You can't protect what you can't see, and when the data platform is ineffective, everyone is impacted -- including customers," says Josh Benamram, co-founder and CEO of Databand.ai. "That's why global brands such as FanDuel, Agoda and Trax Retail already rely on Databand.ai to remove bad data surprises by detecting and resolving them before they create costly business impacts. Joining IBM will help us scale our software and significantly accelerate our ability to meet the evolving needs of enterprise clients."

You can find out more on the IBM site.

Image credit: lightsource/depositphotos.com</a