Syniti update

Syniti is a data management company headquartered in the US but with operations in thirty countries and with around 1,400 employees. It used to be called Back Office Associates, and was originally a consulting firm focused on large SAP accounts, but this has changed in recent years. It now sells packaged data management software, with about a third of its revenue (and growing) coming from licenses rather than professional services.

It provides a broad data management “Knowledge Platform”, with software that deals with data quality, master data management, data migration and, to a degree, with data governance also. The software has elaborate profiling capability via various “scanner” utilities, with a particularly good knowledge of the SAP metadata due to their historical focus on this platform. However, the software can also work well with data from Oracle applications and other data across different data domains, whether customer data, product data, material data or whatever.

The company claims to have a particularly strong matching algorithm, which it acquired from a company called “360Science” in September 2021. This algorithm is high performance and tends to result in an unusually low number of false positives when tested on benchmark data. The software has a data catalog that drives its data quality and MDM capabilities, and uses machine learning to assist with data automation. The product has a natural language capability, allowing business rules to be defined in normal English (or 11 other languages) which can then create any necessary technical statements such as SQL syntax rules that can be embedded in applications. The software can suggest business rules based on its artificial intelligence underpinnings. Syniti’s software is cloud-native but can be deployed in a flexible manner, with customers able to deploy a small software footprint in a private cloud or on-premises if desired. Although Syniti has some data governance capabilities, it does not directly compete in this market with products like Collibra and Alation. Similarly, although it has some data movement (ETL etc) capabilities, it usually works with whatever data movement tools that a customer already has in place.

Syniti competes with other data management platforms such as those from Informatica or Ataccama. The company has a long list of well-known global customers, and it is certainly an option worth considering for companies who are contemplating a data migration project or data quality initiative. This is especially the case if you have a large SAP footprint, where Syniti has a deep track record.