Zoomix to Match Data

Zoomix, an Israel-based vendor of data cleansing software, was acquired by Microsoft in July 2008. The company’s Zoomix Accelerator software examines input data and automatically makes corrections and modifications to improve data accuracy and consistency across systems. The software will support SQL Server Integration Services, Microsoft’s bulk data transfer and cleansing technology, and could particularly prove useful in data warehousing. Zoomix might also play a role in Microsoft’s future products for master data management.

Zoomix Accelerator provides a data matching and extraction service that developers can integrate into business applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Given a record or text, Zoomix Accelerator attempts to match it to existing records in application databases and standardize or extract field values. For example, the product can recognize “Microsoft Corp.” as a variant of “Microsoft Corporation” in an invoice record and add a standard vendor identifier to the record. The product uses natural language technology and manually matched examples to improve matching performance, and it has specific support for classifying product data using standard classification systems, such as the Global Standards 1 product classification system for consumer products.