Reference Code: TA001690BIN Publication Date: June 2009 Author: Karthik Balakrishnan, Somak Roy, and Sarah Burnett

TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

Trillium Software System, Version 12.0

Trillium Software
BUTLER GROUP VIEW
ABSTRACT
Trillium Software System is an integrated data quality suite which helps companies profile, cleanse, standardise, enrich, and monitor their corporate data. It can be used for end-to-end data quality requirements to improve customer-oriented and other business processes or for downstream initiatives such as Business Intelligence (BI), Master Data Management (MDM), and application integration. It offers extensive capabilities for data discovery and quality improvement, including analysis of data patterns by entities and attributes, and analysis of the data itself based on name and address conventions for different countries. The patterndiscovery capabilities can be used to find records that do not meet the data quality standards, and to specify the different cleansing, standardisation, duplication, and survivorship (creating a golden record) rules that need to be applied to the data to enhance quality. The rules can be grouped into sets and workflow; executed in batch or point of capture mode; and integrated with Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools and with MDM solutions and business applications. Butler Group believes that companies with significant customer or product data management or application integration challenges would benefit from Trillium Software System.

KEY FINDINGS
Rules can be arranged into workflows and reused from libraries. Extensive partnerships with ETL, business application, and MDM providers. UI provided in many languages as well as support for Unicode characters. Data governance-oriented reporting capabilities. Can provide data enrichment using geocodes for US territories.

Impressive international coverage with rule

sets for over 240 countries. Lacks change management capabilities. Part of direct marketing services company Harte Hanks (revenues US$1 billion).

LOOK AHEAD
The Q4 2009 release will include additional geo-coding integration as well as enhancements to APIs and to Trillium Software Insight, Trilliums Web-based dashboard for data quality information.

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FUNCTIONALITY
For companies with large-scale communication requirements, the quality of customer information plays a significant role in ensuring streamlined operations and a consistent corporate image, and in reducing the cost of operations. A number of very direct and tangible benefits could accrue with regularly cleansed and updated data. Furthermore, today, many organisations have a substantial global presence and require additional information sets that are global and exhaustive, and which incorporate the numerous country variations and idiosyncrasies. For many organisations, overlaying the address data with demographic and geographic information could go a long way in optimising both the inbound and the outbound customer communication processes. Also, data quality is important to get the most out of an enterprises long history of transactions with customers, particularly given the current economic climate. Additionally, data quality matters from the point of view of application integration, MDM, and other factors such as regulatory reporting requirements.

Product Analysis
Trillium Software System is an enterprise-wide data quality solution that offers extensive capabilities for investigating data quality and improving it in line with data-governance policies. The vendor is part of HarteHanks, a US-based direct-marketing services provider with over US$1 billion in revenues. Harte-Hanks straddles main sectors within the direct marketing functions, and also provides leads-generation services to IT products and services companies. Trillium, the data quality software, was originally developed for the internal data quality management requirements of Harte-Hanks, and was first sold as a packaged product to Barclays Bank in 1992. The product has since grown and become a leader in this segment. It satisfies a wide range of data quality requirements including discovery, profiling, matching, and enrichment. These are summarised under the headings of Investigate, Improve, and Govern as shown in Figure 1 the Phases of Data Quality Lifecycle Management. Figure 1: Phases of Data Quality Lifecycle Management

Source: Trillium Software

DATAMONITOR

Trillium Software Trillium Software System, Version 12.0

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In Butler Groups opinion, Trillium Software System is best suited to larger enterprises because it can handle large deployment scenarios, e.g., involving tens of millions of records, many data owners/analysts and IT personnel, and continuous data-governance and transformation projects involving many stakeholders. The solution comprises three integrated modules: TS Discovery, TS Quality, and TS Insight. TS Discovery: This module performs data discovery and profiling functions such as consistency checks, validity against ranges, duplicates, missing values, and referential integrity. TS Quality: This provides data-cleansing procedures such as standardisation, de-duplication, relationship discovery (e.g., people living in the same household), and the creation of a golden copy (merging and survivorship, or retention). TS Insight: This is a Web-based dashboard for data quality programs and monitoring of results and goals. It delivers data quality scorecarding and trending information through a browser-based interface. Butler Group believes that the following aspects of the Trillium Software solution merit a special mention: Extensive coverage of address information, with in-depth knowledge of local conventions built into the rule sets: Trillium Software System provides pre-built country-specific name and address conventions for 240 countries. The country-specific data support is purchased at additional cost and can be switched on when required. Support for reusability: Trilliums solution provides a development environment which allows a user to develop data quality processes and workflows that can be stored and reused. The data quality rules can be saved in the library and reused as and when needed. However, in our view there is limited change management and history, although there is visual tracking of lineage capabilities built into this feature. Integration with common ETL, MDM, and business application solutions: Trillium Software System can be integrated into legacy applications via various supported APIs which include support for: C, C++, C#, Java, XML over HTTP, .NET, and EJB. In addition, Trillium Software provides direct support for CICS applications. Trillium Software also provides certified integrations with a wide range of third-party applications which include: SAP CRM. SAP ERP, SAP Netweaver MDM, Siebel UCM, Oracle CDH, Teradata MDM, Initiate CDH, Siperian, IBM WCC, and TIBCO. The solutions ETL connectivity includes Ab Initio, Informatica PowerCenter, IBM DataStage, Microsoft SSIS, and Synscort DMExpress. Trillium Software is OEMd by Oracle for Oracle Data Integration and the company has had a long history of partnerships with some of the aforementioned vendors.

Product Operation
Trillium Software System provides a separate design and live environments, allowing data quality procedures to be set up and tested without any impact on live operations. The Trillium Software System architecture is as shown in Figure 3. The Data Quality Repository is utilised in the design environment to store results, data standards, business rules, and supporting data. The solution utilises a data quality application server called Director that routes data cleansing and matching service requests from multiple real-time and batch applications into a data quality engine where the processing takes place. The other parts of the applications, TS Discovery, TS Quality, and TS Insight, are also available as standalone implementations. The following sections provide more details on the capabilities of these modules: TS Discovery: This enables users to understand the state of data and discover any data anomalies, as well as to gain insight into data domains, formats, patterns, and relationships that exist within the data. TS Discovery can be used to automatically profile data from new source systems and to extract the relevant metadata. The solution also supports identification of inconsistency across structured data fields, as well as identifying attributes that should conform to a particular format and structure.

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Figure 2:

Trillium Software System Architecture

Trillium Software System Architecture

Total Data Quality

Profiling

Source: Trillium Software

DATAMONITOR

For text values, the solution utilises phonetic representations of data through Soundexes and Metaphones in order to identify related values, duplications, misspellings, inconsistent punctuation, and other anomalies. The module analyses words and phrases present in particular fields and profiles them for users to understand the types of phrases and words that can exist within the specified field. The solution allows users to measure the level to which attributes comply against Data Standard Definitions that can be used out of the box, or customised so that specific aspects of attributes comply with known standards. Butler Group particularly likes the Venn and Entity Relationship diagrams that provide visual representations of the results. Some limited collaboration capabilities are provided in the package with notes that can be attached to particular entities in a data quality project or team setting. Issues or exceptions can also be flagged but no capability exists out of the box for these to be followed through to completion as part of a data quality project. We believe improvements could be made in this area. The customised reports however, can be exported and shared across all team members.

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TS Quality: The capabilities of this module include data cleansing, matching, parsing, and validating, e.g. ,checking address data against country-specific reference sources, and identifying relationships among records. The solution also includes the TS Enrichment module that allows organisations to enhance existing records with additional country-specific demographic, corporate, and postal data sets. These data sets include country-specific Geocoders, insurance-zone analysis, tax jurisdiction, and more, for a number of countries. The data-matching capability enables users to obtain a single view of records through the module called Commonizer. Consolidation and survivorship is driven by user-defined rules which are defined at a field-by-field level. TS Insight: The Web-based data quality dashboard allows business users, data stewards, and analysts to create, manage, and monitor data quality metrics, ratings, and trends associated with key business functions. Each user is also provided with the ability to customise their individual interfaces in order to track only those pieces of data that are most relevant to them. The solution also allows users to set data governance standards and monitor adherence to the standard. The data governance teams can monitor and report on data quality and adherence to standards through TS Insight. Trillium Software System can work in batch mode, as well as at the point of capture. As far as scalability is concerned, it offers a number of capabilities for high-availability operations with tens of millions of records. The solution is capable of performing parallel processing and also allows monitoring of throughputs and the control of data storage. Director: The Director is Trillium Softwares data quality application server. Through a single callable application interface, the Director delivers high-performance, real-time cleansing and matching services across multiple platforms, servers, and applications. It provides connectivity services between applications and Trillium Software services. The Director ensures that each record is automatically routed and processed using the appropriate country-specific rules, and presents corrected results back to the calling application. The Director also provides load balancing, failover, and monitoring of data quality processes and services. The integration capabilities are particularly impressive, and could help organisations streamline a number of core processes with minimal changes to existing processes. Also, the solution supports a wide range of platforms including mainframes. Trillium also offers a hosted option. Overall, Butler Group believes that the solution is well suited to the requirements of larger organisations and those with large complex environments.

Product Emphasis
Trillium Software System addresses three key aspects of data quality: 1) Automated data profiling with an extensive set of rules that come out of the box and in country-specific versions, and which provide extensive data investigation and analysis capabilities. Integration and certified connectors with other applications (e.g., with SAP), ETL and MDM tools, and a long history of working with other leading software vendors. The provision of governance-oriented reporting capabilities; a broader theme evident in the Trillium suite is the focus on enabling large and mixed group of experts to work on ongoing data quality improvement initiatives.

2)

3)

Overall, Butler Group is impressed with the depth and breadth of the functionality that is offered by the product. It should be noted that Trillium operates in an increasingly competitive software segment. As such we would like to see it continue with its recent drive to increase awareness and recognition of its brand in existing and emerging markets.

Trillium Software Trillium Software System, Version 12.0

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TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

DEPLOYMENT
Trillium Software System can be implemented either in a batch or real-time/Web-based environment. The technical resources required include a collaborative team of data and business analysts during the design and development phase of the project, with technical administrators getting involved during the implementation phase. According to the company, while the solution can be implemented and made to deliver results in just about a day for its profiling and discovery functionality, the design and development of data quality rules can vary from a few weeks to a few months depending on factors such as the size and complexity of the project, the number of data sources, the number of countries for which data quality processes are being deployed, etc. Trillium supports staggered implementation of its suite, wherein organisations can initially start with just data profiling in order to investigate and assess the quality of their data and define the scope of their requirements, and later build their processes on a modular approach or apply data quality processes to specific functional areas, or to country-specific data projects. The solution is available on Windows, Linux (SUSE and Redhat), Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, z-OS, os/390, OS400, and CICS. Post implementation, the maintenance overheads would involve more of ongoing data quality maintenance and less of technical administration. Trillium Software provides training services through regular classroom-based courses in their Billerica, MA and Aldermaston, UK offices. It also offers courses run at customers premises, and Web-based on demand training. Trillium Software provides technical support by phone or online on a 24x7 basis. Additionally, on-site support can be provided for issues that cannot be resolved remotely. The suite accesses data by importing (or linking to) data from any of the following data sources: Flat Files, delimited files, fixed length files described by COBOL copybooks, and relational data sources. The suite can also be integrated via various APIs, and the suite extends its connectivity to a wide range of third-party applications including: SAP CRM, SAP ERP, SAP Netweaver MDM, Siebel UCM, Oracle CDH, Teradata MDM, Initiate CDH, Siperian, IBM WCC, and TIBCO; while the suites ETL connectivity includes Ab Initio, Informatica PowerCenter, IBM DataStage, Microsoft SSIS, and Synscort DMExpress.

PRODUCT STRATEGY
Trillium Software targets the entire business-to-business and business-to-consumer market spectrum, and is applicable to a wide range of sectors ranging from Financial Services organisations (Banking, Insurance, Capital Investment) to Retail, Manufacturing, High Tech, Pharmaceutical and Health Sciences, Entertainment and Gaming, Communications, Utilities, and Transportation, as well as the Public Sector. In terms of company size, Trillium generally targets Fortune 5000 and FTSE 500 organisations with a minimum of US$500M-US$1B in revenue. Trilliums Software suite is sold through a direct sales force in the US, the UK, Germany, and Canada. The company also has an extensive reseller network that covers Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), Asia, and Latin America (LATAM) while the product is also OEMd within Oracles ODI. Trilliums business partners include: Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys, CSC, Wipro, Patni, and Capgemini. The companys technology partners include: Oracle, SAP, IBM, Teradata, TIBCO, Siperian, Initiate, Syncsort, Informatica, Kalido, Cordys, and Microsoft.

Trillium Software Trillium Software System, Version 12.0

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Trillium software licensing is based on a number of factors which include platform, application, fixed-term or perpetual usage, enterprise deployment, and global functionality. In addition, the company also allows the software to be leased. TS Discovery and TS Quality are the standard part of the package but the other software components can be purchased from the following range of products: TS Insight dashboard seats; Trillium Software Director; Trillium Software connectors (SAP, Siebel, Informatica, Siperian, etc.); Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) connectors (DB2, Oracle, and ODBC); Country tables and geocoders (country-specific pre-built project and rules, and postal directory processing); and additional TS Discovery user licences (profiling may be licensed independently for stand-alone use). The annual support and maintenance for Trillium Software System is charged at 20% of the licence fee. Trilliums release strategy is one major release every year. Minor releases are provided when necessary. The companys future development plans include: Additional latitude/longitude integration, Enhanced API to enable sharing of data with third-party applications (metadata tools, modelling, reporting etc), enhancements to TS Insight ratings for business-level groupings, and more chart/graph options.

COMPANY PROFILE
Trillium Software is a business division of Harte-Hanks, and has been completely focused on developing and marketing data quality solutions since 1994. The Trillium Software division is located in Massachusetts, US and also has corporate offices in Aldermaston, England and Stuttgart, Germany. In addition, one of its four customer service offices is located in Australia. Harte-Hanks, Inc. is a publicly traded company under the symbol HHS. The company currently employs around 227 staff in support of its overall operations. Trillium Software does not publicly reveal its revenue figures, however, it has approximately 2,300 licenses sold to 855 organisations around the world. Some of the companys referenceable clients include: British Airways, Barclays Bank, BT, Canon Europe, HSBC, Loyalty Management Group (Nectar), Philips Medical, RBS, Symantec, and U.S. Steel.

SUMMARY
Data quality is an extremely competitive market, populated with many major vendors. Behemoths, such as IBM, SAP (the BusinessObjects division), and Informatica, operate in this segment, as do a number of niche players who are focused exclusively on providing data quality tools. Trillium Softwares success in this highly competitive landscape can be attributed to the strong features of its product that include functionality, reusability, integration, and scalability. These are augmented with extensive support for the requirements of different cultures and geographies (notably Japan). Also, in the age of dwindling numbers of niche and independent software vendors, Trilliums status as a unit of a much larger company (and one that understands the importance of data quality through its own experience), should bode well for Trilliums existing and prospective customers.

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TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

Table 1:

Contact Details Harte-Hanks Trillium Software 1-2 Fortuna Court Calleva Park, Aldermaston RG7 8UB UK Tel: +44 (0)118 940 7634 Fax: +44 (0)118 940 7699 Mob: +44 (0)7771 617046

Trillium Software Global Headquarters 25 Linnell Circle Billerica MA 01821 USA Tel: +1 (978) 436 8900 Fax: +1 (978) 670 5793 E-mail: trlinfo@trilliumsoftware.com web: www.trilliumsoftware.com
Source: Trillium Software

DATAMONITOR

Headquarters
Shirethorn House, 37/43 Prospect Street, Kingston upon Hull, HU2 8PX, UK Tel: +44 (0)1482 586149 Fax: +44 (0)1482 323577

Butler Direct Pty Ltd.

Level 46, Citigroup Building, 2 Park Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000, Australia Tel: + 61 (02) 8705 6960 Fax: + 61 (02) 8705 6961

Butler Group
245 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10016, USA Tel: +1 212 652 5302 Fax: +1 212 202 4684

Important Notice
This report contains data and information upto-date and correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of preparation. The data and information comes from a variety of sources outside our direct control, therefore Butler Direct Limited cannot give any guarantees relating to the content of this report. Ultimate responsibility for all interpretations of, and use of, data, information and commentary

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