Redpoint Global moves into data quality as a service

Redpoint Global, a customer data management vendor, has released In Situ, a data quality as a service tool that also performs identity resolution and some automated data governance operations.

In Situ uses an ID graph for identity resolution, to reconcile multiple identities customers often create with a company when logging in from different devices or touchpoints -- which makes the data "dirty" -- into a golden record.

The name In Situ is a Latin phrase meaning "in place," and references how the service works: Analyzing cloud-based data in place, where it rests, as a service without the need to risk security and move data to another cloud server to perform. Leaving data in place was chief among customer requests as Redpoint Global built the service, which normalizes and standardizes data to improve personalization, said CTO and co-founder George Corugedo.

Gartner analyst Melody Chien said that while users will most likely initially apply the tools to customer data, it could be extended to related data sets that figure into customer interactions. Some examples include partner data, transactional data, supplier data and product data.

Customers typically introduce data hygiene issues because they come to companies through marketplaces like Amazon, physical stores, websites and other channels. Not only do customers enter their own data inconsistently, but employees such as cashiers and salespeople also do so when they enter data on customers' behalf. Users of In Situ can apply automated data hygiene tools to clean up those problems that are mostly caused by human error, according to Chien.

"Redpoint recognized these are really very important capabilities here, and they want to deploy them in the customer management scenario," Chien said. "I see that as the biggest strength of their platform."

Redpoint isn't the first data quality as a service, or DQaaS, vendor. Chien said it's early days for this enterprise technology sector, however, which is also occupied by companies that have a head start on Redpoint, such as Talend and Innovative Systems.

Redpoint Global is part of a hot sector of cloud vendors that manage customer data and perform ID management to create a single customer record -- ID resolution is a big part of that. Most competing vendors call themselves customer data platforms, but Redpoint does not. Chien said that it's probably fair that Redpoint eschews the label and doesn't want to be lumped into that category because the company's platform does a lot more than ID management en route to more granular personalization, including data hygiene.

"The problem I have with 'CDP' is that you speak to 10 different people and they have 10 different definitions for it," Corugedo said. "What we have initiated from the very first day we came to market was to create a virtuous cycle around the capabilities of data insight and action, because that is the fundamental way you monetize data in business."