IBM has announced the acquisition of the assets of Exeros, a privately-held company based in Santa Clara, Calif., that provides leading data discovery software. Financial details were not disclosed. The acquisition is designed to strengthen IBM's Information Agenda strategy to help companies turn data into a strategic asset, and provide new capabilities for IBM's recently announced Business Analytics Optimization Consulting practice.

Exeros' technology automatically uncovers hidden relationships between databases, helping users make sense of disparate data sources much faster than otherwise possible. This capability, which can dramatically reduce the cost of data-intensive projects such as data warehousing and master data management, can help clients generate new levels of intelligence that can identify new market trends and predict business outcomes with more certainty.

For example, a credit card company or airline could use Exeros software to consolidate customer award program information from multiple databases containing millions of client records, down to a single, master view of all customer information without the need for labour-intensive manual mapping of data. By automating the process and validating its accuracy, the company could begin to quickly gain new insights about customers in a matter of days rather than months.

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