Trillium acquires Avellino to strengthen data management hand

Trillium Software, a subsidiary of Harte-Hanks announced today the acquisition of Avellino Technologies, a vendor of data profiling software.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.  

While Trillium’s and Avellino’s products will continue to be marketed separately, the objective of the acquisition was to strengthen Trillium’s information asset management offering, the Trillium Software System, with Avellino’s data profiling technology, Discovery, according to Len Dubois, vice president of marketing at Trillium.

“We had some data profiling capability, but Avellino is a best-of-breed vendor with more technical depth,” Dubois said.

The Avellino Discovery software is able to look at all the representations of customer information,  map the fields and link those fields together for a single view of a customer. It integrates customer records from various systems regardless of any differences, such as two different addresses, that might prevent a CRM system from seeing the multiple records as a single customer.

“I want to make sure when that person comes into his bank, and wants a check cashed for $10,000 and he has only $5,000 in his checking account, he’s not turned down because the bank didn’t know that he has $500,000 with them in a separate investment account,” Dubois said.

Last quarter Trillium’s chief rival, Ascential Software upgraded its Data Integration Suite to include data profiling, data integration and data quality in a single offering as well as adding native support for Web services.

Pete Fiore, president of Ascential, said companies are looking for a broad, integrated solution stack.

“Every CIO I talk to is looking to do business with a smaller number of strategic vendors,” Fiore said.

Oracle is a major reseller of Trillium’s data integration technology. Ascential has a major reseller deal with PeopleSoft.

No date has been announced for the integration of Discovery into the Trillium Software System, but even after the integration of the two products is complete, Discovery will continue to be sold as a separate product, said company officials.