Irion

An Italian platform for enterprise data management

Irion develops Irion EDM, a platform for managing enterprise data that it says is built and supported entirely in Italy. The product has been on the market since 2004, and the company reports that it established itself first in banking and insurance before expanding into energy and utilities. It positions the platform as an end-to-end tool for getting the right data to the right people at the right time, wherever the data sits.

Declarative development and metadata

What the company stresses most is how the platform is built. Using a declarative approach, a developer tells the software what must happen rather than how to do it, through a proprietary technology it calls DELT, and the system is driven by metadata. Irion argues this goes beyond the limits of classic extract, transform and load tools and cuts repetitive manual work. When requirements change, for example when more data sources or users appear, the platform is meant to absorb the change automatically wherever it can.

Data quality and governance

Data quality is described as the product's historic strength. After reading the metadata the system sets up hundreds of automated checks within seconds, looking at consistency as well as format, then supports the correction of anything it flags. The company divides augmented data quality into discovery of where data is and how to classify it, suggestion of relationships and rules, and automation of fixes. A rule written as an SQL query is translated into business language through a data dictionary, so technical and business staff can work from the same quality indicators. Governance tools include change management workflows, dynamic APIs, test automation and shared control areas.

Modelling, integration and master data

The site lists further modules: scalable data models and interactive graphs showing how information relates, over two hundred connectors that move data between different systems and formats, reconciliation so that nothing is lost when moving between systems, master data synchronisation for product and customer catalogues, and analytics that reuse a company's existing technology. Example applications include matching of listed derivatives, reinsurance stop loss calculations and port performance fee calculations.

Recognition and support

The company reports an honorable mention in an analyst firm's market report on data quality solutions and says it runs a support portal with documentation, a community and a glossary, plus a partner portal and ready-made components and templates.