Compassoft: masters of metadata

  This week I had the good fortune to meet with the executive team from Compassoft. On a web conference, Paul Bach (President and CEO), Libby Koehn (Founder and EVP Customer Services) and Eric Solberg (CTO) showed me around Compassoft's new product family .

Compassoft collects and analyses metadata from spreadsheets, databases, and reporting systems -- to identify dependencies, locate errors or possible fraud, and track usage. Essentially they make visible and auditable, a company's opaque (and likely out-of-control) collection of business spreadsheets, databases and reports.

It was impressive. I saw Compassoft locate different versions of the same spreadsheets in email and desktop files, identify inconsistencies, show hidden pages and "a second set of books." They analysed data from Excel spreadsheets. Access databases, and RDBs to map dependencies and identify an audit trail.

I don't see this as an easy business to copy. Compassoft obtains the metadata by a combination of search-like spidering indexing and ranking, and deep technical insight into the complex metadata structure (table defintions, label, macros, formulae, ...)  of each data source(spreadsheet, databases, reporting systems, ERP systems, ...). Last month, Compassoft acquired a UK company, Spreadsheet Auditing Limited and its EXChecker spreadsheet auditing product, which Gartner saw as "... a signal of new seriousness in a fragmented and still immature market."

I have been dazed over the last year or so by the welter of producst that address one part or other of Sarbanes-Oxley (or Higgs in the UK) legislation -- but Compassoft is a breath of fresh air. They don't focus on complex procedures and tools to avoid spreadsheet hell. They deal with today's mess,  and -- in dealing with it -- show how to avoid (and detect) it in the future.

Compassoft has great investors: Advanced Technology Ventures, and Leapfrog Ventures.The product has been shipping ony a few months but they have an impressive customer list that includes Deloitte, Lloyds Bank, and Citigroup. I imagine the big accounting firms will be all over them soon.

I think Compassoft is going to find a valuable opportunity as a partner with us -- particularly related to Office 12. In my opinion, the most exciting element of Office 12 is its evolution as a new kind of business intelligence tool -- where business users will meet previously hard-to-locate business data. The Mendocino work with SAP is just the start of major democratization of business intelligence. I think any company with sophisticated insight and reach into business data will find an even broader market than they had suspected.

Comments

[DonDodge]

Great post, Cliff. It is great to hear about Microsoft ISV partners building innovative solutions to tough problems.

It looks like you have found a rising star in Compassoft.