Siperian Momentum
At the Gartner MDM Summit conference three weeks ago in Los Angeles, I sat down with Anurag Wadehra and Ravi Shankar from Siperian. I usually go to Siperian’s user conference, which was held last week in Princeton, NJ. I couldn’t make it this time but had a great time at their Spring 2009 event.
So instead, I thought I’d do a blog article on Siperian’s momentum in the last year or so, based on the briefing that Anurag and Ravi were kind enough to give me in Los Angeles.
Siperian’s ambition is to be a leader in multi-domain master data management and since their product is not tied to a specific data model, that’s a realistic goal. Many of their customers find the business problem they’re initially trying to solve does in fact involve multiple domains (or areas) of master data.
Siperian’s most recent fiscal year ended May 31st, and they wrapped up the new year’s first quarter on August 31st. Impressively, their license sales more than doubled over the last 4 quarters, and overall revenue almost doubled.
The reduction in dependence on services revenue and the corresponding increase in license revenue, indicates a positive trend that Siperian continues to shift its implementations to its alliance partners.
One of the reasons Siperian wanted to sit down with myself and others in the MDM space was to dispel some rumors that have been floating around about the company. The economic downturn that began in the fall of 2008 has been widely felt, to be sure, and Siperian had significant exposure at that time to the financial services industry, which was one of the hardest hit industry sectors.
But Siperian has done a good job diversifying its customer base into other verticals, more than a dozen total to date, and is continuing to close deals with new customers, extending its footprint at existing customers, and building significant relationships with global systems integrators.
With customers like Johnson & Johnson, Merrill Lynch, and Cephalon speaking on behalf of Siperian at events like the Gartner MDM Summit and Siperian’s own user conference, there definitely seems to be a pattern emerging of large organizations with challenging MDM requirements turning to Siperian.
Another trend worth mentioning is that a large portion of Siperian’s revenue is repeat business – customers who have done a successful project with the company and are expanding their MDM footprint into another domain, geography, etc. This speaks volumes about the success of Siperian customers’ current implementations.
Siperian’s “Business Data Director” (BDD) product, launched at the spring user conference, has already signed up more than a dozen customers, with 2-3 already “live” and more going live in the next few months. I was there for the launch of BDD and remain impressed with it.
To a large degree, Siperian’s strategy of scaling through alliances is paying off. Ninety percent of its revenue in the last 4 quarters was partner influenced, with its top four partners accounting for 60% of that business.
I’ve followed the company closely for the past couple of years, and I think their company strategy and product roadmap is solid. Siperian helps keep the “Big Three” of MDM (Oracle, IBM and SAP) on their toes, and has generated a lot of innovation in this space.
I’m sorry to have missed their user conference last week, and I continue to expect great things from Siperian. Please share your thoughts on the company and their products here using the Comments feature.
MDM Track at the OAUG Conference
The Oracle Applications Users Group conference, COLLABORATE 10, is being held April 18-22, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
But the Master Data Management (MDM) track of COLLABORATE 10 needs YOUR help!
This is your final invitation to share your MDM and Data Governance success story, knowledge and expertise by presenting at the conference.
The MDM Track’s call for papers has been extended to 11:59 pm EDT on Monday, October 26; this deadline will not be extended further.
More than 5,000 users, technology leaders, Oracle executives and solution innovators will gather for the event April 18-22, 2010, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.
We hope we’ll see you there — as a speaker!
If you’re interested in presenting, all you need at this point is a title, a short abstract of 520 characters summarizing your idea, and up to five “bullet point” objectives.
If you’d like to submit a paper, just send an e-mail to info (at) hubdesigns (dot) com, giving me a brief sketch of your idea. I’ll respond with the URL you’ll need to submit it.
Silver Creek Systems
Another strong session at Oracle OpenWorld this afternoon.
Alison Schofield, the Product Strategy Director at Oracle for PIM Data Hub, lead off the session by talkking about the business challenges in improving the data quality of product information, calling it the “greatest threat to your PIM initiative.”
Items are formatted inconsistently, misclassified, with overloaded description fields and lots of non-standardized data.
Martin Boyd from Silver Creek Systems took over to talk about the DataLens product, which Oracle is now selling on an OEM basis on the Oracle price list.
Martin pointed out that 10% of the total effort will be on the MDM software implementation, 40% on establishing governance and documenting the master data architecture, and 50% on data remediation (according to AMR Research, “MDM Strategies for Enterprise Applications, April 2007″).
Data mastering is about “getting your data right” and “keeping it right”.
And there are very few standards governing product data (outside of your product information management system) – all of your legacy systems and outside trading partners are going to feed you a lot of product data of questionable quality.
Martin presented Silver Creek’s DataLens capabilities “at a glance” – the ability to standardize and validation of attributes and descriptions, translate between languages, assignment to popular product classification schema, enrichment with internal and external data. matching and merging, and re-purposing so data can be published in any format for use by downstream systems.
Martin differentiated between tools designed to handle customer data quality and those handling product data.
Name and address data has a relatively fixed syntax, but product data has no fixed syntax. And there are only about 200 or so country address formats, while there are tens of thousands of product types.
Two thirds of companies use manual efforts or custom code, but they say it’s too unreliable (75%) or too slow (64%).
Gartner (and many other analyst firms) have given great reviews to Silver Creek in the last few months.
Oracle’s Product Data Quality Server (DataLens bundled into and pre-integrated with Oracle PIM Hub by Oracle) has been used at large retail, manufacturing and health care companies.
The product’s capability starts with semantic recognition – recognizing the product within the current context – and then you can standardize, match, enrich, and repurpose the data, although those things are quite different for product data than for customer data.
The session wound up with a demo of DataLens, and the integration with Oracle’s PIM Hub.
I’ve spent the last six months on the product side of the master data management world, so I’ve found Silver Creek’s DataLens product very interesting, as it solves a major problem in the product MDM space. It was great seeing the Silver Creek folks presenting with Oracle at OpenWorld today.
Building a Next Generation Business using AIA
This afternoon at Oracle OpenWorld, I attended a great session led by Darrin Pohlman, Enterprise Architect at LexisNexis and MK Rizwan from Infosys.
They talked about the enterprise transformation program at LexisNexis, and the strategic use of technology to enable and drive that transformation effort.
MK started by pointing out the constraints of the single, global instance application strategy. You’re constrained by the vendor’s application architecture, and not all the functionality is best-of-breed across the entire suite. There are inevitable customizations and extensions which pile up over time, which leads to ever-increasing Total Cost of Ownership. It’s difficult to introduce industry-specific functionality, and it takes a long time to introduce new business models or capabilities.
The trend recently has been toward unbundling of the packages through SOA integration such as Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture (AIA) and the accompanying Process Integration Packs (PIPs). Further trends include vendor consolidation – Oracle acquiring Siebel, Hyperion, BEA, etc.
Interestingly, MK mentioned the important of prioritizing master data management, which got my attention, and he mentioned that would be particularly as people started to migrate in the future to the Fusion Applications products.
They went on to talk about AIA, particularly foundation packs, process integration packs and direct integrations. The foundation pack provides shared services, design patterns and standards. It runs on Fusion Middleware.
Darrin discussed the pro’s of AIA: good reference model for building composite applications, standards-based, extensible for unique characteristics of your business, and where Oracle is eager to demonstrate successful implementations. On the con side, PIPs can be tightly coupled, and the versioning of the AIA foundation pack can depend on specific versions of Siebel and other Oracle applications. Also, there are change management considerations of the IT team. There are licensing and maintenance considerations as well.
LexisNexis is an early adopter of this technology but has to plan for multiple upgrades over the next 12-18 months.
The audience was very engaged and asked some great questions during the session.
I found the session very helpful in better understanding the underlying enterprise architecture and technology strategy that LexisNexis is pursuing, and how Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture fits into that strategy, and Darrin and MK did a great job in explaining the pro’s and con’s of the approach and the experience that LexisNexis has had with it so far.
Like this:
Aaron Zornes Data Governance Session at Oracle OpenWorld
I’ve always enjoyed the depth and quality of Aaron Zornes’ analysis on master data management. I’ve been attending the MDM Summit conferences that he organizes in the U.S. with SourceMedia since 2006, and I’ve spoken at quite a few of his events.
Today I had the pleasure of hearing him speak on enterprise data governance. Here are some of his major points:
- Don’t settle for “passive” / downstream data governance; instead demand “active” / upstream data governance (please see my white paper with Siperian on this at http://forms.siperian.com/content/PowerGovernancePR).
- Don’t expect data governance maturity assessments to solve all your problems and provide a roadmap out of data governance anarchy.
- Today’s “data stewardship consoles” are substantially less than true enterprise data governance.
- Vendor viability does matter.
- Be prepared to spend $250k-$500k for an initial data governance solution.
Aaron styles himself as the “godfather of MDM” and today was a good reminder of why he deserves that title.
“Just Call Oracle”
Oracle showed a funny video today in Thomas Kurian’s keynote address on Day 2 of Oracle OpenWorld.
Using a fictional company with lots of systems and applications issues, Thomas walked everyone through how Oracle would solve a lot of those problems.
There were some great customer cameos from companies like Ingersoll-Rand and Office Depot. It was a little on the sales-y side, as Oracle keynotes can sometimes be, but it was well done and wasn’t over the top.
This session was a good reminder of the breadth and depth of Oracle’s offerings in the technology and applications space, and frankly it made my head hurt. I’m glad that Hub Designs specializes in master data management – the Oracle universe has gotten so big, it’s a little overwhelming for most people.
I’ll write more later today on the MDM track sessions.
First Day at Oracle OpenWorld
Having a dedicated MDM track at Oracle OpenWorld this year makes a big difference, in terms of being able to find the sessions more easily and in the focus and energy in the sessions.
First up today was a panel discussion on Hyperion Data Relationship Management (DRM). It was moderated by my friend Rahul Kamath from Oracle, and included Dongyan Wang from NetApp, Anand Raaj from Halliburton, and Nimish Mehta from Lumendata. It was very well done, and gave some good insights into the role that DRM can play as a hierarchy management tool in an MDM environment.
Next was Pascal Laik, VP of MDM Product Strategy at Oracle, who co-presented with Cisco’s Kin-Ching Wu. Pascal talked about the reality of complex, heterogeneous environments, and the difference between “push mode” and “pull mode”. He discussed the business drivers of growth, efficiency, IT agility and compliance, and the hard work Oracle has been doing over the past couple of years to help its customers to create their business cases and document the ROI that MDM has been realizing for them. Pascal laid out Oracle’s end-to-end data quality, pre-built integration and data governance strategies, and announced the new Data Governance Manager as a way to Define, Operate, Monitor and Fix data in the hub. Interestingly, 95% of the applications that Oracle customers integrate with are non-Oracle applications.
KC Wu from Cisco discussed their Customer Registry program, which draws data from 40 source systems and publishes it to about 80 downstream systems. She described a fascinating 10-year journey up the MDM maturity model.
The highlight of the next session for me was Bill Miller, a senior IT person at Oracle whom I’ve known for several years, who recently successfully implemented Oracle Customer Hub 8.0 at Oracle. It was very interesting to hear him describe how Oracle has put in place a lot of customer MDM and data governance best practices.
The last session of the day was Vanessa Hsu from Oracle, along with Kelle O’Neal from First San Francisco Partners and Angie Couron from Symantec. They did a great session on enterprise data governance, and gave a “first look” at Data Governance Manager.
Oracle OpenWorld 2009
I just arrived in lovely San Francisco for the latest edition of Oracle OpenWorld.
I’m particularly interested in the Master Data Management (MDM) track this year, as it looks as if the Oracle team has done a great job putting together a roster of Oracle employees, customers and partners to speak on its MDM products for managing master data on customers, products, financials, sites and suppliers.
I ran into several Oracle people like Pascal Laik, David Butler, and Rahul Kamath at last week’s Gartner MDM Summit conference in Los Angeles (more on that later), and as always, it was great to see them.
I’m really looking forward to this week’s sessions on the state of the art in MDM and data governance, and will be speaking myself on Thursday, Oct. 15th at 3:00 pm PDT. So if you’re interested in MDM and you’re attending OpenWorld this week, please stop by and say hello.
For that matter, if you’re in San Francisco and want to get together, send me an e-mail at powerd (at) hubdesigns (dot) com, or call my office number (781-749-8910) – it’s forwarded to my cell phone.
Hope to run into you in the City by the Bay!
Gartner MDM Excellence Award Winner Is …
Kraft Foods, an SAP MDM customer.
