First Look at Oracle Fusion MDM Hub
“All NDAs are lifted” were the magic words uttered by Steve Miranda from Oracle at the Fusion Inner Circle Event at Oracle OpenWorld on October 15th.
Just to make sure, I asked Steve explicitly during the Q&A section of the program if it was okay under the non-disclosure agreement we had all signed to write about Fusion on my blog, and he said “Yes.”
Hub Designs was invited back in February to help Oracle’s Fusion MDM team with some design review, validation, and testing activities. In return for our assistance, we’ve gotten to see Fusion MDM inside and out, and we can proudly say that we are one of the very few trusted partners who helped Oracle to design and develop the application.
We participated in a lot of conference calls with Haidong Song, Oracle’s Product Strategy Director for Customer MDM, and other members of his team. And we attended a week-long “hands-on validation” event at Oracle headquarters in August, looking specifically at the customer data management aspects of the Fusion MDM hub.
My first impressions of Fusion MDM during that hands-on session were very favorable. I remember thinking to myself, “Oracle could almost start selling this into the MDM hub market right now!”
Of course, Fusion isn’t scheduled to ship until sometime in 2010, and there’s still plenty of work to be done between now and then. But the core functionality needed for master data management was there, and the Oracle Fusion MDM team had a room full of customers and partners banging on it for a week without any significant crashes or issues.
There was plenty to like in Fusion that didn’t relate specifically to master data management – the new and improved user interface, the embedded analytics, the modern, standards-based architecture, the usability research that Oracle has done, the improved business processes, the built-in collaboration capabilities …
But the fundamentals of MDM were strong as well. Haidong and his team demonstrated how to import and consolidate customer data from outside sources, and we did our first hands-on lab session bringing in a small customer data load from a desktop file, such as a list of trade show leads.
We also tested a larger volume of customer data being brought into Fusion MDM through the Bulk Import process.
We did another exercise simulating how a typical customer data steward would identify potential duplicate customers, and then resolve those duplicates by merging the duplicate parties.
We also got a good look at the Informatica components that Oracle is bundling into Fusion on an OEM basis: the former Identity Systems matching engine and the former Address Doctor address cleansing tool. Previous Oracle MDM products like Customer Data Hub have had loose integration with Trillium and Firstlogic for address cleansing, but it’s refreshing to see Oracle investing in deep integration with industry leading solutions.
I think there are going to be a lot of Oracle customers who will move to Fusion MDM as the first wave of their overall migration to Fusion, who will see Fusion MDM as a good way to get some early experience with the Fusion applications family, before committing their mission critical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications to the Fusion platform.
And in 2010 and beyond, I think will be a lot of potential customers who evaluate Fusion MDM positively on its own merits against competitive MDM hubs. Oracle brings a robust data model, open architecture, and a next-generation approach to master data management, with state-of-the-art matching, data quality, middleware, and business process management.
Please let me know by commenting here what your thoughts and expectations are for Oracle’s Fusion MDM hub.
As always , nice job with your blog Dan.I “believe” the selling factor of fusion will be its cool and intuitive user interface. I’m hoping that Oracle is doing something about the performance of batch loads of Customer,Supplier, Product as well. Gone are those days when user used to sit patiently for 30 mins to load 30K records … For good or bad new generation users are all iPhone users and they want things to happen in a second of a mouse click, like the way it happens in iPhone.
Also some kind of in built feature in data profiling tools or reports which will help data stewards in data cleansing effort.
Thanks for the kind words, Sudeep. I think you’re right that one of the big selling factors of Fusion will be the intuitive user interface. And that people are much less forgiving now of bad user interfaces and of slower performance – the iPhone has raised the bar for everyone!
Dan,
Thanks for sharing your Oracle Fusion MDM Hub insights – its much appreciated.
Will the MDM Hub have built-in integration to a 3rd party data source (e.g., D&B) to facilitate customer identification, or will customer identification be handled strictly internally?
Thanks again,
Jim
Hi Jim, great hearing from you here.
My understanding is that third party content providers like D&B will be supported in batch mode in Fusion MDM Release 1. Real-time support will follow in later releases. This is subject to change, of course.
Hi Dan,
At the outset, thanks for providing a nice overview of what to expect out of Fusion MDM.
While reading this article and few others authored by you around Fusion MDM, I am thinking if I have to choose between Siebel UCM and Oracle CDH for R12 implementation (with Siebel CRM OnDemand and Oracle E Biz in the solution footprint) , which one should I go for? I read another article by you and there you commented “The E-Business Suite based hubs (Customer, Product, Supplier and Site) on Release 12.x are being positioned to align better with Fusion MDM”.. Can you elaborate a little on that?
Regards,
Kundan
Hi Kundan,
Thanks for your kind words. Choosing between the Siebel UCM and Oracle CDH products for Customer MDM is a tough choice. The Oracle “playbook” typically recommends Siebel UCM for companies that have Siebel CRM in place and are service-oriented or consumer-focused business. Typically Oracle CDH is a better fit for people that have Oracle E-Business Suite in place or are manufacturing or product based businesses.
That having been said, Oracle has not updated the Release 12 version of CDH very much in the last few years, so Siebel UCM has been the flagship product in the Apps Unlimited family in terms of innovation. Most of Oracle’s development resources have been focused on Fusion MDM, but the remainder was definitely focused on Siebel UCM rather than CDH.
One thing to keep in mind is that the underlying data model for Fusion MDM for Customer is based on the TCA data model in Release 12. So the data model layer will be very familiar to R12 resources.
I would think seriously about using Fusion MDM itself in your footprint, given that it’s been shipping for a while now and you have both Siebel CRM and Oracle EBS in your footprint. That would give you the benefit of getting your internal resources familiar with Fusion well ahead of your having to upgrade your EBS instance.
Hope these ideas are helpful!