And Then There Were Five
The landscape of the MDM hub vendors has shifted quite a bit in the last month. Siperian has been acquired by Informatica, and Initiate Systems has been acquired by IBM.
What does this mean for the average Fortune 1000 company buying MDM technology? Not as much as you might think.
On the mega-vendor side, they’ve still got Oracle, IBM and SAP to choose from. IBM, obviously, now has three MDM platforms to offer (InfoSphere MDM Server, InfoSphere MDM Server for PIM, and Initiate Systems) where they used to have two. But Oracle has three as well, and will soon have four: Customer Data Hub and Universal Customer Master for customer MDM, PIM Data Hub for product MDM, and Fusion MDM Hub, Release 1 of which is supposed to ship later in 2010. And SAP continues to forge ahead with improved versions of their NetWeaver MDM product. So the recent consolidation doesn’t seem to have affected the mega-vendors that much – “the big get bigger”, you might say.
Outside of the “Big Three”, I continue to think Siperian being acquired by Informatica is a good thing, for Siperian’s customers, for the product roadmap, and for the market as a whole. Informatica brings a lot of expertise in integration and data quality to the table, and its Identity Systems matching engine and Address Doctor data cleansing tools are very good at what they do. It will be interesting to see how Informatica integrates Siperian as a company and as a product into itself, but I have a lot of confidence that they’ll do it well.
All this does pose an interesting issue for Oracle, however. Oracle made a big commitment to Informatica in its Fusion MDM Hub by including Informatica components for matching and cleansing on an OEM basis. But by buying Siperian, Informatica has declared itself a direct competitor in the MDM market. So there’s a lot of speculation as to what Oracle will do about this. In the short term, it may be too late to pull the Informatica components out of Fusion MDM Release 1.0, but longer term, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Informatica components either replaced or deemphasized, perhaps with an open architecture approach allowing other third party identity resolution / matching and address cleansing products to be plugged in, in place of Informatica’s. Although there’s also been a lot of speculation about Oracle buying Informatica.
D&B/Purisma remains an interesting player. Disclosure: prior to starting Hub Designs, I worked for D&B. I saw D&B’s launch of a hosted version of Purisma last fall and was impressed by it. For a lot of situations, Purisma’s product can be a good solution. So even though I wouldn’t call Purisma a full-fledged master data management solution, it’s worth keeping an eye on because it does a great job of integrating internal customer data with D&B’s external reference data. And having it available on a hosted basis can be very helpful.
So the bottom line is, where there used to be six players, now there are five. Of course, the MDM market being as hot as it is, everyone and their brother claims to be an MDM solution, but these are the five products that I pay the most attention to, and that we see the most in the marketplace. What do you think? Please let us know by commenting here.
Long Live MDM
Editor’s Note: Today’s post was written by Jeff Schaffzin. Jeff is an independent consultant with over 15 years of experience in high tech. He’s worked with a number of leading software vendors in roles such as product marketing, professional services and information technology. Specializing in data management, Jeff has spent the last three years focusing on Customer Data Integration and Master Data Management and has worked with a number of high profile companies in the United States and abroad.
DISCLAIMER: While the facts that I’ve included here are true, I’m speculating on the reasons why they’re taking place. I have no affiliation with any company mentioned here, nor should my opinions be construed as knowledge of their actions.
If you, like me, have followed MDM for the past year or two, you knew that what has been happening recently was going to happen sooner or later. Whether it was due to choice or necessity, MDM has been in the IT press a lot lately. Oracle acquired Silver Creek to enrich its product information management offering. Talend has announced and started to promote its open source MDM application. Data integration provider Informatica acquired Siperian recently in order to enter the MDM space and IBM recently acquired Initiate Systems as well.
Each of these events leads to one key question – how will this impact MDM in the short term and in the future? Given my understanding of the space, I think three scenarios are likely:
Scenario 1
It is hard to ignore the movements that IBM and Oracle have been making in the past year or so. In a market economy, the goal is to have as much market share as possible. In order to do this, you either build new products or acquire existing companies that have the technologies that you want.
While each company has done a combination of both building and buying solutions, their strategic plans are hardly a secret. IBM has proposed a vision of an end-to-end data management platform, which includes their MDM offering as well as reporting tools like Cognos and analytics/statistics from SPSS. Now that IBM has acquired Initiate Systems to complement their MDM stack, the question is why. Do they want to be known as a serious player in the health care industry? There could be other reasons too – they may consider MDM just a small piece of their data management toolkit and this could solidify that position, moving MDM from one of the hottest ‘technologies’ out there to just a “means to an end” to increase market share for their software business unit. Regardless of the reason, it means one less major MDM player in the market.
Then we have Oracle. For as long as I can remember, Oracle has been promoting its Fusion strategy. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Fusion is Oracle’s attempt to provide one code base that would pull together the applications it has built and purchased. This momentous undertaking was finally demonstrated at last year’s Oracle Open World (while Oracle continued to acquire other companies such as Silver Creek Systems).
However, like IBM, one can speculate on where MDM fits in this Fusion strategy. Oracle has always promoted its database first and sold its applications second. Even with the numerous special purpose hubs they’ve been developing lately, could this finally be the technology that enables Oracle to transcend from being a database vendor to a true platform player. Only time will tell with this one.
Scenario 2
There’s always the possibility that MDM has been considered the “secret sauce” – the so-called missing link – that rounds out the product lines for data integration/migration vendors.
Talend’s acquisition of French software company Amalto provided them a way to enter the MDM space. The open source vendor has been a darling of the analysts for a number of years and even won an award by Gartner, one of the first (if not the first) they offered such a company. However, since I don’t have contacts within Talend, it’s not clear what their next step will be, since they seem to be focusing their energies mostly in MDM after hiring two people to drive that effort within the past 6 months or so.
As the de facto leader in data integration, Informatica needed to extend its reach beyond that space. If you look at their job listings, they are looking for someone to market their CEP (Complex Event Processing) efforts. Relatively recently, they were looking to hire someone who had experience with ERP or MDM, but it is unclear which path they decided to take with that. Regardless, there were always looming rumors of them wanting to add MDM to their portfolio with the press suggesting that they would acquire Initiate Systems. However, instead of buying them, they purchased Siperian – a company half its size in terms of customer base and revenue.
In either of these cases, MDM may not be their flagship product, but at least it shows that it is a viable technology and shows that it is something that won’t be going away any time soon.
Scenario 3
People like me who have been in the data management space are always interested in improving something. I believe in the statement, “even if something isn’t broken, there’s always a reason to make it better.” This was clear when Customer Data Integration (CDI) first came about and many companies hopped on that bandwagon, knowing that they wanted a way to track their customers more efficiently.
At the same time, other companies explored Product Information Management (PIM), a way to have a single source of product information which was sourced from PLM, inventory and supply chain systems. Following that was the concept of MDM – a beautiful vision – having a single source of truth that can be used by an entire company.
Now we have a new concept that has been promoted – Multi-domain MDM. Siperian and other companies have began to promote this to show the world that they are truly the most advanced players out there. While this has been going on, there have been rumblings about Enterprise Information Management (EIM). What I’m still not clear on is – what’s the difference between multi-domain MDM and EIM? Are they the same? If not, what are the differences between the two concepts?
In any case, there’s a lot to think about. I don’t know where you stand, but one thing is certain – MDM is not going away, at least for the foreseeable future.
Data Profiling For All The Right Reasons, Part 5
The Hub Designs Blog welcomes the final installment of this great series by Rob DuMoulin, an information architect with more than 26 years of IT experience, specializing in master data management, database administration and design, and business intelligence.
Part 5: The Profiling Payoff
This is the final part of a five-part series, describing how data profiling benefits both IT projects and business operations. In Part One, we discussed profiling perspectives. In Parts Two, Three and Four, we introduced the value of system, entity, and attribute-level metrics. This part discusses the archival and beneficial uses of profile results.
If you have defined your corporate data profiling strategy similar to the methods discussed in the preceding parts of this series, you’ll have amassed a robust collection of metadata spanning relevant systems across your business. Although systems may be of different types and locations, the structured approach and common metrics you collected create a centralized repository of information that can be examined holistically. Ideally, this information will exist in an open-source database repository with reports made available across the enterprise. System and Entity information help planners and developers organize information strategies. Attribute-level domains, constraints, and business rules help data architects understand existing systems. Relationships and value patterns are readily available to support validation of information-related hypotheses as needed.
If you plan to design your own repository, consider adding timestamps and indicators to help you manage and present the information. To keep your repository relevant to business needs, design collection rules to be configurable. This allows you to easily ignore superfluous information or enable tests only at certain critical times. Allow initial system profiling efforts to gather a large set of metrics and store them as your baseline. As you learn about the information, you will see which tests or which data objects add no value. Us geeky DBA-types who understand system-level catalogs have our own scripts to do much of what was described inParts Two,Three and Four. Those less-inclined may prefer to use a third-party tool for profiling. Either way works as long as the business needs are satisfied and the entire enterprise standardizes on one approach (and thus one integrated repository).
You will find that collecting and maintaining this level of detail has a definite cost. Even if the collection is automated, interrogations of large data sets places an overhead on production systems that may not be practical. Record and monitor profile execution metrics to identify bottlenecks or tuning opportunities. Realize that the extent of data profiling is contingent on the project phase, specific data elements, and most of all, business value. Review profiling goals on a regular basis and eliminate unnecessary and redundant checks.
How much profile history to maintain is another consideration. Even though disk is “relatively” cheap, maintaining all historical entries in a live repository may not be necessary. Consider business needs and value for historical profile information. Even consider archiving at a summarized (or less frequent) level and keep only a limited time window of statistics online.
This discussion on data profiling was intended to broaden perceptions of what it means to a business and the value it can bring if done in a sustainable way. The blog format is not conducive to in-depth discussions, but hopefully the topics covered here spur some thoughts into how you can add value to your business by implementing some of these concepts. Use your imagination, but remember that no matter how cool it might be to collect and store some profile output, if it does not add business value to somebody, it might not be worth the overhead to continue recording it.
Go back to Part 4.
Initiate Systems Acquired By IBM
Today, IBM announced that it is acquiring Initiate Systems.
This was widely rumored last week, but the announcement of Informatica’s acquisition of Siperian took my mind off this temporarily.
On the face of it, it makes all the sense in the world. IBM knows a good product when it sees it, and Initiate has been doing well in the MDM world lately, particularly in the healthcare vertical, where it grew up, and in the public sector vertical. IBM’s press release explicitly mentions Initiate as a leader in “data integrity software for information sharing” among healthcare and government organizations. I thought it was interesting that the IBM release didn’t mention the terms “master data management” or “MDM” even once.
I was a little surprised that IBM’s release made no mention of the financial terms, since IBM is a public company, but I’m sure it will only be a matter of time before those details become available to those who know where to look or whom to ask.
It wasn’t a surprise to see the IBM release mention the stimulus funding being invested around the globe. When I first saw the rumors last week, I immediately thought – IBM is buying Initiate to be better prepared for the various e-Healthcare initiatives that are coming down the pike.
Where things may get a bit tricky is explaining the multiple MDM platforms from IBM to potential customers, and managing several different development roadmaps and product portfolios. There’s the IBM InfoSphere MDM Server (the former DWL product) and there’s also IBM InfoSphere MDM Server for Product Information Management (the former Trigo product). And now there’s the Initiate product too.
While the acquisition does make sense, there is an “embarrassment of riches” factor. IBM will, of course, develop a sales playbook explaining what situations at what type of customer are a good fit for each product.
I think the lingering feeling I have with Initiate Systems is that it may be headed for a “golden ghetto” at IBM – never to reach its full potential as a solution across many different industries, and eventually to handle many different domains of master data. IBM may (and rightly so, in its mind) pigeonhole it into the healthcare and government verticals.
But Initiate’s had some good success outside those two industries. In the Financial Services vertical, they’ve got customers like Capital One Financial, Countrywide Financial (now Bank of America), eSure Insurance, and Wells Fargo. In the Hospitality industry, they’ve got Choice Hotels. In manufacturing, they’ve got Mitsubishi Motors Australia. In the Logistics vertical, they’ve got Federal Express. In the retail sector, Barnes & Noble, CVS, Longs Drug Stores and SuperValu are all customers. And in the high tech space, they’ve got Dell, Ingenix, Intuit, LocatePLUS, Microsoft and National Instruments.
Unfortunately, they didn’t achieve enough critical mass in any of these other verticals to compete with the strong momentum they’d developed in healthcare and government.
As I said last week, these are interesting times in the MDM world. The recent M&A activity, the healthy demand from large and medium sized corporations, the large number of consultants from other areas claiming to now have experience in MDM – these are all signals to me of a large and fast-growing market. So the New Year, for those of us in the MDM space, is off to a good start.
