Jill Dyche’s Talk at Gartner MDM 2013
I attended the Gartner 2013 MDM Summit, and had a chance to hear Jill Dyche, VP of Best Practices at SAS. Read more 
Dan Power From Hub Designs Presenting at 2013 Gartner MDM Summit
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dan Power From Hub Designs Presenting at 2013 Gartner Master Data Management Summit
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Save $300 Registering For Gartner MDM Summit
Hub Designs and Stibo Systems are offering a $300 discount on the upcoming Gartner MDM Summit. Read more
Teradata Aprimo Master Data Manager 3.2, by Julie Hunt
A briefing by Teradata for the Hub Designs MDM Think Tank
Read more
The Corner Office – To Whom Are the MDM Vendors Marketing?
A great article by David Pratt on the target market for most MDM vendors Read more
Extreme Information Management
A “live blog” of Mark Beyer’s “Extreme Information Management” session at the Gartner MDM Summit 2012 Read more
Hub Designs Sponsoring Gartner MDM Summit for 4th Year
Next week, Hub Designs will be sponsoring the Gartner MDM Summit for the fourth year in a row. Read more
A New Editor for Hub Designs Magazine
Big news for Hub Designs Magazine readers – we have a new editor! Read more
Are You Taking Charge of Your Information? by Ramon Sistermans
Research analysts like Gartner and thought leaders all around the world agree that information should be reliable, as it underpins many operational and strategic business decisions. Read more
Recapping the 2011 Gartner MDM Summit
This is the fourth article in an ongoing series sponsored by SAP. Read more
Gartner MDM Summit 2011 Off to a Strong Start
The Gartner MDM Summit 2011 is in its second day. It’s off to a great start, with over 500 attendees. Read more
Hub Designs Sponsoring Gartner MDM Summit for 3rd Year
Next week, Hub Designs will be exhibiting at the Gartner MDM Summit for the third year in a row. Read more
Hub Designs Blog’s Top 10 for 2010
Inspired by Crysta Anderson from Initiate, who put together IBM’s Mastering Data Management blog Top 10 Posts of 2010, I decided to put together a similar “Top Ten Posts of 2010″ for the Hub Designs Blog.
In our holiday greetings article, Thank You To Our Readers, we covered some of the top articles from the beginning of this blog in July 2007, and included some readership statistics, which we won’t bore you with today.
Our reports on MDM vendors like Oracle, IBM Initiate, Informatica (formerly Siperian), Kalido, and Orchestra Networks were very popular in 2010. And our series on MDM best practices, practicing enterprise architecture within MDM (by Jim Parnitzke) and on data profiling (by Rob DuMoulin) were also big hits.
Without further ado, here’s the Hub Designs Blog “Top 10 for 2010″.
- Oracle’s MDM Strategy and Roadmap – A look at Oracle’s MDM strategy and roadmap, from the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) COLLABORATE conference in April 2010.
- Building MDM-Powered Solutions with Initiate Composer – A description of Initiate’s new Composer product, which is a framework for building solutions on top of IBM’s Initiate Master Data Service hub.
- Master Data Management Best Practice Series, by Dan Power – A ten part series on MDM and data governance best practices, based on my presentation at Oracle OpenWorld 2010.
- Modeling the MDM Blueprint, by James Parnitzke – A six part series on applying important enterprise architecture concepts to MDM projects.
- Data Profiling For All The Right Reasons, by Rob DuMoulin – A five part series on data profiling and its role within MDM and data governance initiatives.
- Siperian Acquired By Informatica – My analysis of Siperian’s acquisition by Informatica, written on the day the news broke.
- Informatica Analyst Briefing – Hub Designs is regularly briefed by the major MDM vendors; this one by Informatica was about 2 months after the acquisition. A later briefing from October 2010 can be found here.
- Kalido MDM and AB InBev – I live blogged this at the Gartner MDM Summit during a session by Kalido’s President and CEO Bill Hewitt and Jonathan Starkey, the Director of Business Intelligence at AB InBev North America.
- Intersection of MDM, CRM and ERP – My article on Why Product Information Management in Information Management magazine sparked a short blog article by Andrew White of Gartner. The “Intersection of MDM, CRM and ERP” article is in response to Andrew’s.
- Orchestra Networks Enters Gartner Magic Quadrant – We thought it was newsworthy that Orchestra Networks, a specialized MDM vendor, was included in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data” for the first time. Also, Orchestra Networks sponsored a white paper titled A Real Multidomain MDM Solution or a Wannabe? by Hub Designs that was published in September.
It’s been a busy 2010. I recently read the 2009 Year in Review from this time last year, and was exhausted just reading it, but this year has been the same – several conferences (Gartner MDM Summit, OAUG COLLABORATE, Oracle OpenWorld, Kalido), webinars (with eLearning Curve, TechTarget and Oracle Applications Users Group) and some exciting things to look forward to and update you on in 2011.
I’d like to to thank my wife and two boys for their unwavering support throughout 2010 – and my heartfelt thanks to the folks on the Hub Designs team - I couldn’t do it without you!
And thank you – as always – for your readership and support. Happy New Year!
Gartner Projects MDM Software Revenue to Grow 14%
Bank Systems & Technology magazine had a good article by Penny Crosman today.
Gartner Research is predicting 14% growth over 2009 levels for master data management (MDM) software license revenues, to $1.5 billion.
Business drivers for adoption range from delivering revenue, service, agility and risk management improvement, cost reduction and integration simplification. John Radcliffe, a research vice president at Gartner, said ”Today, most organizations juggle multiple sets of business and data applications across corporate, regional and local systems. At the same time, customers are demanding faster and more complex responses from organizations, leading to an inconsistency that hinders the organization’s ability to measure and move within the market. With MDM, CIOs can create a unified view of existing data, leading to greater enterprise agility, simplified integration and, ultimately, improved profitability.”
Some interesting predictions were included in the Bank Systems & Technology article:
- From 2009 through 2014, MDM software markets will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18%, from $1.3 billion to $2.9 billion.
- Gartner foresees a larger, more unified MDM software market reaching nearly $3 billion by 2014.
- By 2015, 10 percent of packaged MDM implementations will be delivered as software as a service in the public cloud (MDM today is typically implemented on-premises)
- Through 2015, 66 percent of organizations that initiate an MDM program will struggle to demonstrate the business value of MDM.
This is not because MDM can’t show sufficient business value. The Bank Systems & Technology article goes on to say “If IT departments initiate an MDM initiative, they often struggle to get the business on board and to demonstrate the business value of MDM, particularly if there are no business-process-oriented metrics and financial quantifications to define and measure success, Gartner analysts say.” (emphasis added)
At Hub Designs, like many other MDM practitioners, we’ve been saying for quite a while that the business needs to own the MDM initiative. This isn’t always a popular stance, particularly when the people bringing you into a particular client company are the IT people. But it’s the truth – if the business doesn’t own it, the business won’t feel ownership.
The article goes on to say “MDM needs to align with the business vision and strategy, and will require executive business sponsorship, strong involvement of business stakeholders and change management.”
“It’s not just an IT project. The business needs to take responsibility and be accountable for master data governance and stewardship,” says Radcliffe.
“Unless organizations take a holistic, business-driven approach to MDM, addressing governance and metrics requirements in particular, they risk having their MDM programs fail,” he says. “Internal politics won’t be brought under control without a governance framework, and without a metrics structure, there will be no way of objectively defining what success looks like and measuring whether or not it has been achieved.”
We couldn’t agree more. In our “Ten Best Practices” series this October, we specifically discussed that topic in Master Data Management Best Practice #10 – Use a Balanced, Holistic Approach, saying “This may be the most important best practice of all: use a balanced, holistic approach – addressing people, process, technology and information. Start with the people, politics and culture, and then move on to the data governance and stewardship processes, then the technology.”
The MDM initiatives that companies are taking on right now aren’t “too big to fail”, but they are too important to fail.
As a long-time MDM evangelist, who is used to describing MDM and data governance in such a way that people get excited about the change it can make for their companies, I think we need the types of economic and technological changes described in Penny Crosman’s article. Too many companies are lurching into the 21st century with the baggage of a late 90′s technology infrastructure holding them back. Faster, better decision-making, increased revenue and reduced costs, easier compliance and risk management, improved business and IT agility – these are things that aren’t going to come easily but they are worth it, and MDM and data governance are a big part of the answer for a lot of companies.
So hats off to Penny Crosman and her article in Bank Systems & Technology, and to John Radcliffe and Andrew White at Gartner Research for all the good work that they do.
Gartner Positions Stibo Systems on MDM Magic Quadrant
In yesterday’s article about the inclusion of Orchestra Networks in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data”, I mentioned that Orchestra is not considered a “dedicated PIM vendor”.
One company that has historically been a strong player in the Product Information Management (PIM) space is Stibo Systems. Stibo is also developing a credible multidomain MDM vision. I’ve been following them since the 2009 Gartner MDM Summit and am impressed by both their product offering as well as their growing customer base (now up to 140 global organizations).
Stibo has now been included on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Product MDM for three consecutive years, and has been devoting more attention lately to marketing and analyst outreach. Their customer list is impressive and includes companies such as: GE, Sony, Siemens, Fujitsu, Sears, Office Depot, Harbor Freight Tools, Millipore, The Home Depot, W.W. Grainger and Thomas Cook.
On the product side, Stibo’s latest release, STEP 5.2 (available since July 2010) lets companies build and maintain a single authoritative view of product, supplier and location information for use across the enterprise. This ensures consistency across all phases of the information supply chain, and leads to cost reductions, reduced time to market and a faster new product introduction process.
As I continue to study the MDM market, and watch what the mega-vendors like Oracle, IBM and SAP are doing, it’s very encouraging to see so much innovation from best-of-breed vendors like Orchestra Networks and Stibo Systems.
To me, this indicates that the MDM market has a lot of growth and life in it yet, and the consolidation we’ve seen in the last couple of years, with IBM buying Initiate Systems and Informatica buying Siperian, doesn’t mean that the smaller vendors are finished creating great products and bringing them to market.
Please let us know – in the comments here or in the forums on the MDM Community – what you think of the latest developments in the master data management and data governance market and the latest “Magic Quadrant” report from Gartner.
Orchestra Networks Enters Gartner Magic Quadrant
Orchestra Networks, a specialized Master Data Management (MDM) software vendor based in France and the United States, announced yesterday that the company will be included in Gartner Inc.’s “Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data”, released on September 27, 2010.
Since Orchestra Networks provides a model-driven solution to model and master all types of master data and reference data, it’s interesting that Gartner is including them on the Product MDM “Magic Quadrant”.
As described in our recent white paper, “A Real Multidomain MDM Solution or a Wannabe?”, a true multidomain solution allows all domains of data to be incorporated into the MDM hub’s data model on an equal basis. So although Orchestra’s product doesn’t specialize in product information per se, it handles this data very well, and in many ways, allows the enterprise to model its ideal way of describing its products, and build that into its MDM hub from the ground up.
The Orchestra Networks product also provides for enterprise-wide data governance at a business level – what we refer to in the white paper as “proactive data governance”. The combination of a flexible, model-driven approach and of proactive data governance includes the business in the entire MDM life cycle, so business owners, end users and data stewards are involved in every step of solving tough business problems using the data governance platform.
But Orchestra Networks is a bit of “square peg in a round hole”, from the analysts’ perspective. It doesn’t fit neatly into the “Customer Data Integration” or the “Product Information Management” pigeonholes. Recognition by Gartner in the “Magic Quadrant” for PIM shows how strong Orchestra’s solution is, since it’s the only multidomain solution competing head to head against dedicated PIM vendors.
As I’ve worked with Orchestra Networks over the past few months I’ve come to respect the company and its products. I’m pleased to see them recognized by Gartner in its “Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data”. The MDM market is starting to realize that the most challenging business problems involve data from many different domains, and that true multidomain MDM platforms are required to enable enterprise-wide data governance.
As MDM continues to evolve at a frantic pace, all vendors are rapidly evolving their products. But Orchestra Networks is one to keep an eye on.
Please let us know – in the comments here or in the forums on the MDM Community – what you think of multidomain MDM and the continuing evolution of data governance in the enterprise.
Intersection of MDM, CRM and ERP
My earlier article on Why Product Information Management in Information Management magazine prompted Andrew White of Gartner to write a short blog article.
Andrew picked up on my comment “If CRM and ERP platforms were better able to manage master data, perhaps we wouldn’t need MDM solutions.” He goes on to say that “these applications were designed in an era when there was no need to take account of information requirements ACROSS the enterprise.”
The operating assumption for most CRM and ERP platforms, unfortunately, was that you were going to run your ENTIRE business on them. This rarely, if ever, turns out to be the case, particularly if the business does a lot of acquisitions. One business unit or geography certainly. And the count may grow over time. But there are always going to be areas of the business “outside the pale” – not included in that particular CRM or ERP solution’s purview. This leads to silos of data, which create many problems in the management and analysis of information in the enterprise.
That’s why an MDM hub makes so much sense. It provides a neutral place for customer, product and other master data from all over the enterprise to be created, read, updated and managed. Increasingly, today’s CRM and ERP applications are being used in concert with a robust MDM hub. Even now, CRM and ERP products just aren’t designed to manage master data effectively. They don’t have the built-in data quality and data governance processes that are needed to ensure a single view of accurate, complete, timely and consistent master data across the enterprise.
You can read the article by Andrew White of Gartner Research at
http://blogs.gartner.com/andrew_white/2010/06/07/good-summary-of-mdm-of-product-data-and-its-value-to-the-business/
.
Our Booth at the Gartner MDM Summit
Hub Designs was a Silver sponsor at the Gartner MDM Summit 2010. Here’s the new, 3-minute video we produced to describe what Hub Designs does as an consulting firm focused specifically on MDM:
Great New White Paper and Other Collateral Available at Our Booth
At the event, we announced with Equifax a new product that integrates Equifax commercial information with Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Customer Data Hub. This product simplifies the process of integrating Equifax credit and marketing information with prospect and customer data in Oracle. Both the joint press release and a one-page product overview were distributed at the booth.
Also available was a new whitepaper written in collaboration with Informatica titled, When Data Governance Turns Bureaucratic: How Data Governance Police Can Constrain the Value of Your Multidomain Master Data Management Initiative. This updated version of an earlier white paper written with Siperian in 2009 added both new content and industry insights. It was very well received at the Gartner conference this week.
Finally, we handed out one of the most popular recent articles from this blog, Hidden Costs of Duplicate Customer Data.
The conference drew attendees from many different market sectors, so discussions and meetings were both informative and valuable from an MDM perspective. Several Hub Designs clients were able to join us there, from the insurance, software and transportation industries, and we had four of our team members there as well. I’m going to write a separate article with my thoughts on the sessions and the mood of the conference, but I wanted to provide a look at our booth as well, for our readers who weren’t able to make it to Las Vegas this week.
Kalido MDM and AB InBev
The Gartner MDM Summit in Las Vegas wraps up today, and this morning I caught a session by Kalido’s President and CEO Bill Hewitt and Jonathan Starkey, the Director of Business Intelligence at AB InBev North America.
AB InBev purchased Anheuser Busch in 2008 to become the largest brewer in the world, with over 116,000 employees worldwide and $39 billion in annual revenue.
AB InBev sees master data as a foundation element supporting supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). All of that data winds up in a data warehouse and is used for reporting and planning. This shared focus on both reporting and analysis, and planning and forecasting makes up their philosophy on business intelligence.
This integration approach is being to bring together the Canadian and US operations gradually over time, but to integrate the SCM, ERP and CRM pillars of the US and Canadian operations of such a large enterprise realistically is going to take three to five years.
Turning more to the master data side of things, the first way AB InBev is using Kalido is to synchronize and cross-reference product and customer information across SCM and ERP systems. Secondly, they’re using Kalido to look for active exceptions across all of the various domains – between plants and products, between employees in HR and in ERP, between any two systems where master data is not in agreement. Thirdly, they’re using Kalido to kick off requests for new master data – new employees, new products, etc. that then get passed to various systems around the company.
The “real world” benefits from Kalido at AB InBev include procurement savings, strategic inventory optimization, overhead and budget tracking, people and resource movement tracking.
AB InBev went through a rigorous selection process, and selected Kalido in large part because of its ability to change rapidly as their business needs changed. Jonathan Starkey said ”Kalido does a very good job at managing change over time”.
I really enjoyed this session. Both Bill Hewitt and Jonathan Starkey did a great job, and it was enlightening to hear how a large global enterprise has addressed their MDM and business intelligence needs. Hub Designs recently became a Kalido partner, and one of our goals for this Gartner MDM Summit was to learn more about the company and their products, and this session definitely helped us do that.
For more information on Kalido, please visit www.kalido.com.
Evolving from Product MDM to Multidomain MDM
I’m attending the Gartner MDM Summit in Las Vegas, and this morning I caught a great session by Andrew White on the evolution from master data management (MDM) of product data to “multidomain MDM”.
Andrew started by talking by talking about the strong intersection of product MDM with enterprise resource planning (ERP), workflow, product configuration, and business rules. The market for product MDM is fairly healthy and is actually a little larger than the market for customer MDM.
The initial need to master product data usually arises from having too many copies of product data in different places around the enterprise. Then typically, product data quality issues need to be addressed, but that needs to be addressed as a continuing process, not as a one-time process.
Multi-channel commerce is known as the “sell side” of product MDM, and procurement is known as the “buy side”. There’s involvement with fulfillment and supply chain management, and with ERP and operations. There are many different silos that need to be connected and synchronized (one client I worked with last year had 175 different applications, systems and databases, most of which used or created product data in some way).
At some point, governance has to be addressed. Companies have to go from departmental or business unit governance to enterprise-wide data governance, and expand from single domain (typically customer) to multidomain (customer and product) master data governance.
Andrew mentioned the level of Product MDM adoption – there was software license spending of $432 million in 2008. Certain industries such as discrete and process manufacturing, communications, retailing, and healthcare providers are classified as “hot” according to Gartner (as of Q1, 2010). Retail in particular is almost post-recession. Healthcare providers has more awareness on the buy side.
A common scenario for some is to have a product MDM hub as a system of record, connected to CRM systems for sales & marketing and customer service, to PLM (product lifecycle management) as a system of reference, and to ERP systems (which need the data for their Item Masters). So the CRM, PLM and ERP systems are process owners, but the MDM platform provides the product and material master data, attributes, hierarchies and so on, for consumption by the other systems.
Andrew talked about how the inquiries he gets break down: ERP and MDM: 50%, product data quality: 33%, information exchange: 15%, metadata management: 10% and content management: 20%, and “can I use my CDI hub to master product data?”: 10%.
Andrew talked briefly about the current vendors in the product MDM space: the specialists (handling just product data) such as Hybris Software, Heiler, QAD, Pindar, Tribold, Requisite Technology, EnterWorks. He categorized Stibo Systems, Riversand and Tribold as being somewhere in the middle between specialists and generalists (handling other domains).
Oracle, IBM and SAP are strong on product MDM and customer MDM. Tibco and Informatica (formerly Siperian) are customer MDM providers that are moving towards handling the product MDM domain. Microsoft is entering the MDM space but their solution (when it is released later this year) is really suited more for analytical use.
And other vendors such as Data Foundations and Orchestra Networks can model any domain of data, including product data.
Through the end of 2013, you might need two MDM platforms. IBM has three MDM products (IBM InfoSphere MDM Server, MDM Server for PIM which handles complex workflow, and their recent acquisition of Initiate). Other strong vendors include SAP, Oracle and Stibo Systems.
The five-year market growth rate is projected at 18%. The Top Five products have 51% of the market. Vendors to watch include Teradata, INformatica, Tibco and Hybris.
Over the next 12 months, product configuration remains an unsolved problem. Companies typically define business rules all over the place. Over the long term, in MDM, that doesn’t work – those business rules themselves need to be governed centrally. The master data and the business rules both need to be governed. Successful product MDM requires business rules governance.
Reference data is another area – price is NOT master data but it behaves like master data in a lot of ways. It needs to be governed and managed. Business process management and its intersection with MDM is another area of development.
Data quality for product data has its foibles. You need to know where you’re starting from. Most importantly, data quality is not a once and done thing, it’s an ongoing process.
The product master data life cycle looks like: Author > Store > Publish / Synchronize > Enrich > Consume > Analyze.
The picture for the future – there are three main “provinces” for MDM: the “thing” province, the “party” province and the “place” province. But vendors typically have a history in a single domain.
Andrew gave a couple of great example of companies that went through the evolutionary process of going from a single domain of MDM to multiple domains over time.
Andrew closed with recommendations for people beginning their MDM process: create a vision of what could be achieved with a “single view of product data”, to start small but think big and deliver value early, and to define data and process metrics early and then to revise then as needed as you go along.
I’ve been a big fan of Andrew White for several years now, and I thought he did a great job today (as usual). He brings a great deal of analysis to bear on the questions involved in product MDM, and provides clarity and insight into where the MDM market is headed over the next several years. If you’re attending the Gartner MDM Summit in Las Vegas, or have a chance to catch his sessions at a future event, I think you’d find those sessions very rewarding.
Hub Designs and Equifax Introduce Oracle Integration Solution
Today, at the Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Las Vegas, Hub Designs and Equifax jointly announced a new product, Hub Designs Equifax Integration for Oracle, bringing the power of Equifax Commercial Information Solutions data to the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Customer Data Hub platforms.
The solution smoothly integrates Equifax data into Release 12 of Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and master data management (MDM) suites.
Hub Designs Equifax Integration for Oracle provides access to vital credit and marketing data in Oracle’s MDM and ERP modules including:
- Oracle Customers Online
- Oracle Sales Online
- Oracle Receivables
Equifax commercial information helps businesses to:
- Make credit decisions, expedite collections, reduce bad debt and pre-qualify prospects;
- Reveal linkage between related companies;
- Standardize name & address information and prevent duplicates;
- Enrich prospect and customer records with marketing and credit information from Equifax;
- Increase productivity by creating new parties and party relationships in Oracle automatically
The joint press release describes the solution in more detail, and a one-page overview is available as well. If you’re interested in learning more, please contact us via our web site or drop by Booth #7 during the exhibit hall hours at the Gartner MDM Summit.
Informatica Analyst Briefing
Arvind Parthasarathi, Ken Hoang and Ravi Shankar from Informatica were kind enough recently to give me a detailed briefing on Informatica’s master data management (MDM) strategy after its acquisition of Siperian.
First, there’s no doubt this was a game-changing move, for both Siperian and for Informatica. With over 4,000 Informatica installed base customers to leverage, and 200 Informatica sales reps going through training and certification, Siperian’s sales momentum should increase dramatically. And in fact, several new deals have closed just since the acquisition was announced in late January.
And being acquired by Informatica eliminates the “company viability” question that some Fortune 500 IT shops would have about any software company under a certain size (not just Siperian). Informatica itself might be acquired by one of the mega-vendors at some point, but with annual revenue of $500 million, it’s big enough not to be subject to the financial viability question.
Informatica also provides a large partner ecosystem and a significant marketing budget, so living on under the Informatica banner, Siperian can compete more readily for mind share both with partners and with potential customers.
But what impressed me the most was the strategic nature of the other purchases that Informatica has made over the past couple of years, such as Identity Systems for entity resolution (i.e. matching) and Address Doctor for address cleansing. With the addition of Siperian as a strong player in the multidomain MDM hub space, Informatica has declared itself a real competitor against the likes of Oracle, IBM, Initiate Systems (an IBM company) and SAP.
And in some ways, Informatica is better positioned than most of these, for two reasons. First, it has a complete suite of leading products for data integration, data quality and all of the associated things that make up the “MDM ecosystem”. And second, many of its competitors are dependent on it for those components (Ramon Chen wrote a great article on Informatica’s OEM agreements with various competitors).
Informatica’s product lineup supports all of these MDM requirements:
- Multiple MDM architectural styles including the ability to support Registry style (competes most directly with Initiate Systems)
- Multiple data domains, i.e. multidomain MDM (competes most directly with Oracle, IBM and SAP)
- Data Integration and Data Quality as a foundation for MDM (competes with a wide variety of products)
So in some ways, Informatica wins even if customers buy a competitor’s MDM hub product, because there’s a good chance they’ll still buy Informatica’s data integration and/or data quality solutions, to help them with data integration, data profiling and data quality, or to help build the inevitable data services, once the master data is gathered in a centralized hub and able to deliver timely, trusted and relevant to the rest of the enterprise.
Informatica sees its MDM products used in both Operational MDM (where the master data is actively managed by data stewards, governed and improved and then synchronized back to the operational systems), and in Analytical MDM (where for various reasons, the improved master data does not flow back to the operational systems, but flow instead to data warehousing, analytical and business intelligence applications).
Informatica has such a strong, integrated story, with its PowerCenter data integration, Informatica Data Quality, and Informatica MDM products, that it’s able to accommodate customers’ maturity needs starting with data integration and progressing to data quality and MDM.
And Informatica, by giving customers the ability to solve any MDM-related business problem with a unified architecture, spanning data integration, data profiling, data quality, identity resolution, address validation, and all major styles of master data management, has pulled together a great set of solutions for MDM.
I’m looking forward to seeing the Informatica folks at this week’s Gartner MDM Summit conference in Las Vegas. If you’re going to be there, stop by and see the Hub Designs team at Booth #7 during the exhibit hall hours. We’ll be announcing a new product with Equifax, and we’ll be releasing a data governance white paper with Informatica.
Hub Designs at Gartner MDM Summit
We’re in the final stages of getting ready for the Gartner MDM Summit at this point. It will be held on April 14-16, 2010 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, NV.
This will be our third time at this event, and our second as an exhibitor. Last October, we exhibited as a Kiosk sponsor, and this year we will be there as a Silver sponsor. We’ll be in Booth 7 during the exhibit hall hours, and if you’re going to be attending and would like to meet with us, just contact us via our web site.
We’ll be announcing an exciting new product, and publishing a new version of one of our most popular white papers.
Here’s what you’ll learn about if you go:
- Multi-domain MDM
- MDM vision and strategy
- Customer data
- Product data
- Data warehousing, data quality and MDM
- Enterprise information architecture
- Enterprise information management
- SOA and MDM
And here are the key benefits of attending:
- Insight into creating a successful MDM program
- Persuading the business to take a leadership role
- Delivering measurable ROI by linking your MDM to business metrics
- Reducing costs and increasing efficiency by removing duplication and creating consistency
- Improving customer acquisition and cross- selling/upselling activities
- Complying with regulations and leveraging your master data to manage risk
- Consolidating and leveraging data faster following mergers & acquisitions
- Accelerating your new product introductions
- Managing your supply chain more efficiently
It’s not too late to register at the special rate of $1,795 – a $300 savings on the standard rate of $2,095! Go to gartner.com/us/mdm or call 1-866-405-2511 and mention priority code: MDMHUB.
We’d love to see you in Las Vegas! These events are like “old home week” – getting to catch up with people we haven’t seen in a while and find out what everyone in the MDM space is up to. So come along for the ride, catch a few sessions, maybe hit the tables a bit, and head home with a little less cash in your pockets but a little more knowledge in your head. And if you need help convincing the “powers that be” to let you go to the conference, Gartner has very thoughtfully put together an Attendee Justification Kit to help you convince them.
2009 Year in Review
As we’re about to enter 2010, it’s a good time to reflect on what happened in 2009 and what it all means.
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…” So Dickens begins “A Tale of Two Cities”, but it’s also a good description of the past year.
The first half of the year was one of the most challenging I’ve faced in my twenty-three year career in business and technology. The second half of 2009 was better – not without its speed bumps but every month was a little better than the one before it.
The macro-economic climate has been tumultuous at best. But the second half of the year showed enough improvement that Hub Designs’ revenue for the year was up 33%. Not bad for a two and a half year old company during the worst economic conditions in 80 years …
Marketing and Thought Leadership
We launched a new web site in January, and it’s been well received. Total visits to www.hubdesigns.com were up 14% over 2008.
A little later in the year, we updated the “look and feel” of the Hub Designs Blog, branding it as the “world’s fastest growing blog covering master data management and data governance”. We’ve gotten more than 43,000 hits since we started writing in July 2007, and our readership more than doubled in 2009, to about 27,000 hits per year.
We published six issues of our “Best Practices in Master Data Management” newsletter this year. We publish the newsletter about six times a year to roughly 3,300 subscribers.
I wrote six articles for Information Management magazine, including some popular ones on “Product Information Management Challenges”, how to build a business case for master data management, and how to select the right MDM vendor for your organization. I also wrote for Identity Resolution Daily, on “The Growing Role of Identity Resolution in MDM” and “Matching – MDM’s Secret Sauce”.
With our partner Siperian, we wrote a white paper in August called “When Data Governance Turns Bureaucratic: How Data Governance Police Can Constrain the Value of Your MDM Initiative” that has generated quite a bit of discussion. You can download a copy of it here.
A second white paper, called “Best Practices for Leveraging D&B in Oracle E-Business Suite”, was written in partnership with Dun & Bradstreet. It describes using D&B information to drive better supply chain performance for companies using Oracle E-Business Suite. You can download it here.
I volunteer for the Education Committee of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG). A big part of that effort lies in programming the MDM track for the annual conference. This year, it was in Orlando in May, and I really enjoyed speaking there and seeing people from the Oracle community that I don’t see very often. Here’s a link to my OAUG presentation.
We participated in conference calls with Oracle Development during the year, and ultimately attended the Oracle Fusion “Hands-On Validation & Testing” session for Customer MDM at Oracle headquarters in August. It was a great chance to get some early insights into Oracle’s next major product release and to see the progress Oracle has made in building out its Fusion MDM vision, which is striking in its powerful hub technology and its elegant & productive user interface.
In 2008, we attended the Gartner MDM Summit to decide whether to exhibit there in 2009. We were impressed enough with the conference that we did exhibit in 2009, in October in Los Angeles. We had a positive experience, so we’ll be a Silver level sponsor in April 2010 in Las Vegas. Since we specialize in MDM and data governance, we find the association with Gartner’s MDM event a powerful one.
I didn’t attend Oracle OpenWorld for the past couple of years, but this year I was glad I did. It was like “old home week”, seeing people from Oracle itself and from the broader Oracle community that I’ve met over the past 15 years. David Butler, Senior Director of MDM Marketing at Oracle, posted my presentation on Oracle’s web site, and said “you were our cleanup hitter and you hit a home run with the bases loaded”.
We also did webinars with our partners Siperian and Initiate Systems. The Siperian webinar covered the differences between MDM platforms like Siperian and ERP platforms like SAP from a master data perspective. The Initiate webinar, with Initiate’s CTO Marty Moseley, discussed developing strong MDM business case, deploying core MDM technologies and lessons learned on the “build vs. buy” question.
Social Networking
After experimenting with social networking in 2008, this year we had a coordinated strategy to use the Hub Designs Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to communicate & collaborate with our clients, potential clients, team members, partners, suppliers, etc.
It’s a pretty simple strategy. Short updates (140 characters or less) go out on Twitter, and are re-published on both LinkedIn and Facebook. Longer updates (i.e. blog articles) are published on the Hub Designs Blog. We encourage responses and feedback using @replies on Twitter and comments on LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as longer-form comments on the blog. And we get them – almost every blog article gets at least one comment, sometimes as many as a dozen.
When a new blog article comes out, we notify everyone via a single update on Twitter. What’s amazing is that during 2009, social networking now drives about 15% of the Hub Designs Blog’s total traffic. And one of our clients gave us some good feedback that our social networking activities help her stay current on what we’re up to, and help her feel connected to us as a company.
Another social networking experiment that developed further in 2009 was the MDM Community. We started this using Ning (a “social network in a box”) in November 2008, out of frustration with LinkedIn’s “Group” functionality. It now has more than 210 members, from 23 different countries. It’s still a work in progress, but if you’re interested in master data management or data governance, you should check it out at
http://mdmcommunity.ning.com
. It’s becoming an international “who’s who” of the MDM world.
Summary of Client Projects
In case you think the Hub Designs team has been doing nothing but marketing, writing white papers and magazine articles, speaking at conferences, and volunteering for user groups, here’s a summary of our 2009 client projects:
- Technology provider for vehicle dealers: integration of Oracle E-Business Suite with D&B data
- Payroll services company: integration of Oracle E-Business Suite with external credit information
- Information services company: technical support for customers using Oracle E-Business Suite
- Legal information services company: readiness assessment and product MDM strategy & design
- Simulation and engineering software company: advisor to data governance board
- Manufacturer of oil and gas equipment: integration of Oracle E-Business Suite R12 with D&B
- Software company: built connector between Oracle AR and D&B’s DNBi risk management solution
- Technology company: customer MDM strategy workshop
Out With The Old, In With The New
This past year has been a lot of fun, but it has also been somewhat exhausting. So I’m looking forward to a bit more deliberate pace in 2010.
We’re very excited about the coming year at Hub Designs. We’ve got some great projects underway and in the pipeline, and we’ll be continuing to grow and expand to meet our clients’ needs and market demands.
In closing, I’d like to say how grateful I am to my family, for their patience with my traveling so much and for their unconditional love.
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.
Gartner MDM Excellence Award Winner Is …
Kraft Foods, an SAP MDM customer.
Two Passes to Gartner MDM Summit
Hub Designs has two additional passes to the Gartner MDM Summit conference next week in Los Angeles. You will be responsible for all of your own travel, lodging and meals, but your conference registration would be covered.
Please contact me via the “Contact Us” page on our web site. To be fair, the first two people (using the time stamp on your request) will get the passes.
Please provide the following:
- Your first and last name (as you’d like it to appear on your badge)
- Company Name
- Title
- Phone Number
- E-Mail Address
- Mailing Address (please put in Message field on web site)
Only complete entries will be considered.
For more information on the conference, please see
http://www.gartner.com/us/mdm
.
Upcoming Webinar with Siperian
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Loraine Lawson from ITBusinessEdge has a good article on our upcoming webinar sponsored by Siperian.
She pointed out that Andrew White of Gartner thought the webinar raises some good questions in his recent blog article.
Andrew White said “ERP might be a good place to master data. The real question for the user is this: where is the right source of master data for you?”
Andrew is on the right track. In the webinar, we’ll outline the differences between SAP ERP and Siperian MDM, and when it makes sense to have a separate MDM hub.
I think companies should evaluate whether their ERP system is helping them solve business problems involving master data – or causing them.
To register for the webinar, please click here.
2009 Predictions
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In November, I attended Gartner’s second MDM Summit conference in Chicago.
One of the topics people were talking about at that conference was how well the Master Data Management market would fare in an economic downturn.
Certainly, companies that were just “testing the waters” on MDM may cancel or slow down their initiatives, and anyone making the front pages or the nightly news (and not in a good way) is probably going to see some disruption to their Master Data Management efforts.
But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much interest and activity we’ve seen, particularly since 2009 started.
Friends in the MDM space report getting a slew of new opportunities recently, especially in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Industries like that are doing relatively well, and even in affected industries like retail, some companies are “swimming against the tide” and investing into the downturn, looking to take market share and revenue from their competition who are cutting investments and going into hibernation mode.
Barney Beal on SearchDataManagement.com described the picture at BJ’s Wholesale Club:
[John Polizzi, senior vice president and CIO] “Our plan was not an investment in a master data management (MDM) system, or an ERP implementation, or a point of sale (POS), but rather all of them — and more. BJ’s is embarking on a five-year transformation of its IT infrastructure and systems.”
Philip Lay, managing director of TCG Advisors, who spoke at the Gartner conference, said “now is the time to buck conventional wisdom and ‘think like a contrarian’ when it comes to MDM.” Lay advised the attendees “the key to making a successful business case for MDM is to tie MDM to specific, broken business processes” and quantify that impact.
I wrote an article for DM Review on “Easing into Master Data Management” which describes how to get started by building a data governance program first, with existing resources and applications, and tackling data quality and data integration as predecessor steps to MDM.
Certainly, one of the classic drivers for MDM has always been reducing costs – and that’s even more important in a recession (look for a guest post on this topic in a few days from Ravi Shankar at Siperian).
But even more important is to grow the “top line” – to increase revenue and pull customers away from your competitors, through better information, better customer service, better products, better pricing, you name it.
In 2009, I predict the MDM market will be affected somewhat by the recession, but it will still be one of the fastest-growing software segments, as Gartner has been predicting too.
But let’s tap into YOUR collective intelligence – what do you think? Please comment here or on the MDM Community.
MDM Community
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Recently, I created an online community for everyone in the MDM community.
After attending the Fall 2008 MDM Summit in New York, and the Gartner MDM Summit in Chicago, I was looking for a way to keep that feeling of community alive.
Conferences like these are a great way to see old friends and to meet new people, to learn from our colleagues, to exchange best practices and lessons learned, and to investigate vendors of Master Data Management and related technologies.
The MDM Community is an effort to keep that going after everyone heads home.
To join, just click here. And please let me know what you’d like to see there. And I’ll need your help to make it a place that adds value for everyone.
Day 2 of Gartner MDM Summit
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I started out yesterday attending the MDM Excellence Award Finalist presentations. Asian Paints, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems and State Street Bank presented, and each of them told an impressive story.
It was very significant that J&J and State Street are both committed Siperian MDM customers. The announcement of the winner will be at 4:00 pm today. I’ll be heading to the airport just after the announcement, but I’ll announce it here via my phone.
I also attended a VIP session where Gartner had DataFlux speaking about the benefits of exhibiting at the conference, and had Rick Woodand from State Street Bank and Ken from W.W. Grainger gave their perspectives as attendees.
I had a great briefing with Lorita Vannah and John Evans from Kalido, and walked away from it much more aware of Kalido’s product features and their approach to analytical MDM.
I spent some time in the Solutions Showcase, and was talking with Steve Meister and Ken Kotansky from AMB Predictive Data Management. We recently signed a Service Partnership agreement with AMB, and will be using their data profiling and data quality tools on client engagements going forward. I’ve been very impressed with their product’s capabilities and by how flexible and easy it is to work with the company.
Then, I met with Julie Langenkamp, the editor-in-chief of DM Review magazine, and her colleauge David Boone. I will be writing a monthly column in the print edition of DM Review, beginning with the January issue, and we brainstormed a number of other ideas on how we can work together more closely going forward.
Towards the end of the day, I hung out at the Siperian hospitality suite. I’ve been impressed for a while now with Nancy Ellickson, Siperian’s Senior Director of Corporate Marketing. The gathering was very well attended and a number of Siperian people were on hand, chatting with customers and potential customers. I had a great time and thought the understated, classy “California Picnic” theme was the perfect way to end the day.
I had dinner with a good friend from D&B/Purisma, catching up on things and chatting about the MDM market in general and how well Purisma in particular has been doing in 2008.
So look for the update after 4:15 or so today with the announcement of the MDM Excellence award winner!
Day 1 of Gartner MDM Summit
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First, I want to encourage everyone who reads this blog to join the free MDM Community at
http://mdmcommunity.ning.com
.
I’m in Chicago attending Gartner’s second Master Data Management Summit.
I didn’t make it to last year’s event in Hollywood, Florida, but I’m attending this one to investigate exhibiting at next year’s event, and to keep my finger on how the MDM market is doing in the current economic climate.
The first keynote session, by John Radcliffe and Andrew White, was on “Where is MDM Going Over the Next Five Years”. Their lead-in was that MDM is more relevant than ever in today’s econonic meltdown.
Projects will need to offer incremental value, without being too tactical. Developing a data stewardship culture doesn’t hit the capital expense budget. They recommended people focus on the “hard benefits”, efficiencies and compliance requirements, while preparing for the (eventual) upturn. And they strongly suggested developing the metrics to quantify and communicate the value of your MDM program.
They presented the “MDM Hype Report Card”, saying that the hype cycle is at or near its peak. The links between MDM, business process management, service-oriented architecture and business intelligence remain unclear to many users. And external service providers (in their opinion) are finally starting to add some value to MDM programs. And they predicted that by 2012, 70% of SOA projects will fail to yield expected results unless they include Master Data Management.
Andrew and John covered Gartner’s “Seven Building Blocks”: vision, strategy, metrics, governance, organization, process and technology, and recommended a business-driven, holistic approach to MDM, which I’ve been recommending for a couple of years now.
I also really enjoyed “Building the Business Case for MDM” by Michael Smith. It was an engaging but thorough review of Gartner’s recommended steps for creating a thorough business case for your MDM initiative.
After covering the process for developing an effective business case, Michael Smith discussed how metrics can be used to quantify the benefits, and how to use the business case to manage the initiative through the entire lifecycle.
The main argument for taking the time to create a detailed business case is the fact that without one, IT projects in general seem to have only a 50% success rate, but when the time to create a robust business case is invested, the success rate goes up to as high as 75%. If your total project budget is high enough, that higher success rate can translate into some serious savings.
I attended the IBM session highlighting Nationwide’s “Transformation to a Customer-Centric Organization”, and I really enjoyed the remarks by Tara Paider, their Lead Architect for Customer Information Management.
The attendees and exhibitors I spoke to in the Solution Showcase all commented on the power of Gartner’s brand and that the 1st day of the conference was well-attended and full of good content.
I’m a big fan of Aaron Zornes at The MDM Institute and the MDM Summit conference he puts on twice a year in the U.S. with SourceMedia. I’ve attended all six events they’ve done together in the last three years, and have spoken at five of them.
But I see the appeal of the Gartner MDM event as well. At this stage in the development of Master Data Management, competition is a good thing – between software vendors, services firms, and conferences. It makes us all better to have another entry in the market to measure ourselves against and to strive to outdo.
If you’re attending as well, I’d love to hear your comments here.
