IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management
The Hub Designs MDM Think Tank is briefed by IBM’s MDM team. 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!
Building MDM-Powered Solutions with Initiate Composer
Earlier this week, I saw a demo of Initiate’s new Composer product, and was impressed. Composer, announced in March and scheduled for release in June, will be available to all existing Initiate customers.
Initiate Composer is a framework for building MDM-powered solutions on top of the company’s MDM hub, which is called Initiate Master Data Service. Typically, an MDM hub is populated with data from monolithic enterprise systems like front office suites such as customer relationship management (CRM) applications and back office suites such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.
Essentially, these data sources offer the best of both worlds. By pulling the data into a robust MDM hub, you create a “single view of the customer” rather than having multiple views within different silos across the enterprise. Then by building a new, easy-to-use application on top of that trustworthy data, you’ve found a way to quickly deliver value from the MDM initiative back into the business.
Of course, in the real world it’s never quite that easy. But one of the most common things we see clients wanting to do with their newly-built MDM hub is to make the information in it widely available to the enterprise – for search, for reference, for additional data entry, for automation of manual processes, and for viewing corporate hierarchies and other relationships.
Based on the demo I saw, Initiate fulfills this need with Composer. Customer teams can now quickly create production-ready user interfaces that are pre-integrated with the Initiate Master Data Service.
Composer creates Adobe Flex applications, which are cross-platform rich Internet applications. This is helpful because they will run on a variety of clients inside only a browser.
It was impressive to see the degree to which business analysts could quickly be productive writing simple MDM applications, even if they were prototypes that would need to be finished up by a developer. A lot of times, there’s a big gap between design documents and working code. It’s a lot easier for a power user or a business analyst to work with a tool like Composer to “show you what I want” than to just describe it verbally, in writing or on a white board.
With Composer, teams can more easily and more productively build a variety of different user interfaces on top of Initiate’s MDM hub. IBM thought highly enough of Initiate Systems back in February to acquire the company. While I’m sure that Composer was only a small part of why that happened, I’m sure it didn’t hurt.
Initiate has always been a company I’ve followed closely and with whom Hub Designs has partnered, and we look forward to continuing that as they become part of the IBM universe.
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.
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.
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.
Webinar with Initiate Systems
“Master Data Management: The Sliding Scale Between Build and Buy”
Replay of the webinar with Dan Power and Marty Moseley
Please join industry experts Dan Power, Founder and President, Hub Solutions, and Marty Moseley, CTO, Initiate Systems, for this webinar where we’ll outline the best practices that have evolved to support organizations in making the critical “build vs. buy” decision.
Master data management (MDM) transforms data integration and business processes. Many organizations are exploring an MDM solution and will eventually have to answer the build vs. buy question. The combination of build and buy for MDM depends on the individual organization’s circumstances, goals and objectives. As MDM has evolved, so have the best practices for considering how much should be built and how much should be bought.
Some key considerations include:
- What are your current data volumes? How will they change in the near and distant future?
- Are customer relationships one-dimensional? Are you concerned with multiple domains of data and managing the corresponding hierarchies?
- Will you implement Web services? How will they be used?
- Do you augment your internal data with information from external vendors?
- What are the time, budget and resource limitations?
- Is MDM intended to eventually provide an enterprise data platform?
Please click here for the on-demand replay.
Solid Strategies for Surviving a Slowdown (Part 2)
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Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of a two-part series written by Jim Walker from Initiate Systems. You can find Part 1 here.
Here are the rest of the six proven business strategies fueled by real-time, accurate and complete customer data in a master data management (MDM) system:
Use customer service to retain customers and cut costs: Acquiring customers is expensive, and losing them is even more costly. Better customer service will improve customer satisfaction and retention and reduce your costs. Empowering your touch points with a complete and accurate view of each of your customers and their relationships provides a clear picture to both your customer and your representatives. Automated collection and presentation of complete customer information to service professionals reduces search times and has a positive effect on call waiting times, increasing productivity and reducing costs. It allows you to never ask a customer to repeat themselves. Accurate composite customer data enables web self-service applications with a single view of multiple accounts to empower your visitors to help themselves.
Be bold, change the playing field; buy a competitor: A downturn will have an indelible effect on many industries as valuations decrease and otherwise impossible consolidations becomes plausible. Historically, the most successful mergers are made in downturns. According to Harvard Business Review, “downturn mergers generate about 15% more value, as measured by total shareholder return, than boom-time mergers.” However, capital is sparse and careful due diligence of a potential target is imperative, as their problems will become yours if the merger is completed. Merger analysis should include careful consideration of customers and any potential risks. This knowledge will help you make sense of a bold move during a tenuous time.
Regulations never go away: An economic downturn does not delay compliance with government regulations. In fact as a slide continues, governments look to increase regulation to prevent future issues. Compliance in a recession is imperative so that you avoid costly fines that may have a devastating effect on your financial picture.
Obtaining and delivering accurate, comprehensive customer data is at the foundation of all six of these strategies. Your level of success will depend on the quality of the data that feeds each of these business improvements. An accurate data foundation allows you to deliver on fixing short-term pains, while setting up long-term gains. A new breed of data management technology has evolved to meet these challenges.
Master data management enables delivery of these valuable strategies and objectives. It provides complete, accurate customer views and valuable hierarchy management to your customer data. Reliability and effectiveness of this data is determined by its accuracy and ability to reflect real world conditions in any situation where that data is used.
Jim Walker is a Senior Manager, Field Marketing for Initiate Systems, a leading provider of master data management (MDM) solutions. Jim specializes in researching and writing on the effects of MDM on the enterprise. He has held numerous marketing positions at enterprise software companies, focusing on data management and security. He has also designed and implemented large scale enterprise systems as a technology consultant. Jim holds a MBA in e-commerce from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Computer Engineering form the University of Illinois at Chicago. He can be reached at jwalker@initiate.com.
Click here for Part 1 of this series.
Solid Strategies for Surviving a Slowdown (Part 1)
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Editor’s Note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series written by Jim Walker from Initiate Systems. You can find Part 2 here.
As uncertainty accelerates, some companies not only survive, they prepare themselves to thrive during the subsequent recovery. Even in the best economic conditions, organizations look to do more with less, and in a downturn, they are forced to manage things even more tightly. Added market pressures force tough decisions. Less money results in contraction and consolidation of vital resources. Many companies turn to their most valuable asset, their customer data, to forecast and define their future.
A downturn opens rare opportunities to outmaneuver rivals by reducing costs and increasing efficiencies. Reliable and accurate customer data can provide valuable insight into changing market dynamics. Organizations that analyze their data to identify and avoid fraudulent and high-risk accounts can also reduce operating costs. Many use customer data to build and strengthen relationships and identify revenue opportunities. High quality, reliable customer data allows them to spot opportunities across lines of business or properly align a sales force with an up-to-date and accurate customer hierarchy. They can find pricing discount opportunities for customers or identify commissions over-payments.
The potential gain is substantial; however, the effectiveness of these initiatives is only as good as the underlying data that drives the results. Here are six proven business strategies that are fueled by real-time, accurate and complete customer data that master data management (MDM) can provide your organization.
Incent customers through improved pricing: Purchasing behavior changes dramatically in a recession. Consumers increasingly opt for lower-priced alternatives to their usual purchases. Customer upgrades and extensions not only improve your top line, they also increase customer retention and can be completed with much less cost. Knowing your customer will present pricing discounts or up-sale opportunities. However, complex business relationships, such a subsidiary and parent structure, keep you from obtaining a clear picture. Overlaying a trusted hierarchical structure on your customer data will provide an accurate view of rolled-up sales and introduce appropriate pricing discounts to garner new business in difficult times.
Never double pay a commission: Geographies or strategic sales territories sometimes overlap for sales executives. Managing this overlap for hundreds of sales resources across complex business relationships is difficult at best, and the potential overpayment of commissions is high. Identifying and removing the overlap requires you to have a clear picture of the customer and their organizational hierarchy. For instance, if two sales resources are selling into two subsidiaries of the same company, you may have missed an opportunity to roll up the sales and pay a single commission. Identifying and eliminating redundant commissions reduces operating costs.
Spend the right time on the right customers: Organizations are concerned for their own well-being as well as their customers’ and prospects’. Identifying and mitigating customer risk requires complete insight into accurate customer information, license positions and relationships. Overlaying a trusted hierarchical structure on customer data will allow you to roll up risk calculations so that you can analyze and identify a master account and apply appropriate risk strategies. This will help you understand your best customers and make strategic plans to maximize revenues associated to them. It will help you spend the right amount of time with the right customers.
Jim Walker is a Senior Manager, Field Marketing for Initiate Systems, a leading provider of master data management (MDM) solutions. Jim specializes in researching and writing on the effects of MDM on the enterprise. He has held numerous marketing positions at enterprise software companies, focusing on data management and security. He has also designed and implemented large scale enterprise systems as a technology consultant. Jim holds a MBA in e-commerce from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Computer Engineering form the University of Illinois at Chicago. He can be reached at jwalker@initiate.com.
Click here for Part 2 of this series.
Good News from Initiate Systems
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Initiate Systems sent out a press release yesterday, highlighting their performance in Q3 of 2008:
- achieved profitability
- positive cash flow
- year-over-year revenue growth of more than 50 percent
Also, Initiate signed up 10 new accounts in Q3, and now has a total of 177 customers.
It’s always nice to hear some good news, particularly in tough economic times.
Click here for the full press release from Initiate Systems.
Trip Report on Fall 2008 MDM Summit
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The Fall 2008 MDM Summit conference ended a couple of days ago. Here’s a quick trip report summarizing it.
I’ve attended the last six MDM Summit events in the U.S. and have spoken at five of them. I always enjoy them, because of the great job that SourceMedia and The MDM Institute do, because I enjoy seeing everyone I’ve come to know in the MDM world, and because of the new people I meet and the new ideas I pick up.
This year, I arrived via the Acela Express train from Boston, went straight to the Hilton New York, and attended Evan Levy’s pre-conference workshop on “Best Practices for MDM Delivery: Lessons from the Trenches”.
Most people who attended one of the pre-conference workshop came to the Experts and Analysts Panel, with Jill Dyché, Aaron Zornes and myself, moderated by Jim Ericson, Editorial Director of DM Review. The panel was a lot of fun. I’ve known Aaron for several years and continue to appreciate the quality and depth of his analysis. Jill’s insights were right on the money as usual, and Jim did a great job moderating and guiding the discussion.
After the opening night reception in the exhibit hall, I ran into a friend and fellow consultant, Mani Kumar Manda from Rhapsody Technologies. We went to dinner with Christopher Dwight, Director MDM Field Strategy from Oracle’s Master Data Management team. We had a great time, and talked about Oracle’s Hyperion Data Relationship Management solution and the upcoming Oracle Applications Users Group COLLABORATE 09 conference. Mani and I are involved in planning the MDM track of that conference.
The next morning, I attended Aaron Zornes’ keynote “Milestones on the MDM Road for 2008-2009″, which I particularly like as a way to stay current on developments in MDM over the past six months.
Tony Fisher from DataFlux gave a great talk on “Stop Kicking the Tires and Start Your Master Data Engine”. I first met Tony at the Fall 2006 event, and I chatted briefly with him afterwards about Hub Solution Designs’ interest in becoming a DataFlux partner.
Next was Pascal Laik, VP of MDM Product Strategy at Oracle. I’ve known Pascal for several years, since he took over for Ronda Krier in that position. Pascal laid out Oracle’s strengths in the manufacturing, telecommunications, retail and financial services industries, and included an interesting but apocryphal story about the “Battle of Ulm”, where the Russian army showed up 12 days late for the battle due to the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars.
Bence Gazdag also spoke about Oracle’s internal MDM efforts, and I later bumped into my friend Bill Miller, Oracle’s Director & Global Solution Owner for Data Quality Management, who was supposed to deliver that part of the presentation.
The last keynote before lunch was by Chris Lucas from D&B and Kim Fahey, Senior Director of Information Architecture at R.R. Donnelley. Kim did a great job describing Donnelley’s MDM journey and the growing value they’ve gotten from their implementation of Purisma.
I had a quick lunch, then headed off to a session on “Best Practices in DG, DQ & Identity Resolution” by Alex Bentley from Initiate Systems and Scott Drummond from Grange Insurance. This one I really enjoyed – down-to-earth delivery by Scott, and lots of good “lessons learned”.
I spent a fair amount of time Monday in the exhibit hall, talking to the different vendors, gathering more information, and seeing old friends working for various companies. I went to the end-of-day reception again, then headed out to a great dinner at the Blue Water Grill with Initiate Systems.
Tuesday was a bit of a blur. I had a couple of meetings in the morning, then went to lunch with Siperian at a great Venetian restaurant named Remi near the Hilton.
In the afternoon, I caught the “Global B2B Hierarchy Management in the High-Tech Industry” session by Jesse Weissman from EMC. Jesse did a great job describing the challenges and corresponding benefits of managing complex corporate hierarchies in EMC’s MDM environment.
The last session I caught was Eric Hansen from Nationwide Insurance, talking about “Data Governance and MDM – The Nationwide Experience”. This one was very well done too, with lots of good insights into the process of developing a vision for data governance in a large-scale Financial MDM project.
Aaron Zornes would want me to remind you about the virtual MDM Summit, which starts on Nov. 11th.
I don’t know the dates yet for next spring’s MDM Summit, but it’s usually in San Francisco and it’s one of my favorite events of the year.
If I met you, spoke to you, had lunch or dinner with you, or learned new things from you – thank you for making the Fall 2008 MDM Summit such a great experience!
Building Integration using SOA
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Many companies are still deploying Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), with proprietary adapters and integration servers. However, for a Master Data Management (MDM) solution, we recommend a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach for integration between the hub and source systems using web services.
A typical web server provides Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), so Web browsers can receive pages from a web site.
Application servers provide the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interface and host the web services. The web services also provide object components, which provide the business service layer above the applications.
The development time for SOA-based MDM integration will depend on the number of business entities to be exchanged, the availability of a vendor-supplied Software Development Kit for the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL), the complexity of the applications to be integrated and the number of Web services to ultimately be deployed.
Some guidelines for developing an SOA integration for an MDM hub are:
- Use XML (eXtensible Markup Language) for all data exchange (XML is a language that provides a standard way of representing data and information).
- Use UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) for listing and locating applications. UDDI is a directory standard that is provided by some application tools as a built-in service to use during integration.
- The WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file should be obtained from the source system to which data needs to be sent or retrieved. WSDL is a “descriptor standard” that an application uses to describe its interface and interaction rules to other applications. WSDL is a document written in XML which describes a Web service. It specifies the location of the service and the operations (or methods) the service provides.
- WSDL should be leveraged with the help of proprietary tools provided for each application to generate the XML message required to meet that data structure.
Currently, some of the Master Data Management platforms (such as Siperian, Initiate Systems, Oracle and IBM) provide excellent SOA libraries of web services.
With some work by the end customer, these products can provide a standard set of data services at the application level. We believe this approach ultimately will give you more flexibility and adaptability than EAI-based integration.
Perspectives on the MDM Market
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In this article, we’ll give some perspective on the current state of the Master Data Management (MDM) market.
Well-meaning skeptics have raised doubts about whether MDM initiatives have long-term viability, sufficient ROI or in fact, are just another system. This skepticism is, of course, understandable.
Every major new type of enterprise technology, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) goes through an adoption cycle, with early enthusiasm leading to the “Trough of Disillusionment” and eventually, the “Plateau of Productivity”. For more information, see Gartner’s definition of Hype Cycles.
And if you look at the history of MDM solutions over the past few years, the space was very fragmented, initially populated mainly by data quality and matching vendors.
But more recently, some innovations have come together in the MDM space so that it’s starting to offer real value to mainstream companies, not just early adopters.
There have been several innovations on the IT architecture front, such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), plus new analytics capabilities, improved tools to facilitate data stewardship and more mature MDM hub platforms. All this adds up to a fast-changing landscape.
To add to the momentum, the top enterprise software players (like Oracle, IBM and SAP) have jumped feet first onto the MDM bandwagon, joining the best-of-breed players (like Purisma, Siperian and Initiate Systems) who helped launch the space, giving rise to a whole new ecosystem of system integrators, data service providers and an increasing trend toward global solutions beyond North America.
This growing ecosystem is driving significant growth for the MDM industry as a whole. There are exciting frontiers ahead.
For example, we’re already seeing some business process outsourcing relating to the creation and maintenance of an organization’s master data to an external provider.
At Hub Solution Designs, we’re excited to be part of the MDM wave of adoption from the very beginning. We see more growth, better solutions, and more organizations succeeding with MDM every day.
Please use the Comment button to let us know what you think about the trend towards outsourced data stewardship.
Interview at MDM Summit on DMRadio
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I was interviewed recently at the Spring 2008 MDM Summit in San Francisco.
DMRadio (which broadcasts weekly on DMReview.com) did a broadcast from the exhibit floor, featuring:
- Marty Moseley from Initiate Systems
- Christopher Dwight from Oracle
- Dan Power from Hub Solution Designs
- Justin Magruder from Freddie Mac
- Richard Pilkington from SyncSort
- John Smolarski & Anshuman Sindhar from Countrywide
- David Codelli, Sun Microsystems
To hear the interview, just click http://www.dmreview.com/dmradio/10001100-1.html, then click on the third “Play” button from the top.
