COLLABORATE 13 Keynote by Mark Hurd, Oracle President
Today, I’m in an April snowstorm in Denver, at the COLLABORATE 13 conference, sponsored by the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG). Oracle’s president, Mark Hurd, is about to address the crowd.
Bill Miller is the New Product Leader for Oracle Customer Hub
I got a call from Bill Miller at Oracle today. Read more 
MDM Track’s Call for Papers at COLLABORATE 2013
For about seven years now, I’ve volunteered on the Education Committee of the Oracle Application Users Group. The COLLABORATE 13 Call for Presentations is closing this Friday, October 12, 2012.
MDM Track’s Call for Papers at COLLABORATE 2013
For about seven years now, I’ve volunteered on the Education Committee of the Oracle Application Users Group, an independent users group. The COLLABORATE 13 Call for Presentations will be open until October 12, 2012.
Oracle Health Sciences Innovation Forum
Today, I attended the Oracle Health Sciences Innovation Forum in Parsippany, NJ. Read more
Looking for Oracle TCA Business Analyst / Developer
Hub Designs is looking for an exceptional Oracle TCA Business Analyst / Developer Read more
Final Deadline for the MDM Track at COLLABORATE 2012
The final deadline for the COLLABORATE 2012 conference Call for Papers is TODAY - Monday, October 17.
Oracle OpenWorld 2011: Oracle Hyperion DRM Customer Panel
Dan Power, attending Oracle OpenWorld 2011, live blogged this session led by Rahul Kamath, Director of Product Strategy at Oracle. Read more
The MDM Track at COLLABORATE 2012
The deadline for the Call for Papers for the 2012 COLLABORATE conference is coming up fast – Friday, October 14.
Call for Papers for MDM Track at COLLABORATE 2012
by Dan Power
I’m still a volunteer on the Education Committee of the Oracle Application Users Group, which is a robust users group that is completely independent of Oracle Corporation. I’ve been involved in the group as a whole for over 15 years now, and have been on the Education Committee for more than five years. Read more
Oracle Customer MDM Webinar on August 17th
Once again, Hub Designs is joining with Oracle in a webinar, this time on Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 11:00 am Pacific (2:00 pm Eastern). Read more
Oracle Product MDM Webinar on August 11th
Hub Designs is pleased to be joining with Oracle in a new webinar on Thursday, August 11, 2011 at 9:30 am Pacific (12:30 pm Eastern). Read more
Oracle 2011 MDM Strategy and Roadmap
This session at COLLABORATE 2011 was presented by Manoj Tahiliani, Senior Director of MDM Product Management & Strategy at Oracle. Read more
The Strategic Nature of MDM According to Oracle
This week, I attended David Butler’s presentation at the Oracle Applications Users Group COLLABORATE 11 conference in Orlando, FL. 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!
MDM Solution Specialist / Senior Manager at Oracle
From time to time, Hub Designs highlights an MDM-related open position as a courtesy to a friend of the firm.
Oracle’s Applications Solution Group (ASG) is part of the North American Sales organization, and is responsible for, among other things, fueling the growth strategies of the Public Sector’s applications sales teams by providing innovative Edge solutions, creating compelling applications upgrade programs, and driving successful early adopters of new applications. In addition, the ASG is responsible for delivering clear, relevant content and enablement to assist in demand creation and customer roadmap activities.
Oracle’s Master Data Management (MDM) solution is a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) set of applications (MDM Hubs) designed to consolidate, cleanse, enrich, and synchronize key business data objects across the enterprise and across time. It includes pre-defined comprehensive data models with powerful applications to load, cleanse, govern and share the master data with all business processes, operational applications and business intelligence systems. The MDM solution provides Public Sector customers with the ability to overcome problems associated with poor quality and fragmented data that are typically inherent with major programs such as citizen services, social services, child welfare, revenue collections, fraud detection, vendor file management, regulatory compliance, financial controls and site consolidations.
Overlay sales personnel provide specialist product expertise to the sales force. Manages and directs a staff of solution specialists and/or managers in providing specific industry or product expertise to facilitate the closing of deals within sales territory. Establishes and communicates departmental objectives and implements plans to ensure attainment of business objectives. Works closely with sales management to ensure proper utilization of resources and provides justification for additional resource requests. Oversees the Interaction with sales team to architect the solution, and develop and execute solution strategies for market. Manages teams in the sales process for establishing market visibility and deal visibility. Develops forecasts. Participates in industry/product functions, seminars and round tables to remain up to date on industry or product knowledge. May deliver presentations/solutions to high level clients and industry conference attendees. May provide training to field sales on industry/solutions.
Manages and controls activities in multi-functional areas or sections. Ensures appropriate operational planning is effectively executed to meet business needs.
The person in this position will serve as a Solutions Specialist supporting Oracle’s Master Data Management sales activities as part of a team that comprises other ASG members and personnel from various North American Public Sector organizations, including business development, program management, field sales and Industry Business Unit Solutions Specialists.
The Oracle MDM solution includes the following:
- MDM Hubs such as Oracle Customer Hub, Oracle Product Hub, Oracle Supplier Hub and Oracle Site Hub.
- Oracle Data Quality Servers, providing end-to-end data quality for structured data (and Oracle Product Data Quality accommodates unstructured data).
- In addition to the Data Hubs, Oracle MDM includes Data Relationship Management (DRM), a powerful financial reference data master, with best in class hierarchy management capabilities and a business enterprise dimension-mastering tool with deep integration into Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).
MDM represents one of the fastest growing areas for Oracle’s solutions in the government marketplace.
Responsibilities include:
- Develop strategic & tactical plans for Oracle’s MDM solution for the Public Sector (US Federal, State & Local & Canadian governments), including the Data Hub components identified above
- Build clear and differentiated messaging and value propositions for the appropriate target audiences.
- Work with the field sales force to create forecasts and provide status reports regarding revenue quotas
- Work closely with product development & management, business development,
- program management and field sales to develop pipelines and meet revenue quotas
- Assess competitive products and analyze trends to effectively position MDM for Public Sector solutions
- Meet with Public Sector customers to make MDM presentations to convey value propositions for productivity improvements and cost savings
Qualifications:
- Knowledge of and demonstrated experience with MDM software solutions
- Hands-on experience (configuration, implementation, architecture) of MDM products.
- Experience with the data quality components such as Informatica or Product Data Quality
- Knowledge of and demonstrated experience with Public Sector enterprise business processes
- 10+ years of experience in supporting enterprise software sales
- Demonstrated success in devising strategies and supporting end-to-end sales plans and revenue quota achievement
- Proven leadership and “take charge” skills
- Ability to effectively and efficiently work in cross-functional teams and matrix environments.
As part of Oracle’s U.S. employment process, candidates will be required to complete a background check, prior to an offer being extended. These background checks include:
- Prior Employment Verification
- Education Verification
- Social Security Trace
- Criminal Background Check
- Motor Vehicles Records (where required for position)
For a listing of all opportunities at Oracle, please go to www.irecruitment.oracle.com
Oracle Supports Workforce Diversity.
To apply for this position, please contact:
Julie Boyer, Oracle Recruiting at 434-973-0898 or julie.boyer@oracle.com
Thank You To Our Readers
Well, another year has nearly passed, and I’d like to say “thank you” to everyone who has read and supported this blog over the past three and a half years.
Only one thing has made this blog possible: you. Whether you came here to learn about master data management (MDM) and data governance, or to follow the development of the consulting firm Hub Solution Designs, your support is what has kept us writing, with 265 articles to date.
We’ve had some great guest authors over the years, whose work you can see on the Top Series page. They’ve helped to bring great insights and ideas to the blog; I hope you take the time to check out their work.
Our MDM Best Practice series was very popular this October, with the series as a whole receiving more than 2,100 page views in the past two months. The shorter article on Ten Best Practices for Master Data Management, which led to the ten part series, has received 5,100 views so far.
Five Essential Elements of MDM and CDI remains one of our most popular articles, and Joan Lawson’s MDM and SOA, a Strong Partnership is in the “Top Ten” as well.
A couple of the articles we’ve written about Oracle have proven popular as well: Oracle’s MDM Strategy and Roadmap, and the First Look at Oracle Fusion MDM Hub. Jim Parnitzke’s series on Modeling the Blueprint for MDM proved so popular, we re-ran it this summer, as did Rob DuMoulin’s series on Data Profiling for All The Right Reasons.
Our article on the Hidden Costs of Duplicate Customer Data has received 1,175 total views over the past year, and How Master Data Management is Similar to ERP has been averaging 200-300 views per year for more than three years now. MDM and Enterprise Architecture (also by Joan Lawson) is a good reminder of the central role that MDM plays in the practice of Enterprise Architecture.
I hope you enjoy reading the blog as much as I enjoy writing for you. And I hope your holiday season is filled with family, love and happiness, and that you have a safe, healthy and prosperous New Year!
Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management
Rahul Kamath from Oracle kindly did an analyst briefing recently for Hub Designs, to fill us in on the details and progress of Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management, or DRM as it’s widely called.
Rahul is the Director of Product Management at Oracle for DRM. I’ve known him for several years, since my days at D&B managing its strategic alliance with Oracle.
Oracle’s Hyperion DRM product evolved from Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion, and in turn from a product called Razza that Hyperion acquired in 2005. Hyperion DRM manages and streamlines the process of synchronizing master data changes among complex hierarchical structures across enterprise systems.
It is primarily used in “financial master data management” (MDM) and “analytical MDM”. Oracle’s target customer for DRM is the largest, most complex companies.
Hyperion DRM is particularly useful when a company has to manage multiple financial systems. I talked to a potential client today that was using DRM to bring together, map and consolidate 20 different general ledger systems. They went live in May 2010, and were able to reduce the number of different GLs from 35 down to 20, which significantly streamlined their financial processes and dramatically reduced the amount of manual work involved in consolidating their results every month.
One thing that was interesting, according to Rahul, is that 40% of DRM’s customer base is in the financial services industry, with large customers such as Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.
Also, 30% of DRM customers have some SAP financials in their enterprise architectures.
Another big industry vertical is oil & gas, with customers such as Halliburton and Baker Hughes. This shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose, as the oil & gas industry has some of the most complex reporting requirements I have ever come across in my career.
DRM can be used for more than just financial hierarchy management, too. Lockheed Martin is using it as an enterprise-wide Supplier Hub, so that all new suppliers that are onboarded are brought on through DRM.
In the high tech industry, companies like Dell, Google, NetApp, Symantec, Logitech and Xerox are all customers as well. Overall, Oracle has over 230 customers for DRM worldwide across all industries.
Oracle released a new version in May 2010 that is now browser-based and can run in-memory on the server, dramatically increasing performance. It handles Unicode and multi-byte characters, and runs in 64 bits, allowing essentially unlimited size models.
The MDM data model provides for inheritance and derived attribution, and has a strong versioning model, including “what if” analysis for potential changes.
Oracle’s customers seem to be using Hyperion DRM to react to an increasingly complex business environment, where they have to integrate and management dozens of general ledgers and other financial systems with corporate consolidation tools, business intelligence platforms, data warehouses, budgeting systems, multi-dimensional databases, allocation systems, etc.
DRM allows them to manage hierarchies, dimensions, business rules, mappings, and validations, and it enforces referential integrity across all subscribing systems and hierarchies, while maintaining historical versions for comparative reporting and analysis, and tracking all hierarchy and attribute changes with a full-featured audit log.
I understand from talking with several Oracle MDM salespeople in the field that Hyperion DRM is proving to be very popular with customers, and that there is a lot of interest in it from companies with heterogeneous IT environments as a way to “bring order to chaos”. In a way, it has been a bit of a sleeper product within Oracle’s MDM portfolio, but it looks like it’s finally being recognized as the solid piece of technology that it really is. And in Rahul Kamath, Oracle has put one of their best product managers on the job of managing its future.
Moving MDM into the Cloud
This article was originally published in The Data Warehousing Institute’s FlashPoint newsletter.
Whether you call it software-as-a-service or cloud computing, deploying enterprise applications via the Internet continues to gain momentum. In fact, pioneers such as Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, and NetSuite have experienced rapid growth in demand, despite global economic uncertainty.
Although we’re still in the early days of cloud computing, its benefits are compelling. Dave Powers, Eli Lilly’s associate information consultant for discovery IT, recently said “We were … able to launch a 64-machine cluster computer working on bioinformatics sequence information, complete the work, and shut it down in 20 minutes. It cost $6.40. To do that internally–to go from nothing to getting a 64-machine cluster installed and qualified–is a 12-week process.”
Master data management (MDM) is also moving to the cloud. MDM is a set of disciplines, processes, and technologies for ensuring the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and consistency of multiple domains of enterprise data across applications, systems, and databases, and across multiple business processes, functional areas, organizations, geographies, and channels. Note the key words: “multiple,” “across,” and “enterprise.” MDM spans multiple domains of master data and reaches across the many silos that exist in today’s enterprises, and cloud computing helps organizations integrate master data across multiple data centers in different geographies or from different acquisitions.
When I talk to people about moving MDM hubs from corporate data centers to cloud computing environments, security and compliance are by far the most frequently raised issues.
Ironically, corporate data centers may actually be less secure than cloud computing environments. Over the last few years, there have been thousands of well-publicized breeches at “household name” organizations. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has compiled an extensive list of known data breaches, along with the number of records exposed with each incident. Of course, there have also been attacks on, and breaches by, cloud computing providers such as Google, but there are far fewer of these incidents. That being said, there’s both a perception issue and a real need for improved security by cloud providers, particularly as security threats continue to grow and evolve.
When it comes to compliance, moving enterprise applications into the cloud doesn’t absolve a company from the laws and regulations it falls under compared to when the company provides that service inside its firewall. Depending on the industry involved, evaluating potential cloud providers against that industry’s compliance requirements can definitely be a nontrivial effort.
MDM vendors–Oracle, IBM, SAP, Informatica/Siperian, Initiate (an IBM company) and smaller providers–are evolving to the cloud. Oracle’s Fusion MDM hub will offer a cloud deployment capability when it ships early next year. IBM and Initiate are likely working on future versions of their products that will operate smoothly in the cloud. Informatica, having acquired Siperian, has also made major investments in cloud computing.
Security, legal, and technical issues still need to be resolved by the cloud computing providers, software vendors, systems integrators, and their enterprise customers. This will involve firewalls, encryption, backup solutions, disaster recovery, service-level agreements, and so on, but technology and legal teams are good at solving these kinds of problems.
Meanwhile, the benefits are too large to ignore. Economically, it makes more sense to share complex infrastructure and pay only for what you actually use. From a time-to-value perspective, cloud computing allows you to skip hardware procurement and capital expenditure and instead just order from a “menu.”
Maintenance and updates are a constant headache for most IT shops. Thankfully, most cloud providers continuously update their software, adding new features as they become available. As for scalability, cloud systems are built to handle sharp increases in workload. Furthermore, cloud solutions are designed to work with a simple Web browser, so users can access them from their desktops, laptops, or smartphones.
The MDM market will probably trail the rest of the enterprise a bit, but the appetite for building large, multi-million dollar applications inside the firewall is cooling. CIOs see the economics of buying, maintaining, and upgrading the applications and accompanying servers, and end up saying, “On the whole, I think I’d rather rent!”
I’d love to know what you think of the question of moving MDM into the cloud. Please click the “Leave a Comment” button and share your thoughts.
My Take on Oracle OpenWorld 2010
I’m flying home today from Oracle OpenWorld 2010, which I enjoyed enormously, as usual. Beyond the “old home week” aspect of it – seeing old friends, who for some reason I only seem to see at the Oracle Applications Users Group COLLABORATE conference in the spring or at Oracle OpenWorld in the fall – there was a tangible energy in the halls, the session rooms and the exhibit areas this year. And the Black Eyed Peas’ performance Wednesday night was a lot of fun as well.
Let me start out by saying that Hub Designs is vendor agnostic – we partner with all of the leading MDM vendors, including Oracle, Informatica / Siperian, Initiate Systems / IBM, SAP, D&B / Purisma, and Kalido, and are having partnership discussions with others like Orchestra Networks and Stibo Systems.
But my roots in the Oracle community go back to 1995, and my knowledge investment in Oracle’s CRM, ERP and MDM products is considerable. So I feel very comfortable at OpenWorld, and have about 250 Oracle people in my address book.
So although we are vendor agnostic, it’s only natural that we’ve developed a strong relationship with some partners, and are still working on developing that level of partnership with others. It’s hard to have equally deep partnerships with ten or so different companies.
My schedule prevented me from arriving until Tuesday, and when I did get there, I didn’t feel too well. But I did get to some sessions on Wednesday, and I was particularly impressed by “MDM Customer Panel: Implementation Challenges and Best Practices with the MDM Institute, Credit Suisse, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Cricket Communications, and Wind River Systems”.
The session was a very practical Q&A, with different Oracle customers from different industries talking about their experiences, difficulties, and successes over the past four years or so. Several of them had implemented Oracle’s Customer Hub (formerly Siebel Universal Customer Master or UCM), with Wind River having implemented the Customer Data Hub (CDH) product.
The session also included Aaron Zornes, a prominent thought leader and Chief Research Officer of the MDM Institute. It was great to see him and to chat briefly after the session. If you’re able to, you should definitely register for the upcoming MDM and Data Governance Summit in New York City on October 3-5. I’ve been attending these for several years and always find them helpful in order to stay in touch with the pulse of what’s going on in the MDM and data governance space.
The session that I did with Bill Miller and Vanessa Hsu from Oracle was well attended, despite being in the very last time slot of the conference (Thursday at 3:00 pm). We had 101 people in the room, and even though we went a few minutes past the top of the hour, almost everyone stayed to the end. I talked about the need for change in today’s corporations, and the power of being an MDM evangelist in bringing innovation and change back to your company, as well as about the Top Ten best practices that I’ve observed over the past nine years of working in the fields of Data Governance and Master Data Management, across both the customer and product domains.
Bill Miller talked about how Oracle has applied these concepts to its own MDM needs, and its own six year journey from data quality chaos to finely tuned governance machine. It was great to hear, because I’ve known Bill for almost that entire time, and watched him go through some incredible projects, and grow into an important role as Global Solution Owner for Data Quality Management with Oracle’s IT function. He works closely with the business people (the Global Process Owners) in marketing, sales, finance, customer service, and so on. That virtual team is Oracle’s data governance board, and is responsible for some huge improvements in Oracle’s data quality picture over the last few years. Oracle implemented Oracle Customer Hub internally, and made some great process and cultural changes.
Vanessa Hsu is a Senior Product Strategy Manager at Oracle, and is responsible for a new product called Oracle Data Governance Manager. That product is an extension to Oracle Customer Hub, and provides a centralized administration tool for data stewards, giving easy access to key MDM operations, to increase data steward productivity and highlight enterprise-wide data quality metrics at a glance. It’s an important capability that Oracle will extend to its other hub products over its next release cycle.
The “feel on the street” in the MDM track at Oracle OpenWorld this year was that it was “full speed ahead” at Oracle. Gartner recognizes Oracle as one of the leaders in its “Magic Quadrant” for MDM, and deservedly so. There are a lot of smaller vendors with great technology too, but Oracle has done a lot to advance the state of the MDM art, and it was a pleasure to be in San Francisco this week to see their customers talk about their success. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few years as Oracle introduces Fusion MDM to the market.
Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld
Image via Wikipedia
I’m really looking forward to speaking at the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld conference. I’ve been attending OpenWorld since 2004, and my talk at it last year was a big hit. David Butler from Oracle, who manages the MDM track at OpenWorld, said I was their “cleanup hitter” last year and that I “hit a home run with the bases loaded”.
The attendance for the session at the 2009 OpenWorld set a record for its time slot (the very last session in the conference). This year, I’ve got the same time slot again, so if you’re planning to go to OpenWorld and are interested in Master Data Management, hang out to the very end and drop by the session. It will be on Thursday, September 23rd, at 3:00 pm Pacific time, in the Moscone West building, Room 3003.
I’ll be co-presenting with my friends Bill Miller and Vanessa Hsu from Oracle. The topic will be “Best Practices and Advanced Topics in Master Data Management and Data Governance”, and here’s that the Schedule Builder says about our session (Session ID S317887):
Data governance is key for healthy enterprise-wide CRM, ERP, SCM, and BI enterprise processes. Master data management provides a foundation for data governance. Thus, for many companies, it’s not “if” they will implement some form of MDM–it’s “when.” You can’t govern unmanaged data. This session will help you better understand MDM and data governance. It presents some useful MDM and data governance best practices, talks about what works and what doesn’t, covers the importance of a holistic approach, and discusses how to get the political aspects right.
So I’ll present some useful best practices for MDM and data governance, Bill Miller will give an “applied case history” of what Oracle has done internally in its implementations of MDM and data governance, and Vanessa will discuss the Data Governance Manager product that Oracle has recently introduced.
It should be a great session – I’m really looking forward to being part of it!
Oracle’s MDM Strategy and Roadmap
At the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) COLLABORATE 2010 conference this week, I attended a session by Pascal Laik, Oracle’s VP of Master Data Management Strategy.
He started out by talking about several Oracle MDM customers, their success stories and their return on investment, across drivers like growth, efficiency, improved IT agility, and compliance.
Pascal moved on to talk about MDM implementation challenges. Oracle surveys its MDM customers every two years. Measuring actual ROI achieved is the most difficult challenge reported. Next is breaking down organizational silos, and then demonstrating incremental business value.
Five out of the top ten challenges were related to data governance and project/organization. These were big themes two years ago as well. So Oracle worked with an outside partner on the areas of strategy, policies & processes, organization, measurement & monitoring, technology, and communication. They got a group of 10-15 customers together 2-3 times per year, and that group put together a set of requirements for a product that Oracle has now created called Data Governance Manager. This product helps data governance professionals to operate and monitor the hub and to define and enforce policies.
Pascal showed a short video from an Oracle customer, Areva. Their program was called STOCK – Strategic and Operational Customer Knowledge, to ensure the high quality of customer data. They used a five step approach: Collect, Harmonize, Merge, Enrich, and Publish. The benefits included saving employees time, ensuring that internal people can rely on customer and prospect data, and providing the entire enterprise with a clear vision of the customer database.
The second set of challenges related to ROI and business case – measuring actual ROI achieved. Oracle now has a web-based ROI model available through its sales team. Oracle also has a group of people that do a 3-5 week management consulting exercise called “Insight” that delivers a full business case.
The third set of challenges is the first one involving technical issues: #10 and #11 (integration and data quality).
Two years ago, the #1 issue was procuring skilled resources. So Oracle has been working closely with systems integrators, so now this issue is down to #7. Integration with operational applications has gone from #2 to #11.
Lastly, Pascal discussed Oracle solutions, investments and its strategy going forward. Oracle now has Customer Hub, Supplier Hub, Product Hub, and Site Hub. Data Relationship Management, which is a financial hub to manage financial entities such as the chart of accounts and other hierarchies, is also an analytical hub.
Oracle Customer Hub (formerly known as Universal Customer Master) is now on release 8.2, which shipped in January 2010, and includes the new Data Governance Manager module. This is the largest customer release in four years.
Oracle’s MDM strategy has two legs – embedded “best in class”. Oracle has OEM’d the Informatica solution, using the Identity Systems solution (now owned by Informatica) and the Address Doctor solution (also from Informatica) for postal cleansing for 200+ countries. The other leg is “open” – Oracle is providing a “Universal DQ Connector” for selected vendors like Trillium, Acxiom, D&B and Datanomic. (Note: the embedded “best in class” approach is somewhat controversial, since Informatica is now competing directly with Oracle, since it has acquired the Siperian MDM hub).
The end-to-end data quality framework (the Data Quality “Machine”) has a Rules Manager for design, development and validation (IDQ). There is a process (Analyze/Profile, Standardize/Cleanse, Match & De-Duplicate, Enrich) with a Scorecard & Reporting, and an Exception Management Process. The output is to load the MDM system with zero rejects.
Oracle has also acquired Silver Creek Systems, which is focused on product data quality. It is a self-learning semantic engine to handle the complexities of product information.
Pascal talked about some of the newer MDM hubs, Supplier Hub and Site Hub. Site Hub in particular has experienced strong interest from retailers, fast food companies and large enterprises, which are using it to manage stores and locations.
Oracle’s MDM investments are critical for Oracle in terms of its differentiation strategy, and data governance is the number one item from its customer advisory board. Oracle has reached 1,000 MDM customers across all of its various MDM products.
Pascal wrapped up by talking about how competitive the MDM space is and the recent acquisitions in the market. Oracle’s history is in applications. Oracle brings a pre-built, flexible schema with enterprise-grade, verticalized hub applications. Oracle MDM hubs are pre-integrated with both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. And Oracle provides best-in-class data quality and data governance solutions.
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.
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.
Silver Creek Systems Acquired by Oracle
It had to happen eventually: Oracle is acquiring Silver Creek Systems, a leading provider of product data quality solutions.
I first became familiar with Silver Creek through a chance meeting with Martin Boyd, Silver Creek’s VP of Marketing, at the Fall 2007 MDM Summit in New York. We both ran into someone from Weyerhaeuser, and all of us ended up going out to dinner at a great New York steak house.
I stayed in touch with Martin after that, and gradually learned more about Silver Creek’s product data quality solution, DataLens. I’ve said for a long time that data quality plays a critical role in master data management, so as I learned more about product information management (PIM) and product MDM, I naturally wanted to learn more about Silver Creek.
I profiled Silver Creek in April 2009, and my first hunch that they might end up getting acquired by Oracle came with the announcement later that April about the OEM relationship between Oracle and Silver Creek, where Oracle would pre-integrate Silver Creek’s DataLens solution with Oracle’s Product Data Hub.
This blog covered Silver Creek again in October 2009, where Martin Boyd did a great presentation at Oracle OpenWorld, saying that “10% of the total effort will be on the MDM software implementation, 40% on establishing governance and documenting the master data architecture, and 50% on data remediation” (according to AMR Research).
So I’m pleased but not surprised to see the news of Oracle’s acquisition today. For more information, you can read Oracle’s press release here.
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.
First Look at Oracle Fusion MDM Hub
“All NDAs are lifted” were the magic words uttered by Steve Miranda from Oracle at the Fusion Inner Circle Event at Oracle OpenWorld on October 15th.
Just to make sure, I asked Steve explicitly during the Q&A section of the program if it was okay under the non-disclosure agreement we had all signed to write about Fusion on my blog, and he said “Yes.”
Hub Designs was invited back in February to help Oracle’s Fusion MDM team with some design review, validation, and testing activities. In return for our assistance, we’ve gotten to see Fusion MDM inside and out, and we can proudly say that we are one of the very few trusted partners who helped Oracle to design and develop the application.
We participated in a lot of conference calls with Haidong Song, Oracle’s Product Strategy Director for Customer MDM, and other members of his team. And we attended a week-long “hands-on validation” event at Oracle headquarters in August, looking specifically at the customer data management aspects of the Fusion MDM hub.
My first impressions of Fusion MDM during that hands-on session were very favorable. I remember thinking to myself, “Oracle could almost start selling this into the MDM hub market right now!”
Of course, Fusion isn’t scheduled to ship until sometime in 2010, and there’s still plenty of work to be done between now and then. But the core functionality needed for master data management was there, and the Oracle Fusion MDM team had a room full of customers and partners banging on it for a week without any significant crashes or issues.
There was plenty to like in Fusion that didn’t relate specifically to master data management – the new and improved user interface, the embedded analytics, the modern, standards-based architecture, the usability research that Oracle has done, the improved business processes, the built-in collaboration capabilities …
But the fundamentals of MDM were strong as well. Haidong and his team demonstrated how to import and consolidate customer data from outside sources, and we did our first hands-on lab session bringing in a small customer data load from a desktop file, such as a list of trade show leads.
We also tested a larger volume of customer data being brought into Fusion MDM through the Bulk Import process.
We did another exercise simulating how a typical customer data steward would identify potential duplicate customers, and then resolve those duplicates by merging the duplicate parties.
We also got a good look at the Informatica components that Oracle is bundling into Fusion on an OEM basis: the former Identity Systems matching engine and the former Address Doctor address cleansing tool. Previous Oracle MDM products like Customer Data Hub have had loose integration with Trillium and Firstlogic for address cleansing, but it’s refreshing to see Oracle investing in deep integration with industry leading solutions.
I think there are going to be a lot of Oracle customers who will move to Fusion MDM as the first wave of their overall migration to Fusion, who will see Fusion MDM as a good way to get some early experience with the Fusion applications family, before committing their mission critical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications to the Fusion platform.
And in 2010 and beyond, I think will be a lot of potential customers who evaluate Fusion MDM positively on its own merits against competitive MDM hubs. Oracle brings a robust data model, open architecture, and a next-generation approach to master data management, with state-of-the-art matching, data quality, middleware, and business process management.
Please let me know by commenting here what your thoughts and expectations are for Oracle’s Fusion MDM hub.
Oracle OpenWorld Presentation
I had a great time at the Oracle OpenWorld conference this year.
Oracle did a great job organizing the MDM track. There were a lot of great presentations, and a good balance of speakers between Oracle people, outside consultants and experts, and end users with success stories to share.
David Butler, Senior Director of MDM Marketing at Oracle, was kind enough to convert my presentation titled “Best Practices in Master Data Management and Data Governance” to PDF format and to post it on the Oracle.com MDM web page.
You can find it in the ‘Partners’ portlet on the right hand side of the page, or just click here.
Silver Creek Systems
Another strong session at Oracle OpenWorld this afternoon.
Alison Schofield, the Product Strategy Director at Oracle for PIM Data Hub, lead off the session by talkking about the business challenges in improving the data quality of product information, calling it the “greatest threat to your PIM initiative.”
Items are formatted inconsistently, misclassified, with overloaded description fields and lots of non-standardized data.
Martin Boyd from Silver Creek Systems took over to talk about the DataLens product, which Oracle is now selling on an OEM basis on the Oracle price list.
Martin pointed out that 10% of the total effort will be on the MDM software implementation, 40% on establishing governance and documenting the master data architecture, and 50% on data remediation (according to AMR Research, “MDM Strategies for Enterprise Applications, April 2007″).
Data mastering is about “getting your data right” and “keeping it right”.
And there are very few standards governing product data (outside of your product information management system) – all of your legacy systems and outside trading partners are going to feed you a lot of product data of questionable quality.
Martin presented Silver Creek’s DataLens capabilities “at a glance” – the ability to standardize and validation of attributes and descriptions, translate between languages, assignment to popular product classification schema, enrichment with internal and external data. matching and merging, and re-purposing so data can be published in any format for use by downstream systems.
Martin differentiated between tools designed to handle customer data quality and those handling product data.
Name and address data has a relatively fixed syntax, but product data has no fixed syntax. And there are only about 200 or so country address formats, while there are tens of thousands of product types.
Two thirds of companies use manual efforts or custom code, but they say it’s too unreliable (75%) or too slow (64%).
Gartner (and many other analyst firms) have given great reviews to Silver Creek in the last few months.
Oracle’s Product Data Quality Server (DataLens bundled into and pre-integrated with Oracle PIM Hub by Oracle) has been used at large retail, manufacturing and health care companies.
The product’s capability starts with semantic recognition – recognizing the product within the current context – and then you can standardize, match, enrich, and repurpose the data, although those things are quite different for product data than for customer data.
The session wound up with a demo of DataLens, and the integration with Oracle’s PIM Hub.
I’ve spent the last six months on the product side of the master data management world, so I’ve found Silver Creek’s DataLens product very interesting, as it solves a major problem in the product MDM space. It was great seeing the Silver Creek folks presenting with Oracle at OpenWorld today.
Building a Next Generation Business using AIA
This afternoon at Oracle OpenWorld, I attended a great session led by Darrin Pohlman, Enterprise Architect at LexisNexis and MK Rizwan from Infosys.
They talked about the enterprise transformation program at LexisNexis, and the strategic use of technology to enable and drive that transformation effort.
MK started by pointing out the constraints of the single, global instance application strategy. You’re constrained by the vendor’s application architecture, and not all the functionality is best-of-breed across the entire suite. There are inevitable customizations and extensions which pile up over time, which leads to ever-increasing Total Cost of Ownership. It’s difficult to introduce industry-specific functionality, and it takes a long time to introduce new business models or capabilities.
The trend recently has been toward unbundling of the packages through SOA integration such as Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture (AIA) and the accompanying Process Integration Packs (PIPs). Further trends include vendor consolidation – Oracle acquiring Siebel, Hyperion, BEA, etc.
Interestingly, MK mentioned the important of prioritizing master data management, which got my attention, and he mentioned that would be particularly as people started to migrate in the future to the Fusion Applications products.
They went on to talk about AIA, particularly foundation packs, process integration packs and direct integrations. The foundation pack provides shared services, design patterns and standards. It runs on Fusion Middleware.
Darrin discussed the pro’s of AIA: good reference model for building composite applications, standards-based, extensible for unique characteristics of your business, and where Oracle is eager to demonstrate successful implementations. On the con side, PIPs can be tightly coupled, and the versioning of the AIA foundation pack can depend on specific versions of Siebel and other Oracle applications. Also, there are change management considerations of the IT team. There are licensing and maintenance considerations as well.
LexisNexis is an early adopter of this technology but has to plan for multiple upgrades over the next 12-18 months.
The audience was very engaged and asked some great questions during the session.
I found the session very helpful in better understanding the underlying enterprise architecture and technology strategy that LexisNexis is pursuing, and how Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture fits into that strategy, and Darrin and MK did a great job in explaining the pro’s and con’s of the approach and the experience that LexisNexis has had with it so far.
Aaron Zornes Data Governance Session at Oracle OpenWorld
I’ve always enjoyed the depth and quality of Aaron Zornes’ analysis on master data management. I’ve been attending the MDM Summit conferences that he organizes in the U.S. with SourceMedia since 2006, and I’ve spoken at quite a few of his events.
Today I had the pleasure of hearing him speak on enterprise data governance. Here are some of his major points:
- Don’t settle for “passive” / downstream data governance; instead demand “active” / upstream data governance (please see my white paper with Siperian on this at http://forms.siperian.com/content/PowerGovernancePR).
- Don’t expect data governance maturity assessments to solve all your problems and provide a roadmap out of data governance anarchy.
- Today’s “data stewardship consoles” are substantially less than true enterprise data governance.
- Vendor viability does matter.
- Be prepared to spend $250k-$500k for an initial data governance solution.
Aaron styles himself as the “godfather of MDM” and today was a good reminder of why he deserves that title.
“Just Call Oracle”
Oracle showed a funny video today in Thomas Kurian’s keynote address on Day 2 of Oracle OpenWorld.
Using a fictional company with lots of systems and applications issues, Thomas walked everyone through how Oracle would solve a lot of those problems.
There were some great customer cameos from companies like Ingersoll-Rand and Office Depot. It was a little on the sales-y side, as Oracle keynotes can sometimes be, but it was well done and wasn’t over the top.
This session was a good reminder of the breadth and depth of Oracle’s offerings in the technology and applications space, and frankly it made my head hurt. I’m glad that Hub Designs specializes in master data management – the Oracle universe has gotten so big, it’s a little overwhelming for most people.
I’ll write more later today on the MDM track sessions.
