Getting Data Governance Up and Running
This is the latest article in an ongoing series on Data Governance sponsored by SAP. Read more 
Organizing Data Governance for Success
This series on Data Governance is sponsored by SAP. Previous articles have included Why Govern Master Data?, Getting Started with Data Governance, Part 1 and Getting Started with Data Governance, Part 2. Read more
Getting Started with Data Governance, Part 2
This is the third article in an ongoing series on Data Governance sponsored by SAP. Here are Part One and Part Two of the series. Read more
Getting Started with Data Governance, Part 1
This is the second article in an ongoing series on Data Governance sponsored by SAP. You can find the first article in the series here. Read more
Why Govern Master Data?
While I’m on vacation for the next two weeks, Hub Designs Magazine will be republishing some of our most popular articles and series. This article, from an ongoing series on Data Governance sponsored by SAP, was first published on March 20th.
The most important thing about data governance is to “start from where you are”. Most companies are just getting started on their data governance journey. It can be hard to admit that your company is at data governance maturity level 0 or 1. But the most critical step is the first one – getting started. Read more
Organizing Data Governance for Success
This series on Data Governance is sponsored by SAP. Previous articles have included Why Govern Master Data?, Getting Started with Data Governance, Part 1 and Getting Started with Data Governance, Part 2. Read more
Getting Started with Data Governance, Part 2
This is the third article in an ongoing series on Data Governance sponsored by SAP. Here are Part One and Part Two of the series. Read more
Getting Started with Data Governance, Part 1
This is the second article in an ongoing series on Data Governance sponsored by SAP. You can find the first article in the series here. Read more
Why Govern Master Data?
This is the first article in an ongoing series on Data Governance sponsored by SAP.
The most important thing about data governance is to “start from where you are”. Most companies are just getting started on their data governance journeys. It can be hard to admit that your company is at data governance maturity level 0 or 1. But the most critical step is the first one – getting started. Read more
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.
Speaking at SAP Virtual Trade Show
Hub Designs is an associate member of SAP’s alliance program, and on September 23rd, Dan Power from Hub Designs will be speaking at an SAP virtual trade show being put on by SearchSAP.com and TechTarget.
This free virtual seminar is focused on best practices for maximizing SAP performance. The day long virtual event features expert presentations, live panels and expert networking opportunities to help you make the most of your SAP environment, and will cover the hottest topics in SAP right now – including business intelligence, virtualization, master data management and mobile technologies. You’ll learn tips that you can put into practice immediately and you’ll get unbiased advice for long-term strategy development. At this unique online event, go beyond the hype and get insight into the latest technologies and best practices you can use to improve operational efficiency in SAP environments.
Dan Power’s session will be at 1:30 pm EDT, and will cover topics such as:
- Definitions of master data management, data governance and data quality
- The five essential elements of MDM
- Why companies are doing MDM and what this means to you
- Getting started on an MDM roadmap
- Is your organization ready?
- Creating the MDM business case
- MDM software selection
- Some important best practices
For more information, please visit http://searchsap.techtarget.com/feature/Getting-the-most-out-of-your-SAP-environment, and to register, please click here.
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.
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.
Maureen Butler Joins Team; Brings Extensive SAP Expertise
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I’m very pleased to announce that Maureen Butler is joining us as a Senior Consultant. She brings significant SAP information management, marketing, supply chain, organizational design and change management expertise to the team.
Prior to joining the firm, she was Director, Customer Information Management for a Fortune 500 company, W.W. Grainger, Inc., where she led a team of 35 people in cleansing & migrating customer data into an enterprise-wide SAP system. She also developed the Data Governance and Quality programs, and implemented Grainger’s Center of Excellence for Customer Information.
By launching a cross-functional Master Data Management initiative at W.W. Grainger to improve data quality and usability, she helped drive significant revenue growth, cost savings, and process improvements for customer acquisition and penetration.
Ms. Butler has more than seventeen years of strategic leadership experience in integrated market planning and communications, customer brand strategy, organizational design, change management, product management, and supply chain with companies such as W.W. Grainger, Inc., National Education Training Group, and Educational Resources.
She is a Six Sigma Champion and a graduate of Grainger’s Leadership Development Program. She received an MBA from Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, and a business marketing degree from Loyola University Chicago. Ms. Butler is located in Palatine, Illinois.
In line with our article yesterday on our MDM partnership strategy, Maureen will help us to establish and grow our partnership with SAP.
Our MDM Partnership Strategy
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At Hub Solution Designs, our MDM partnership strategy is pretty straightforward.
We are a management & technology consulting firm focused exclusively on Master Data Management and Data Governance. Our strategy is to partner with all of the leading MDM vendors, because there is no “one-size fits all” solution and businesses need options here. So our strategy is to provide unbiased solutions that best meet the needs of our clients.
Partnering with all of the MDM vendors is an ambitious strategy, but as Teddy Roosevelt said, “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing”.
And pragmatically speaking, as trusted advisors who bring a tested methodology and sound best practices to bear on every MDM engagement, we think the question of which consulting firm or systems integrator you select is, if anything, more important than which MDM hub platform you select.
So here’s where we stand today with the three MDM “mega-vendors” (Oracle, IBM and SAP) and the three smaller MDM vendors (Siperian, Initiate Systems and Purisma/D&B).
Oracle: We joined the Oracle Partner Network as a worldwide partner in November 2007. Several of our team members have extensive experience with Oracle’s growing portfolio of MDM solutions, and have driven successful implementations of them at financial services institutions, software companies, and high tech firms. We have good relationships with Oracle’s MDM product strategy team and with Oracle sales teams around the country. We’re also involved in the independent Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) and, as part of its Education Committee, helped plan the MDM track of OAUG’s upcoming COLLABORATE 08 conference.
IBM: We joined IBM’s PartnerWorld program in September 2007, based on knowing several people from DWL (acquired by IBM in 2005) and other parts of IBM. We think that IBM is going to do very well with companies in their “sweet spot” (certain industries like financial services and companies that are historically heavy users of IBM hardware or software). So we’ll keep looking for opportunities to grow our client relationships, our team and our expertise in the area of IBM’s MDM solutions.
SAP: another slow starter, with an MDM solution that was originally very centered around the “Product” domain. But SAP’s NetWeaver MDM solution continues to evolve and develop. And SAP also has a strong “sweet spot” of companies (global manufacturers, consumer packaged goods companies and European-headquartered firms), and a large installed base of SAP applications users who are pretty loyal when it comes to considering an MDM solution from SAP. We’re just about to join the SAP partner program at the Associate Partner level to start, and have just brought on a new team member with significant experience in Master Data Management and SAP.
We also continue to be impressed by the smaller MDM software vendors. We think we’re still in the early stages of MDM market development and there’s still room for a “best of breed” MDM strategy at this point.
The Siperian MDM Hub is a robust product, and is able to identify and manage relationships among multiple types of enterprise data, such as customers, products or accounts, across multiple applications and lines of business. The company has done very well in the financial services and pharmaceutical & life sciences industries. Siperian had a more than 300% growth rate from 2006 to 2007, and just received a $25 million round of financing in January, to support additional expansion in Europe and further development of its channels and products. The Siperian customers we’ve talked to really like the product, and the Siperian people we work with are top notch. We’ve been an approved Siperian partner since October 2007, and are planning to attend the Siperian user group and partner summit in San Francisco in early April.
Initiate Systems filed with the SEC to go public in November 2007. The company was founded in 1995 and has more than 140 customers in production, in industries such as health care, financial services, public sector, retail and technology, with marquee customers such as Microsoft, Intuit, Capital One, Countrywide, Wells Fargo, Humana, Hyatt Hotels, Barnes & Noble, CVS, and SuperValu. We signed a partnership agreement with Initiate in December 2007, after talking with some Initiate people and customers at the Fall 2007 MDM Summit conference in New York. The company’s technology has some very interesting capabilities, and we’re impressed with what we’ve seen to date of the product, the company and its people.
Purisma (a D&B company): Prior to starting Hub Solution Designs in mid-2007, I worked for Dun & Bradstreet for three years in its Global Alliance team, managing D&B’s strategic alliance with Oracle. I was part of various CDI and MDM related teams and initiatives within D&B, and was one of the few people from D&B to attend the first public CDI-MDM Summit conference in Spring 2006. After being an internal MDM evangelist at D&B for several years, I was pleased to see the company acquire Purisma in November 2007. The acquisition was a good strategic fit for both companies, allowing D&B to become more of a player in the Customer Data Integration (CDI) and MDM marketplace, and giving Purisma the chance to extend its market reach. We’re not formal partners with D&B/Purisma yet, but we’re working on it, and in the meantime, our network of informal relationships within both companies continues to grow.
After establishing and growing our relationships with all of these companies, we’re listening carefully to what our clients and the market as a whole are telling us about their relative strengths & weaknesses, who has the best product for which situation in which industries, and who’s growing their market share over time. We think there will be some additional consolidation in MDM, as in every other part of the enterprise software market, and we hope to continue as thought leaders by being able to look “around the corner” at what’s coming two to five years down the road.
We’ve got our eye on other large enterprise software players, like Microsoft, salesforce.com and Google, that are not yet really playing in the MDM space in an organized way.
Our formal & informal relationships with Oracle, IBM, SAP, Siperian, Initiate Systems and Purisma/D&B will continue to develop and grow. Our clients benefit from our solid methodology, approaches and best practices, plus the processes, procedures and data governance that we help you wrap around these MDM products, regardless of which vendor you select. Please review our service offerings for Educational Workshops, Readiness Assessment, Software Selection, and Business Case Creation to get an idea of how we help clients map out and execute a winning MDM strategy.
The vendors bring great technology and we bring great people with broad domain expertise.
