MDM Landscape - The Information Difference Company Limited

The MDM Landscape Q2 2011

The master data management (MDM) market in 2010 experienced dramatic growth.  We estimate that the market for MDM software was worth $740 million, reflecting vigorous growth of 31% over 2009.  This includes the MDM-related revenues of all the software companies operating in the market.  It does not include systems integration and consulting revenue associated with MDM implementations (but does include the professional services revenue of the software vendors).  We calculate the pure software license revenue for MDM software at $407 million, maintenance revenue at $126 million and MDM professional services revenue of the software vendors at $207 million.  Our research shows that on average the people costs of a MDM project are four times that of the software license cost, so there is clearly a large and separate consultancy market associated with MDM.

The market has continued to see significant merger and acquisition activity, as well as new products and a number of companies rebadging their offerings with an MDM slant.  Vendors large and small have been reporting substantially increased software license sales, both to new customers and with expansion of the software footprint with customers that until recently had been running limited scale pilot projects, but are now deploying MDM more widely.  

The increasing market maturity is reflected by the degree to which just about every large software vendor can now claim an MDM product (in some cases several products) as part of a broader software stack.  Whereas MDM used to be sold as a stand-alone product, now it is increasingly marketed as part of an interconnected broader platform, with data quality, data integration and even workflow and support for data governance in addition to a master data repository.  Several previously independent vendors have been snapped up by larger players.  Recent examples include the acquisition of Data Foundations by Software AG and Rollstream by GXS.   Major vendors IBM, SAP, Oracle, Informatica, Teradata and DataFlux, as well as open source vendor Talend, had already gone down this path.  Microsoft is at an earlier stage in this evolution with the release of their MDS product.

Although there are still independent vendors with multidomain solutions, such as Orchestra Networks, Kalido and Ataccama, there are also many vendors that specialise in a particular data domain, even if their products can deal with multiple domains from a technical viewpoint.  The most obvious example of this is the product data domain, which has specialist vendors like Stibo, Heiler, hybris and Riversand  (GXS, Tibco, Zycus and Sparesfinder are others).  Other vendors have specialized in different data domains, such as Rollstream and Zycus in supplier data, or in certain verticals (VisionWare in UK local government and US healthcare, GoldenSource in financial services).
        
In terms of customer deployments, we have seen a dramatic upsurge in the awareness of how data governance should be an integrated part of, if not a precursor to, a successful MDM program.  Data governance is the set of processes and the organisation designed to allow the business to take ownership of data, rather than just relying on the IT department to sort things out.  The very nature of master data, which is shared across an enterprise, means dealing with inconsistent and competing data definitions, and this means engaging with business people.  Although data governance is not a technology, MDM vendors are increasingly moving to at least provide support for data governance through software, in the form of workflow support, data governance reporting, data stewardship consoles and the like.  Kalido has gone as far as releasing a data governance product unconnected to its own MDM offering which can work with MDM hubs from other vendors.
   
We believe that the last twelve months has seen MDM truly moving to a new level, beyond its early pioneering stage into a mainstream technology.  More and more companies are starting down the MDM path, and many more are expanding beyond the pilot stage in broader deployments.  The main vendors in the market are summarised in the diagram below.  

The landscape diagram represents the market in three dimensions.  The size of the bubble represents the customer base of the vendor i.e. the number of corporations it has sold MDM software to, adjusted for deal size. The larger the bubble, the broader the customer base, though this is not to scale.  The technology score is made up of a weighted set of scores derived from: customer satisfaction as measured by a survey of reference customers (*), analyst impression of the technology, maturity of the technology in terms of its time in the market and the breadth of the technology in terms of its coverage against our functionality model.  Market strength is made up of a weighted set of scores derived from: MDM revenue, growth, financial strength, size of partner ecosystem and geographic coverage.  The Information Difference maintains profiles on each vendor which go into more detail.  Customers are encouraged to carefully look at their own specific requirements rather than high-level assessments such as the Landscape diagram when assessing their needs.  We maintain a comprehensive MDM functionality model and evaluation approach which we offer to customers.

A significant part of the "technology" dimension scoring is assigned to customer satisfaction, as determined by a survey of vendor customers.  In this research cycle the vendors with the happiest customers were VisionWare, followed by Software AG (previously Data Foundations), Informatica, hybris and Kalido.   Our congratulations to those vendors.

___________________________
(*) In the absence of sufficient completed references, a neutral score was assigned to this factor.


Below is a list of the significant MDM vendors.