The Information Difference Company

The MDM Landscape Q2 2010

The master data management (MDM) market continued to grow in 2009, despite the difficult economy. We estimate the MDM software market to be worth $565 million, a 7% increase over 2008. 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 $311 million, maintenance revenue at $96 million and MDM professional services revenue of the software vendors at $158 million. Our latest 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 last year saw continued consolidation in the space, with the acquisition of Initiate by IBM and of Siperian by Informatica. There is now a clear split between vendors offering a broad software stack including data quality and data integration software versus pure-play offerings. The vendors of such platforms (Informatica, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Talend, Tibco) will naturally argue that they offer advantages due to pre integration of the various elements of an MDM solution, while the pure play vendors retort that they offer flexibility since they are not tied to a specific middleware stack.

General developments in the market include a surge of interest in data governance, as companies start to move beyond initial MDM projects in one business area and need to tackle the business ownership and processes needed for cross-enterprise master data management. MDM vendors are increasingly responding by adding functionality to their products to support governance-related roles like data stewards (one example of which is Global IDs), while one vendor (Kalido) has launched a stand-alone data governance offering not tied to their MDM product.

MDM vendors are increasingly realising that data quality is an inherent part of any MDM project (our own research shows that data quality issues consume around 30% of a typical MDM project), and have responded by either OEMing stand-alone data quality products, or even acquiring them (Tibco bought Netrics, for example). In the case of Ataccama they have gone the other way, a case of a data quality vendor later adding an MDM product to its suite (this is also resold as part of a wider offering by Information Builders). The same can be said of DataFlux, a leading data quality vendor now with a separate MDM hub. Similarly Teradata has added an MDM product to serve its data warehouse customers.

The need to manage different data domains (i.e. beyond customer and product) has increasingly been recognised by vendors. In some cases this has been done by changing marketing messages to reflect a multi-domain stance. Vendors that specialise in product data (GXS, Heiler, Hybris, Sparesfinder, Stibo, Tibco) are being asked to demonstrate their support for related data types e.g. locations associated with the sale of products. However the recognition that certain data domains have specific characteristics has been shown in the case of Data Foundations bringing out a CDI offering to complement its existing multi-domain product, which already supports operational and analytical MDM.

There are also vendors that have targeted a specific industry niche (Cadis, Smartco and Golden Source in financial services, Visionware in local government) or a different data domain, such as Rollstream for supplier data.

The entry of Microsoft into the MDM market in April 2010 was too late for inclusion in this research cycle, but clearly will have some influence on the market.

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 detailed 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 Data Foundations, followed by Visionware, DataFlux, Stibo and Cadis.
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(*) If a vendor did not provide sufficient customer references, a moderate default score was assigned.


Below is a list of the significant MDM vendors.