MDM Landscape

MDM Landscape

The MDM Landscape Q2 2022

Master data management (MDM) is the software and set of supporting processes to support the handling of data that goes across an organization, such as customer and product data. There are several master data domains in addition to these, such as data on locations, suppliers, assets, staff, contracts etc. It is common for a global enterprise to have dozens or even hundreds of major applications spread across many subsidiaries, including multiple instances of ERP systems, so this kind of master data is almost inevitably duplicated across different enterprise software applications, with potentially inconsistent data appearing across business processes like “sell to customer”. Even if you started with a clean slate of perfectly consistent master data, as soon as you make an acquisition of another company then that acquired company will bring with it its own systems and master data, and this will take time to integrate. If you do a lot of acquisitions (and some large companies make more than one such purchase a month) then it can be seen how tricky it is to ensure consistency of key master data. This inconsistency makes it hard to answer even basic questions about the operational running of a business. For example, suppose you decided that you want to rationalise your brands and eliminate the least profitable ones. To do this you actually need to have data about the revenues by brand and consistent cost allocation rules so that you can calculate brand profitability. If revenue and cost data are spread amongst multiple systems and cost allocation rules are inconsistent across an enterprise then you have no sound basis to even get started.

Such problems led to the development of the master data management industry, originally concentrated around the common domains of customer and product data, but later expanding to cater for asset, location and other master data. Such data is either co-ordinated in a virtual form or physically copied into master data hubs, where business rules are applied to ensure that the most reliable and up to date version of master data is identified. This data may be fed into a data warehouse for analytic purposes, or (more rarely) used to correct older or incorrect data in operational systems. MDM software needs to be able to handle issues such as hierarchy management and be able to resolve inconsistencies between classification schemes used in different operational systems. There is an inherent data quality element to any MDM project, as reliable master data should be complete, accurate and up to date. MDM software typically has its own data quality components such as merge/matching, either as part of the core software or through an OEM arrangement with a data quality vendor.

These days, MDM software has to deal not just with data held in on-premise operational systems, but also data held in public or private clouds. As well as traditional numeric values, MDM systems need to be able to deal with text, images and video, for example descriptions of consumer products that are advertised on a corporate website. Such product data may very well be imported from suppliers or exported to channel partners. A modern MDM system should be able to handle relatively static reference data such as currency and country codes, but also regularly changing data such as customer addresses, product images and may be required to deal with near real-time data from eCommerce systems and websites. Customer data records may number in the hundreds of millions, and product data may have very complex classification schemes for different marketing purposes, with variable depth hierarchies.

In recent years we have seen some consolidation in the industry as larger vendors have acquired innovative start-ups and moved from point MDM solutions to broader data management platforms that encompass data preparation and transformation, MDM and data quality in (at least on paper) integrated software suites. This M&A activity continues, with for example Riversand being acquired by Syndigo in May 2021, as well as Magnitude being acquired by insightsoftware in October 2021. Various analysts project the MDM software industry will continue to grow at a rate of around 15% in the coming years, around double that of the enterprise software market as a whole. Information Difference research shows that on average the people costs of an 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 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 the following elements: 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, (revenue adjusted) customer base and geographic coverage. The Information Difference maintains profiles on each vendor that 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 (MDM Select) that 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 vendor with the happiest customers was Viamedici, followed closely by Magnitude and Informatica, and then Ataccama, Stibo Systems and TIBCO. Congratulations to those vendors.

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

Below is a list of the significant MDM vendors.