MDM Landscape
The MDM Landscape Q2 2020
Master data management (MDM) is the software and supporting processes to support the handling of data that crosses an organization. Customer data and product data are the best-known examples, but many other data fits into the same category, for example data on suppliers, assets, locations, staff, contracts etc. This master data is often duplicated across the many computer systems of a large enterprise, with the competing versions of such data causing problems when you need to take a view across the business. For example, if you want to know your profitability by customer, then the revenues and costs associated with each customer need to be consistently stored, allocated and calculated.
To deal with master data consistency an industry of software solutions has been developed over the last two decades. Master data is usually stored in a separate repository or database, drawn from source systems, or at the least a map of master data relationships is stored, so that a central system knows where to go to look for the data. Business rules are established to determine which data sources are the most trusted and up to date, and data quality rules are applied to ensure accuracy. Matching algorithms are used to detect likely duplicate records, often with workflow-driven processes to ensure review by domain experts, and finally a “golden copy” of master data records is produced. This can be used to drive other systems, such as corporate data warehouses or analytic applications. Data governance processes are complementary to master data management, and modern MDM tools usually provide some degree of support for data governance, allowing data stewards to ensure that data is accurate, complete and up to date, and to resolve issues of inconsistency between systems. Recently some vendors have employed artificial intelligence techniques to help, for example training expert systems on how human data stewards resolve record matching issues, in order to improve automated matching.
MDM software originally focused on customer and product data, which are common to virtually every enterprise. Customer data tends to be high in volume especially in industries such as Telco, retail and retail banking, but relatively simple. Product data tends to be less voluminous but more elaborate, often with complex hierarchies of classification, and so these two data domains typically require somewhat different product features. Multi-domain software, the third original strand of the MDM market, was designed to handle any master data types, asset data, location data etc. These days most MDM vendors claim to support any data domain, but typically have a heritage in one of these three separate strands, and these typically reflect the bulk of their customer use cases.
The MDM industry is responding to the gradual migration of enterprise applications from on-premise to the cloud, a trend which takes times due to the sheer number of installed applications but is a trend that is steadily gathering pace. As data starts to migrate from in-house servers to the cloud, MDM software needs to be able to adapt to this, and to be able to handle data from a hybrid environment, with some sources on premise and some in the cloud. Similarly, the number and type of data sources continues to diversify, with the rise of “big data” storage such as HDFS files, designed to provide inexpensive storage for extremely large data generated by web commerce applications, sensors and the like depending on the industry.
The MDM market in the past year showed continued growth. We estimate that the market for MDM software was worth $1.7 billion. 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 $908 million, maintenance revenue at $281 million and MDM professional services revenue of the software vendors at $462 million. Our 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: 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 Ataccama, just a whisker ahead of TIBCO and Profisee, followed by Magnitude and Stibo Systems. 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.
| Vendor | Brief Description | Website |
|---|---|---|
| Agility Multichannel (by Magnitude) | MDM for product data vendor specializing in product management for commerce. Acquired by Magnitude in late 2017. | www.agilitymultichannel.com |
| AllSight | SaaS vendor that populates an intelligent Customer 360 through synthesis, inferences and analytics. | www.allsight.com |
| Ataccama | Ataccama is a data management & data governance vendor with an MDM offering, one part of their integrated enterprise platform. | www.attacama.com |
| Cadis | Enterprise data management vendor specializing in financial services industry. | www.cadisedm.com |
| Contentserv | Provides retailers and brands a “Product Experience Platform” combining MDM, PIM, DAM, and Marketing Experience Management in a single stack. | www.contentserv.com |
| D&B Purisma | Customer hub software acquired by business services giant D&B. | www.pursima.com |
| Dell Boomi | Services arm of Dell now has a cloud-based MDM software product. | www.boomi.com/mdm |
| EnterWorks | Multi-domain MDM vendor with its roots in product information management. | www.enterworks.com |
| Global IDs | New York-based vendor with an emphasis on data governance. | www.globalids.com |
| Golden Source | UK vendor specializing in financial services industry. | www.thegoldensource.com |
| GXS | Vendor specializing in product master data but which can manage other data domains. | www.gxs.com www.gxsproductmasterdata.com |
| hybris | Vendor specializing in product master data and eCommerce. Now part of SAP. | www.hybris.com |
| IBM | Industry giant with comprehensive MDM offerings across all data domains and implementation styles. | www.ibm.com |
| Indus Valley Partners (IVP) | Enterprise data management vendor specializing in the buy side of the capital markets. | www.ivp.in |
| Informatica | Informatica offers a modular, end-to-end, multi-domain MDM that’s unified, flexible and scalable. Built on Intelligent Data Platform (IDP), MDM provides master data-fueled business apps such as Product 360, Supplier 360, Customer 360, Customer 360 for Salesforce, Relate 360 that are designed to address key business challenges every organizations face. Informatica’s MDM solution combines Data as a Service (DaaS), Data Quality, and Business Process Management. | www.informatica.com |
| Information Builders (IBI) | Provider of Enterprise BI, MDM, Data Quality and Integration. Offers iWay Master Data Suite, OMNI packaged solutions for healthcare, and OMNI-Gen MDM automation technology. | www.informationbuilders.com |
| InRiver | Product Information Management vendor with its HQ in Sweden. | www.inriver.com |
| InterSystems | Vendor using an object database combined with an application integration platform to provide MDM. | www.intersystems.co.uk |
| Lansa | Vendor with PIM and eCommerce tool amongst a broader software portfolio. | www.lansa.com |
| Liaison | Cloud-based MDM software with an emphasis on product data. | www.liaison.com |
| Magnitude | Model-driven multi-domain MDM vendor (formerly called Kalido) with increasing emphasis on operational MDM use cases. | www.kalido.com |
| Naveego | A hybrid and multi-cloud data accuracy product using artificial intelligence. | www.naveego.com |
| Oracle | Database and applications giant with several MDM solutions. | www.oracle.com |
| Pitney Bowes Software | A large vendor that in 2012 launched an MDM product based on a graphical database. | www.pb.com |
| Profisee | Pure-play MDM vendor based on Microsoft tech stack. Single, integrated product, cloud-native PaaS and inherently multidomain. | www.profisee.com |
| QAD | Vendor specializing in product master data. | www.qad.com |
| Reltio | Master data cloud solution specializing in life sciences. | www.reltio.com |
| Riversand | Multi-domain master data provider specializing in product data. | www.riversand.com |
| Rollstream | Vendor specializing in supplier master data. | www.rollstream.com |
| Salsify | Product content management vendor. | www.salsify.com |
| SAP | Applications giant with its own MDM solution. | www.sap.com |
| SAS | The privately held software giant has a multi-domain MDM solution. | www.sas.com |
| Semarchy | Hybrid, "Intelligent Data Hub" multi-domain MDM vendor focused on governance, quality, catalogue and workflows in parallel. | www.semarchy.com |
| Sigma Systems | Vendor with catalogue management, order management and provisioning software. | www.sigma-systems.com |
| Smartco | Enterprise data management vendor specializing in financial services industry. | www.smartco.com |
| Software AG | Vendor of multi-domain MDM, BPM, and SOA solutions. | www.softwareag.com/mdm |
| sparesfinder | Vendor specializing in the mastering of spares part data. | www.sparesfinder.com |
| Stibo Systems | Stibo Systems provide a full integrated, multi-domain solution that supports large data sets at scale. | www.stibosystems.com |
| Talend | Open source vendor with an MDM suite. | www.talend.com |
| Teradata | Database giant with its own multi-domain MDM and Reference Data Management (RDM) that provides a data and analytics ecosystem and powers Customer Data Platform. | www.teradata.com |
| TIBCO | Formerly Orchestra Networks, a model-driven, multi-domain MDM product (TIBCO EBX) with an emphasis on data governance. | www.orchestranetworks.com |
| Veeva | Provides cloud-based multi-domain MDM software to the life sciences industry. | www.veeva.com |
| verato | Provide identity management software and data, crossing the boundaries between MDM, data quality and data broker. | www.verato.com |
| Verdantis | Provides cloud-based MDM software for the material and product domains with self-service and turnkey delivery models. | www.verdantis.com |
| Viamedici | German MDM vendor specializing in MDM for manufacturing. | www.viamedici.com |
| VisionWare | MDM vendor based in UK and US specializing in healthcare, financial services and local government with their MultiVue product. | www.visionwareplc.com |
| Winshuttle | Data management and process automation vendor providing a multi-domain MDM solution called EnterWorks. | www.winshuttle.com |