Purisma Points to MDM

Purisma upgraded its core Data Hub MDM solution and unveiled what it claims to be the industry's first MDM appliance system by releasing the first of its series of Business Data Appliances dubbed MDM in a box. Bob Hagenau, vice president of products, says his company's appliance is "software-only," meaning it runs independent of proprietary hardware platforms. The first of these Business Data Appliances is called MyData for Dunn and Bradstreet and is targeted at customers that leverage Dunn and Bradstreet, which hosts and enriches B2B information for companies, Hagenau says. For example, a company might upload their Siebel CRM data to D&B, who then cleanses and appends it with hierarchical and additional information. The enriched data is then pushed back to the company's Siebel database and used to support business initiatives like cross- and upselling. "Hundreds of D&B customers have problems exchanging information from their own systems and D&B," Hagenau says. MyData for D&B looks to address this problem by leveraging the Purisma MDM Hub's interchange and enrichment functions that have now been linked to D&B environments through predefined workflows, hierarchy views, and exception management and change preservation tools. "Typically file exchanges with D&B are via flat file or ETL that sometimes get corrupted; hence the process of transfer itself could take over a week," Hagenau says. With the Business Data Appliances family, Purisma is taking a point-solution approach to tackling MDM, according to Hagenau. Rather than attempting to boil the ocean with an enterprise-wide implementation like the larger infrastructure players like IBM, Oracle, and SAP, Purisma is attempting to make it easier for enterprises to launch their MDM initiatives by targeting specific departments and lines of business. Ray Wang, senior analyst, enterprise applications, at Forrester Research, says these point solutions are becoming tremendously popular, as it provides companies with "different entry points" into the broader MDM project. "An organization doesn't have to go full throttle into a 2 or 3 year implementation and rollout of an MDM project." In parallel with its appliance launch, Purisma also updated its flagship product, Data Hub. Version 3 of the software extends the data stewardship capabilities with better team-based governance that incorporates workflow-driven prioritization, delegation, review, and approval tools. More advanced rules-based management capabilities have also been added to catch data exceptions and hand them off to stewards for the necessary changes. Version 3 also beefs up multidimensional hierarchy management, allowing multiple rollups for the same dimensional data representations. "It's really useful for what-if scenarios, where you might want to move subsidiaries in your organizational hierarchy around," Hagenau says. Companies can also auto-generate and maintain role-based views of master data across dimensions. Some of the new features in Data Hub 3.0 also ripple over to the MyData for D&B appliance as well. Hagenau says that MyData for D&B will be fully upgradeable to Purisma's full-fledged Data Hub product. "We really see this as a way to seed the market for our fuller MDM technology platform." Related articles: DataFlux Accelerates the Path to MDM and CDI MDM for Companies on the Go

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