Gartner Releases Its Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management

The demand for solutions to manage customer data has increased, according to Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Customer Data.

A organization's ability to create and maintain a sharable version of customer master data is regarded as an essential requirement in commercial and noncommercial spaces, according to the report's author, Research Vice President John Radcliffe. But, he argues, large enterprises tend to have heterogeneous application and information management porfolios with inconsistent and sometimes inaccurate data and no current systems contain only a single view or manage the complete lifecycle of master data.

Gartner has been monitoring the of customer data management market (previously known as the customer data integration  hub market) since 2004. MDM has become a larger part of the emerging multi-domain and multi-use-case MDM market.

"[Gartner is] routinely asked whether we have an overall MDM Magic Quadrant, but, while we continue to monitor the aggregate MDM market, we still believe that it is premature, because MDM needs are very diverse, leading to different market segments and the majority of the buying activity still focused on initiatives for specific master data domains," writes Radcliffe. " In addition, although many MDM solutions are marketed as multi-domain MDM, we find that they don't provide similar depth of capability in every data domain."

Radcliffe also adds that MDM of customer data technology is now considered in the "early mainstream status," progressing along the "Gartner Hype Cycle."

Although the recession caused a decrease in revenue in the software markets in 2009, the first quarter of 2010 saw great change in the  customer data management market. The two leading vendors, Initiate Systems and Siperian, were acquired by ICM and Informantica respectively. Microsoft also entered the market in the second quarter of 2010. New vendors like Ataccama, Information Builders, Microsoft, and Talend were not included in the Quadrant due to small revenues.

The business drivers for MDM of customer data include:

• compliance and risk management drivers, which tend to be the hardest benefits and are essential to have;
• cost optimization and efficiency drivers, which have tangible benefits and are a good fit for organizations during a down economy; and
  
• growth in revenue and profitability drivers, which can be more difficult to measure but are a major focus when the economy is going well.

The inclusion and exclusion criteria for participating vendors was kept the same as it was 2009 because of a slow return to growth drivers.

To be included in the Magic Quadrant, vendors  needed to have:

• at least 12 live customer references for MDM of customer data product functionality;
• at least eight new customers for MDM of customer data products in the past four quarters;
  
• at least $8 million in total software revenue (licenses and maintenance) related to MDM of customer data systems in the past four quarters;
• sufficient professional services to fulfill customer demand during the next six months; and
  
• enough cash to fund a year of operations at the current burn rate (that is, if the year of operations is cash-flow-negative, then companies spend their cash reserves).

This Magic Quadrant excludes:

• vendors focused on a single vertical industry market or single geographical region;
• vendors that solely focus on analytical (downstream) MDM requirements;
• vendors reselling another vendor's MDM of customer data product, unless they exceed the revenue minimum for inclusion; and
  
• providers of hosted services, marketing service providers, or data providers with trusted reference customer data external to the enterprise, but don't provide an MDM for customer data product that specifically meets the definition.

The report breaks down the vendors as follows:

The Leaders:

• Oracle (Siebel UCM)
• IBM (MDM Sever)
• IBM (intitiate MDS)
• Informatica

The Challengers:

• Oracle (CHD)

The Niche Players:

• SAP
• D&B Parisma
• DataFlux
• Tibco Software
• VisionWare

There were no Visionaries in this year's report.

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