It’s Official: Metadata Management Is a Strategic Problem –

Gartner recently published its first ever Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions.

Managing metadata isn’t a new problem. Gartner‘s Magic Quadrant research reports aren’t new, either — the market watcher has been publishing them for eight years now. Why, then, did Gartner only publish its first-ever Magic Quadrant for metadata management in 2016?

Because it only now believes metadata management has become a strategic problem.

“The growing need for organizations to treat information as an asset is making metadata management strategic,” write analysts Guido De Simoni and Roxane Edjlali in the Gartner report.

If you’re an old data management (DM) hand, you might be thinking, “Metadata management? No problem!” In traditional DM, metadata management is a well-understood problem for which there is a wide range of workable technological and process-oriented solutions. Besides, you might say, even if some of the issues that come under the rubric of managing metadata do pose unique challenges (master data management, for one), they’re nonetheless doable — and you’d be right.

However, Gartner‘s inaugural Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions looks at the new lay of the land — a land in which NoSQL systems such as Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB, and others are important and growing factors.