Who Leads in the Race for Better Master Data Management?
The Internet of Things has opened a greater need for master data management.
The master data management (MDM) industry has existed for a number of years, but, according to a recent Magic Quadrant report from Gartner, the industry is in rapid and dramatic flux. After following the progression of individual players for a number of years, Gartner believes that soon, 80 percent of all MDM revenue will be driven by support for all of the buying company’s requirements, which is up from 15 percent in 2015.
The newest Magic Quadrant examines MDM industry leaders to determine which are striking the right balance between their ability to execute and the completeness of their vision.
For those not in the know, MDM solutions are software products that help companies link and synchronize master data and provide a central, persisted system of record. They aim to improve visibility and improve governance by workflow-based monitoring and the ability to take corrective action.
The newest Magic Quadrant looked at how each of the solutions instantiates master data, allows customers to use and construction the data, the latency and accessibility of master data, and even the size and physical location of the “golden record” itself. All the vendors have more than $15 million in revenue for MDM implementations and support operations in at least two of these regions: Americas, Europe and Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australasia.
At the top of the heap is Informatica, followed closely by Orchestra Networks—Gartner considers these two to be the only market leaders.
Informatica was praised for the sheer size of its MDM operations and continued investment in its core multidomain MDM platform. It has “the most extensive network of implementation partner firms of any vendor in this Magic Quadrant,” the report states. One hiccup was due to marketing—many early clients thought Informatica offers a physical product, when it is actually a vision and strategy involving multiple products.
Orchestra Networks is a smaller operation than Informatica, but its revenue grow 23.6 percent in 2015 and its EBX5 integrated MDM solution scored very highly among a customer survey. Orchestra also ranked best-in-class for the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Right in the middle were Riversand, IBM, SAP, and Stibo Systems, which were all closer to average in their completeness of vision and ability to execute.
