Expert Analysis: The New Masters of Master DataExpert Analysis: The New Masters of Master Data

One month into the New Year and new decade, master data management (MDM) has come to the fore. Thanks to recent moves by Informatica and Talend, MDM is making headlines. Will its time in the limelight attract enough attention to sustain interest? Will 2010 be the year in which MDM beats back the negative rap it has in some IT circles for being difficult, expensive and slow to deliver?

Given that the quest to bring consistency and quality to data stretches well into the past and will continue into the future, MDM is probably not the last word, or acronym, we'll hear on the subject. In many organizations, implementing MDM technology isn't even the hardest part; "governance" issues involving people, politics and processes end up being more difficult. First, there's the age-old battle between IT and users about who really owns or controls the data. And second, with the benefits of MDM or any information management initiative often well downstream, it can be hard to sustain backing and funding.

However, all that said, MDM is rising in importance because organizations are indeed under pressure to improve their ability to access, analyze and manage information. If you are going to be a data-driven organization, you need a steady supply of good data. Plus, overlaying the business reasons for making improvements to information management are toughening regulations and policies for data privacy, security and reporting. To participate in collaborative systems such as healthcare information exchanges (HIEs) and similar entities specialized for other industries, organizations need to meet these requirements and manage data well -- not to mention more efficiently using software automation to keep the cost of doing so from skyrocketing.

Will recent vendor moves have an impact? Informatica's purchase of Siperian last week wasn't an earth-shattering event given the close technology and marketing partnership that already existed between the two companies. Siperian even had embedded in its solutions identity resolution technology from Identity Systems, which Informatica acquired in 2008. So, customers of both companies should not have to wait long for deeper integration.

The Siperian acquisition puts Informatica squarely in the MDM market. Through other acquisitions and development, Informatica had been amassing tools that are important to MDM initiatives, but the company did not own the hub itself. Now, Informatica will be in a position to supply the core hub technology as well as tools for HIEs, customer or patient data hubs and other "party" MDM systems. Companies should benefit from the stronger competition that Informatica will give the usual suspects that appear on the customer data integration (CDI) and MDM technology short lists, such as Initiate Systems and Oracle.

Potentially more disruptive is data integration vendor Talend's introduction of Talend MDM, which is based on open source code. Along with the free open-source community edition offered at Talend's Web site, the company is marketing an enterprise edition for $100,000 or less, depending on various size factors. Talend's move clearly brings a lower-cost alternative into the MDM technology market.

Talend claims that its MDM system, which it developed based on the Amalto technology it acquired in early 2009, does not have a "rigid" data model specialized for customer, product or other specific types of data. In other words, Talend proposes that companies can use its one, XML-based data model for all MDM purposes. "Our model is the centerpiece of everything we do," said Jim Walker, product marketing manager, during my briefing with the company. By using XML to describe the data, Talend says that its data model "drives the lifecycle of the master data. The data within our hub controls its own destiny regarding when it should be updated, validated, integrated with other systems or augmented with other data."

Having a common model addresses a significant concern many companies have about MDM: that is, whether MDM initiatives will simply create more, albeit higher-level information silos built around particular types of data. The other side of the question, of course, is whether a general-purpose MDM system can handle specific needs, such as for CDI hubs or product information management (PIM) systems. However, given that XML support is found in so many languages and tools for software and service development and integration today, developers at Talend or elsewhere in the open-source community could create tools for specialized purposes.

Talend and Informatica have given the information managers and developers something to talk about. No doubt, competitors such as IBM, Initiate and Oracle will be heard from as the year unfolds. But will the discussion offer sweet enough music to the ears of business users, who "own" the data, if not potential project funding? It'll probably take a different kind of melody than we've heard thus far to make the business advantages crystal clear.

David Stodder is an independent analyst, writer and researcher focused on innovative uses of information to achieve business objectives. Along with heading up his own firm, Perceptive Information Strategies, he is a Research Fellow with Ventana Research.