Gartner Highlights Three Trends That Will Shape Master Data Management Market

SOURCE:  IIFL

As the master data management (MDM) market grows and matures, new trends will help shape its evolution, according to Gartner Inc. IT and business leaders involved in MDM programs need to understand trends involving multi-domain MDM, MDM in the cloud, and MDM and social networking, so they can keep their strategies up to date.

“These three key trends are generating increasing interest within the MDM market and will have a significant impact on it over the next few years,” said John Radcliffe, research vice president at Gartner.

Analysts are outlining the key issues facing the industry here through Thursday at the Gartner Master Data Management Summit.

The three trends that will shape the MDM market include:

Growing Demand for Multi-domain MDM Software
By 2014, 66% of Fortune 1000 organizations will have deployed two or more MDM solutions to support their enterprise MDM strategies.

Historically, most MDM initiatives have been oriented around a single master data domain. However, many organizations are now striving for a broader vision of how to achieve multi-domain capabilities over time.

What constitutes the ‘multi’ in ‘multi-domain’ differs by industry. Implementation phases tend to focus on individual data domains, even if the overall vision is multi-domain. On the supply side an increasing number of MDM software vendors promote their products as supporting multi-domain MDM. “Although this may be true at some level, it does not necessarily mean that the vendor can meet all multi-domain needs in a single product,” Mr. Radcliffe said. “When evaluating MDM software products to meet multi-domain MDM needs, organizations should evaluate each relevant master data domain and demand proof that the vendor can satisfy both the breadth and depth of their requirements.

Rising Adoption of MDM in the Cloud
By 2015, 10 percent of packaged MDM implementations will be delivered as SaaS in the public cloud.

Currently, MDM is typically implemented in on-premises solutions. Many industries, such as financial services, are reluctant to place such important, heavily shared information as master data outside the firewall. Equally, there is resistance to the idea that the governance of one’s primary information assets can be left to an outsider. Privacy issues have also dampened adoption of software as a service (SaaS) in some regions, such as Europe. However, on-premises MDM solutions are increasingly being integrated with SaaS applications, and there are various cloud-sourced data services (such as data quality or data integration as a service) that can help with MDM implementations.

“On the supply side, very few MDM technology and service providers have, so far, developed specific MDM SaaS or PaaS products that are scalable, elastic and multitenant,” Mr. Radcliffe said. “But when they do, we expect them to exploit the cloud computing value proposition and increase their marketing of MDM in the cloud, in defined scenarios.”

Increasing Links Between MDM and Social Networks
By 2015, 15 percent of organizations will have added social media data about their customers to the customer master data attributes they manage in their MDM systems.

In a social customer relationship management (CRM) context customer insight derives from:
Sentiment analysis: What are people saying about my company, product or brand? This analysis can be either at the level of individuals or of an aggregate trend.
Network analysis: Who is that person? Whom do they know? How important are they as influencers?