My exposure to Master Data Management as a tool and all the surrounding process, organization and platforms dates back to 2005 in one form or another. MDM as a tool and its expected functionality are evolving constantly. I was curious to see what MDM tools and vendor landscape looked like in 2006 compared to MDM Tools as it stands in 2014. MDM market typically has been a fragmented market place with major market share (Over 50%) among the small vendors.
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As with any new technology, start-ups go for the market share until the consolidation happens. So let’s look at the charts and see how the market place has changed. My quick observation is that the big companies with no core Data Management expertise vanished along with their MDM products. Some of the data rich companies stayed within that domain (D&B still has an MDM product). So the large software vendors has secured their dominance in terms of product offering and market share, though a lot of small vendors are still in the market. My experience is that MDM is gravitating towards a tool with bells & whistles. But two major themes remain strong, MDM for specific Domain and Multi-Domain MDM. I also find big vendors have multiple MDM products and they may consolidate those products. I got a kick out of seeing some of the familiar but non-existent companies. Enjoy!
The problem here is that the Forrester wave is fundamentally flawed. I don’t know what research was done prior to issuing it or what the criteria are for appearing on it but there are so many good MDM products missing from it as to make it useless; Orchestra Networks, Stibo and my own company Semarchy to name just a few. No doubt you will immediately know of many more.
I agree that the list does not include all the products. I am familiar with Orchestra, and Stibo in catalog and MDM. Amazingly Gartner list also looks the same. To be fair I compared Forrester to Forrester. Smaller MDM vendors still hold significant market share, looks like the criteria here is market presence which may push the big vendors to the top quadrant. But my point is Tibco is in the game, Sun Micro doesn’t exist, Initiate is now IBM etc.
Yep, there missing in fact some big leaders, as in the MDM for Supply Chain (Between Enterprise Application and Data Management) where you can found for example Agility from AgilityMultichannel which is surely not a small one in the market.
I agree with Richard. The Forrester MDM Wave is no doubt flawed and a closer look at the criteria they put up just gives an unrealistic picture of what the market is actually requesting and using. Like Richard mentions Stibo Systems (my company), Orchestra and others should be in it. Although they just released their PIM wave which gives a more clear picture on the market. I am sure the MDM Wave will be very different next time;)
Is there a better resource/study to see more complete list? Lot of the PIM vendors focus on the product solutions which goes beyond MDM and end up us catalog or retail solutions and not counted as ‘True MDM’ solutions…I am interested in knowing the volume of sales or customer base for example – that is not easily avaialable and no one will talk about it either. Thoughts?
Well I assume it depends on the definition of MDM. For me managing master data strategically as an asset is the key to MDM. The it does not matter if it is Product data, Customer data etc. and the PIM solutions out there is more than just Retail and Catalog solutions.
I would look more towards Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Product and Customer MDM. They also state they cannot do a joined MDM Quadrant with the current market.