Five Pitfalls to Avoid with Hadoop
The master data management (MDM) software market reached $1.08 billion last year, according to a recent Information Difference Report on the MDM landscape. That’s a 24 percent growth rate over 2011.
How does that break down? Well, it doesn’t include systems integration (and keep in mind, integration plays a key role in MDM) or consulting revenues, but it does include:
- $591 million for MDM software licenses
- $182 million for maintenance costs
- $301 for related professional services performed by the software vendors
Not surprisingly, product and customer data are still the primary reasons for adopting MDM. Pilot customer data projects in particular took seed and grew last year, the report states.
That’s nice for software vendors, but what takeaways are in this report for CIOs and other IT leaders?
- Need MDM for reference data such as currency codes, country codes and security codes? Shop around. It turns out some MDM vendors are offering a “cut-down reference data version of their MDM product at a lower price.”
- For MDM to succeed, you absolutely have to have data governance. To help, many vendors — but not all — are now offering some sort of support for data governance. Usually, it will be workflow modules for data stewards, the Information Difference report states.
- New trends that MDM vendors are starting to support: Big Data, especially Hadoop, as well as sentiment analysis and social media tracking.
- Expect new vendors to emerge and some to be acquired, the report warns.
- When you’re estimating the costs of your MDM project, don’t forget the consultancy costs. On average, that will be four times the software license cost, according to the report.
- Remember, just because a vendor ranks well doesn’t mean that’s the solution for you. Vendors may offer niche solutions, only a product or customer MDM tool or they may offer multi-domain MDM, which Gartner previously argued was still an immature market. The updated Magic Quadrant is expected in September, so we’ll see if that changes this year, but it’s worth considering for now.
- Which vendors have the happiest customers? The Information Difference includes a customer survey as part of its research. “In this research cycle the vendors with the happiest customers were Stibo Systems, Orchestra Networks and VisionWare, then those of IBM, Informatica and Software AG.”
The report is available for free reading. Overall, it’s more market-focused and less in-depth in evaluating the actual tools, but you’ll find a graph ranking the top vendors and a list of the “significant MDM vendors.”
As an added bonus, you don’t have to provide your name and email to anyone to read this report.
While you’re on the site, click product, then landscape and check out the Data Quality Landscape, released the first quarter of this year.
Data quality is a bit tricky as a market, because it started as a stand-alone solution, but most vendors now incorporate data quality tools into broader data management suites, as the report notes.
“Master data management projects have data quality as a major component; indeed an Information Difference survey showed that master data projects consume on average 30 percent of their budget on issues related to data quality,” the report states. “Data quality is increasingly being regarded as just one facet of data governance, with ever more links between these areas.”
The newest area of convergence: More databases now offer “in-database data quality.”
The report explains how data quality technology is adjusting to new data situations, such as mobile devices and better geospatial data.
Again, with data quality, it’s going to be tricky because it’s often bought as part of a more holistic solution, but for what it’s worth, the happiest reports came from customers who use X88, Active Prime and Trillium, followed closely by the customers of Satori, Datactics, SAS, IBM and Informatica.
