Informatica Perspectives

Las Vegas, as we all know, is the city of conventions, fantastic shows, great restaurants, and of course casinos. But one thing struck me on this visit that I hadn’t really noticed before. Each of these aspects of Las Vegas are world class in and of themselves. But when you really start to think about it, they are even more attractive as a complete set of activities which the conventioneer can pick and choose from to maximize the value of the trip – me, I chose to spend the day at TDWI sessions, dine at Bouchon, catch the Beatle’s Love show, and twice placed $5 down on #9 at the roulette table. Each of these is world class by themselves, but together, they provided an integrated experience that was greater than the sum of the parts. [Read more]

There is a new whitepaper from Evan Levy of Baseline Consulting available on our website, “Master Data Management – Building A Foundation For Success”. The theme of the paper is about what components make up the foundation of any MDM project – whether a customer hub, a product hub, an operational hub, an analytical hub, one that is bought from a vendor or one that you build yourself. In all cases, there is a common infrastructure that time and again, leading practitioners such as Mr. Levy find to be required. [Read more]

Since recently attending the Gartner MDM Summit, reading the latest report on MDM Trends from Forrester, and speaking with several customers, a few trends are starting to emerge:

• There is no one single technology that will help organizations solve all of their MDM challenges
• While some MDM products are supporting multiple domains, they are still either customer-centric or product-centric
• Analytical style of MDM is gaining in importance, and
• The common challenges across all data domains and hub styles are data integration and data quality

[Read more]

Many organizations use a half way point of their fiscal year to analyze results of their efforts and decide whether their strategies are working or if changes need to be made. Informatica just passed its half way point for our fiscal year and I had to determine how many Master Data Management (MDM) projects included Informatica products for data integration, data quality, and identity resolution.

While I can’t disclose how we did, I can tell you this, it’s difficult to say exactly which client purchases were for use in an MDM project or not. Of course there are some easy ones to identify as MDM. The client purchased PowerCenter and Identity Resolution to build a Customer Registry. Or, the client purchased PowerCenter and Informatica Data Quality to load high quality data into an Oracle Universal Customer Hub. Clear cut, that client is using Informatica for an MDM project. [Read more]

Gartner released their “Hype Cycle for Application Architecture, 2009” last week.  If you are not familiar with this report, it’s a great read.  It tries to put into perspective from a productivity standpoint where different technologies are in reality, compared with the “hype”.
This year’s report again includes Master Data Management (MDM), and much to my surprise, Gartner put MDM in the “height of inflated expectations” category — the very peak of hype.  Does that mean that MDM is not delivering on the promise?  The short answer is, MDM does provide value.  So what is Gartner getting at? [Read more]