Tag Archives: Gartner
Has MDM Crossed the Chasm? Musings of a Marketer at Gartner MDM Summit
The general feeling, at the recent Gartner Master Data Management Summit, was one of excitement. It wasn’t just that this was the largest MDM Summit to date with 600+ registrants; it was also the buzz in and around the convention center. The conversation wasn’t about promises and “what ifs,” it was about tactics, and 2nd or even 3rd generation MDM initiatives. This growth is a sign that MDM has matured past the initial phase of high expectations, in Gartner’s hype cycle. To put it in Geoffrey Moore’s terms, I think it’s a sign that MDM has crossed the chasm from early adoption to more widespread, pragmatic adoption.
A Case for Universal MDM: The Federation of Point-MDM Solutions
I’m at Barcelona this week for the European Gartner MDM Summit. I had a chance to catch up with one of the Gartner MDM analysts before the event, and we had a discussion about the growth of MDM. He mentioned that MDM will become pervasive within the enterprise as organizations expand its use as a necessary foundation for governing all of their business-critical master data such as customers, products, and so on.
To solve their business problems accurately, companies seek targeted MDM solutions. For e.g., retail, distribution, and manufacturing companies use PIM for merchandising, distributing products, and supplier on-boarding, while financial services, healthcare, and high tech companies use customer MDM with their CRM, such as salesforce.com, for improving customer segmentation, cross-sell , and up-sell. (more…)
My Thoughts on Gartner’s Thoughts About the Challenges of Hadoop for Data Integration
Just read a great Gartner report titled “Hadoop is Not a Data Integration Solution” (January 29, 2013). However, I beg to differ slightly with Gartner on this one. The title should have been “Hadoop Alone is Not a Data Integration Solution.” The report outlines all of the reasons that just deploying Hadoop by itself is often quite challenging.
Issues that we at Informatica have personally seen our customers deal with include: (more…)
How to Avoid the Big Data Trough of Disillusionment
Has big data entered the “trough of disillusionment?” That’s what I’ve heard recently. Like many hyped up technology trends the trough can be deep and long as project failures accumulate, or for ‘hot’ trends that evolve and mature quickly the trough can be shallow and short, leading to broader and rapid adoption. Is the big data hype failing to deliver on its promise of increased revenue and competitive advantage for companies that leverage big data to introduce new products and services and improve business operations? Why is it that some big data projects fail to deliver on their promise? Svetlana Sicular, Research Director, Gartner points out in her blog Big Data is Falling into the Trough of Disillusionment that, “These [advanced client] organizations have fascinating ideas, but they are disappointed with a difficulty of figuring out reliable solutions.” There are several reasons why big data projects may fail to deliver on their promise: (more…)
Informatica Named a Leader in Data Masking Gartner Magic Quadrant
Informatica was listed as a leader in the industry’s first Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Masking Technology. Finally, the data masking market gets a main stage role in one of the fastest growing enterprise software markets – data security. With the incredible explosion of data and the resulting number of places our personal information exists in the cybersphere, this confirmation is desperately needed as we enter into 2013. (more…)
Let Your Data Scientists Be Scientists
With the rise in popularity of the elusive and expensive data scientist it’s very sad that once a data science team is assembled (at a very high recurring cost to the company I may add) that they spend most of their time doing work they weren’t really hired to do in the first place. That’s right! It turns out that data scientists spend only about 20% of their time doing real analysis – that is the work they were trained to do. How is the other 80% of their time spent? (more…)
The Report of My Death Was an Exaggeration
“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
– Mark Twain
Ah yes, another conference another old technology is declared dead. Mainframe… dead. Any programming language other than Java…. dead. 8 track tapes …OK, well some things thankfully do die, along with the Ford Pinto that I used to listen to the Beatles Greatest Hits Red Album over and over again on that 8 track… ah yes the good old days, but I digress. (more…)
Will Salesforce be the Catalyst to Propel MDM into the Cloud?
Salesforce.com – a company that has become synonymous with the cloud – acquired over 100,000 customers and one million users within a span of just 10 years. Compare that to a traditional company like General Electric, the only company to be on the Dow Jones Index for over 100 years – it took them over five-times that many years to acquire the same number of customers. This goes to say that customers have been enamored by the cloud and its benefits – no software maintenance, rapid time-to-value, and subscription pricing – to name a few. No wonder, there are thousands of cloud applications and millions of users out there now. I’ve seen projections that the cloud computing market will grow to $241 billion by 2020. This might be a conservative estimate.
From B2B Hype to Reality
For once hype could be a good thing. Well it is if you’re reading the latest Gartner – Hype Cycle for Application Infrastructure published last month, in July; because in it you will see how two important technology trends – the areas of BGS (sorry, another TLA for you to learn – B2B Gateway Software (and it’s even a nested TLA!)), and Managed File Transfer (MFT) have now made it out of the Trough of Disillusionment and up onto the Slope of Enlightenment. Why do I suddenly feel like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim?
Anyway, the key points that Gartner identifies are that centrally managing B2B interactions provides:
- Economies of scale and deeper insight into the technical aspects of data integration, transaction delivery, process integration and SOA interoperability, such as consolidating, tracking, storing and auditing files, messages, process events, acknowledgments, receipts, and errors and exceptions.
The B2B communications process with your external business partners, suppliers, etc. is not a static process and you need to be able to have visibility of these communications for not only regulatory compliance and auditability issues but also to manage the dynamic process.
- A single point through which to troubleshoot B2B integration issues.
B2B Gateways are now a mature technology and like standards most organisations use a number of them. Integrating them provides significant benefit and enables the organisation to have visibility of their business relationships and transactions and also know where to go to when things go wrong and need managing as they definitely will.
- A central, reusable repository for external business partner profiles and Web services APIs. This is particularly valuable when dealing with a large number of external business partners and cloud APIs, and when multiple business units interact with the same partners or cloud services.
The number of business partners we all have to deal with is increasing rapidly as we outsource, subcontract, farm-out and generally rely more on external specialist organisations. Having visibility of these relationships and making the most from new integration methodologies and processes can generate great savings and also give visibility of our business exposure to these suppliers.
- Support for the myriad data formats, transport and communication protocols, and security standards.
As the old saying goes “I love standards, there are so many to choose from.” Well our business processes are not getting any simpler; data standards are under constant change and revision with data formats becoming increasingly complex. So to be able to handle not just a few but all key formats and to be able to reuse previous transformation experience, utilise already developed libraries and lever new complex hierarchical data structures makes the difference between a stove-piped and soon to be redundant system and one that is flexible and supports new and ever changing business requirements.
As one of the vendors identified that can actively compete with offerings positioned to address the broader set of usage scenarios, Informatica’s B2B Data Exchange solution not only supports the B2B functional requirements an organisation will have but also integrates this process and data into the wider internal data integration platform and management process. (Look at this presentation for the new 9.5 functionality of key new featues.)
So now the reality not hype of B2B solutions can be delivered.
Sources: Gartner Hype Cycle for Application Infrastructure, 2012. Published: 24 July 2012
Analyst: Jess Thompson
Gartner Disclaimer re the Hype Cycle
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Healthcare Providers Evolving Their Use of MDM
Having spoken with a number of healthcare providers at recent events including the Gartner MDM Summit, Informatica’s own MDM workshops and a variety of other meetings, I’ve noticed their use of MDM is evolving as of late. It’s clear that within the provider community, MDM is quickly maturing beyond a single virtual view of the patient using an Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI). (more…)