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Blog: Claudia Imhoff

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Gartner's Magic Quadrant Strikes Again

Gartner recently published a new magic quadrant for Customer Data Integration (CDI) hub products. For those of you struggling to create a single view of the customer for your business users, you may want to listen up!

For years, corporations have battled to get a consistent, complete and accurate single view of the customer -- the mantra of CRM. Vendors have taken note of this struggle and have jumped into the fray with CDI hub products. Gartner defines these products as having the following characteristics:

1. Support for the global identification, linking and synchronization of customer information across heterogeneous data sources
2. Creation and management of a central, database-driven system of record (this one is important)
3. Ability to deliver a single view of the customer.

They analyzed many products claiming to be CDI hub products and came up with their new quadrant based on their results. The magic quadrant has as an x-axis - completeness of vision and as a y-axis - ability to execute. The resulting graphic is divided into four quadrants: niche players (lower left), challengers (upper left), visionaries (lower right), and leaders (upper right). Vendors want to be in the upper right quadrant -- leaders who are best in their completeness of vision with the ability to execute on that vision.

According to Gartner, no one is a leader in CDI hub technologies. Siebel just squeaked over the line into the challenger quadrant from the niche one; the rest were either niche players (VisionWare, Dendrite International, SAP and Oracle) or visionaries (Siperian, Initiate Systems, SeeBeyond, and DWL). Several other vendors were -- as Gartner put it -- "on the periphery of the CDI hub market - Acxiom, D&B, IBM, Innovative Systems, Kalido, and Purisma to name a few.

Gartner goes on to say that the market is immature and, except in some well-established verticals like healthcare, the products are suitable for early adopters only. You will have to decide whether you want to take a chance on these new technologies or build a database (operational data store) of integrated customer data yourself.

Yours in BI success,

Claudia

  Posted by Claudia Imhoff on May 3, 2005 3:59 PM |

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