Blog: Dan E. Linstedt

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System of Registries and your Master Data

It is vital in any EII implementation to MANAGE YOUR METADATA. Well, what the heck does that mean? That's a big definition, but it certainly encompasses the ability to manage your services from a GUI perspective, manage the interaction of the API's under the covers, and the accessibility of the EII queries. At a process level it may mean to handle your web-services with ease.

Systinet has been doing this for a while now, and they've gotten good at it. There are a number of software resources out there in this "young" market for managing registries, but Systinet was well known among them. In particular they've been utilized by a number of EII vendors in the market space. As with any advancing technology it is important to have a plan, and implementation strategy, and a set of best practices which utilize the best of breed tools going forward.

Well, the good news is that Systinet provides this kind of thing. The not-so-good news (for EII vendors who partnered with them) is that Systinet has been purchased by Mercury Interactive for $105M.

http://www.newratings.com/analyst_news/article_1175005.html

Good for Mercury Interactive, bad for EII vendors who use their tool set. Once upon a time there were lots of ETL vendors, all these vendors and several other data movement players were using Striva to access their data. Striva got HOT, so hot that Informatica purchased them, and thus ends the story - the other vendors had been "Striva'd"... if you can turn that into a verb.

The last thing any EII vendor needs today is to have this scenario play out again, but it just has. In order to make EII a better business proposition, a system of registries is recommended. I would suggest that any EII vendor out there who's listening take heed: it's time to roll your own, this is product functionality that will add to the bottom line valuation of your company, along with the business proposition - and to have an integrated GUI from which to manage it all would be wondrous. Of course, hold the horses a bit - because if an enterprise already has a System of Registries package, they'll want to integrate. If you roll your own - be sure to include an API that can exchange the information bi-directionally.

If you are NOT a vendor, and are looking at implementing an EII solution, I would strongly urge you to take a look at the success stories spelled out in CIO magazine, most of these recommend a system-of-registries component be in place as a part of the critical architecture.

Do you have a "story" about a system-of-registries and EII interaction? Let us hear it!

Cheers,
Dan L

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