Recently in MDM (Master Data Management) Category

Informatica 9 MDM product release takes aim at the business user across all industries. The new release incorporates the master data management (MDM) capabilities acquired through the acquisition of Siperian with Informatica's unified open data integration platform, making it one of the leaders in MDM. 

The key highlight for me in the release is the MDM-aware business application capability that provides for plug-and-play Data Controls that enable business users to directly access master data, hierarchies and relationships within their existing applications, such as Siebel or salesforce.com that they are trained and familiar with. This has obvious implications implications as we continue to see companies move to virtual environments and the cloud. 

Other key areas within this release include continuous availability support for mission-critical business processes, which is key for all industries. As we have seen with the merging of operational processes with business intelligence, the need for high availability is obvious. Another key area is integrated workflow/business process management that supports workflows for enterprise-wide data governance.

According to Informatica, it has increased its MDM customer base by 50% this year. Customers span a wide range of industries globally including life sciences, retail, healthcare, aerospace and defense, agriculture, education, hospitality and the public sector.

Informatica has already broken into the Leaders Quadrant for Gartner's MDM of Customer Data Magic Quadrant. Informatica MDM's differentiators include managing multiple data domains in a single system and complex hierarchy and relationship management capabilities.

"IBM continues to acquire companies in order to fill out industry-specific solutions, and this acquisition is no different. By acquiring a niche vendor like Initiate, they bolster their portfolio of industry-specific tools that help integrate data, but do little to provide a stronger information management platform for their customers. This acquisition will be delivered like so many others, with dozens of IBM global services consultants to 'knit' the patchwork of tools together.

"What neither Informatica nor IBM really understand despite these acquisitions is that customers are looking for solutions that deliver not only high quality data but the processes to maintain it - in short, data governance."