Posts Tagged ‘Siperian’

Research Report: Rethink Your Next Generation Business Intelligence Strategy

Published on June 28, 2010 by R "Ray" Wang

BI Solutions Must Address The Information Management Matrix

A confluence of changing business requirements and on-going vendor consolidation leads many organizations to rethink their business intelligence (BI) strategies.  Many buyers face decisions to move beyond departmental solutions or to stay with an integrated apps based BI solution.  Meanwhile, some buyers must decide whether or not an integrated platform provides the right balance between business impact and cost of technology.  Additionally, most organizations seek support for new data types and new deployment options.  As BI continues to evolve from fragmented and historical reporting to pervasive, predictive, and real-time decision support, an organization’s success increasingly depends on the support for a expanding information matrix of (see Figure 1):

  • New and traditional data types. A proliferation of data types from social, machine to machine, and mobile sources add new data types to traditional transactional data.  Examples include content, geo-spatial, hardware data points, location based, machine data, metrics, mobile, physical data points, process, RFID’s, search, sentiment, streaming data, social, text, and web.
  • Visualization and reporting paradigms.  Users expect more than the traditional charts, gauges, and dials.  Web 2.0 innovations show how Rich Internet Applications (RIA) through tools such as AJAX, Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight can create interactive BI experiences.  New and old paradigms include ad-hoc query builders, business performance management (BPM) systems, dashboards, production reports, scorecards, and advanced visualizations.  New visualization types include matrix charts, network diagrams, bubble charts, tree maps, word trees, tag clouds, phrase nets, and others.
  • Approaches and styles. Analytical techniques continue to improve as data volumes explode.  New and traditional approaches include advanced analytics, business activity monitoring (BAM), BI workspace, decision support systems, low latency BI, meta data generated BI apps, non-modeled exploration and in-memory analytics, scenario analysis, and OLAP.
  • Deployment options. With data coming from so many different sources, users are seeking new deployment options.  Common solutions in the BI portfolio include BI appliances, BI in the Cloud, BI specific DBMS, Mobile BI, open source BI, on-premises packaged BI apps, private BI clouds, and SaaS based BI.

Figure 1.  The Information Management Matrix Drives Next Gen BI


Explosion In Semi-Structured And Unstructured Data Challenges Existing Solutions

Along with new business requirements, the old world of structured data must make way for a plethora of new data types in unstructured data.  More importantly, solutions must support a growing number of industry vertical standards in semi-structured data.  Unfortunately, no single vendor can support all the data types that fit into the following three categories (see Figure 2):

  • Structured data. Structured data remains the most understood type of data.  Traditional sources comprise of data in transactional systems such as ERP, CRM, SCM and other database management systems.  Solutions conduct analysis via OLAP and traditional apps centric and database centric BI systems.
  • Semi-structured data. Common examples include flat files in record format, RSS feeds, XML documents, and data in spreadsheets.  Industry-specific XML data standards and cross-enterprise data-exchange standards such as ACORD, EDI, HL7, NACHA, and SWIFT will continue to grow as BI goes vertical.  On the document print stream front, new systems should support ASP, Met code, and PCL.
  • Unstructured data. Sources include natural-language text from e-mail, blogs, SMS, social networking sites, text fields, audio, video, and images.  Unstructured data represents up to 80% of today’s data sources.  Enterprises are challenged in discovering and organizing unstructured data for the real-time delivery of information to the right user.

Figure 2.  Data Types Fall Into Three Main Categories


More…

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News Analysis: Siperian Acquisition Vaults Informatica Into An MDM Leadership Position

Published on February 1, 2010 by R "Ray" Wang

Informatica Enters The Battle For Master Data Management Dominance

As with any best of breed market, only a few will survive and even fewer will succeed.  Despite a leading offering, Siperian’s faced a rocky financial situation over the past 12 months.  Many suitors pursued Siperian but in the end Informatica’s $130M acquisition of Siperian took one of the best products off the table.  Customers breathed a sigh of relief as the $500M revenue software vendor brings not only stability of product investment and expertise, but also a complementary set of related MDM technologies to market.  Key benefits include:

  • Full spectrum of MDM offerings. Informatica’s Data Integration and Data Quality products combine with Siperian’s for a comprehensive master data platform.  Siperian brings some of the best data acquisition, data cleansing, relationship and hierarchy management, event management, reference data management, data stewardship, and architecture to market.  Usability and rich graphical interface are other strong points. In addition, the Identity Systems match engine and AddressDoctor postal validation already serve as best of breed solutions in many data quality initiatives.

    Point of View (POV): Informatica has been slowly tip-toeing in this market with 6 acquisitions in 4 years for almost $400M. Consequently, the Redwood City, CA vendor has assembled the key components for a comprehensive MDM offering (see Figure 1).  Informatica can now offer a wide range of entry points from smaller data quality projects to larger identity management projects enabled by a series of data integration flows.  Siperian is the crown jewel that takes Informatica directly into the MDM market and puts competitors such as Oracle, IBM, Initiate Systems, and SAP on guard.

Figure 1. Informatica’s MDM Acquisition History

screen-shot-2010-02-01-at-94533-pm

  • Attractive, referenceable, customer base. Informatica gains over 60 forward thinking MDM customers.  Key customers include big names in financial services and life sciences such as Bank of America, Pifzer, Shire, State Street Bank, Johnson & Johnson, and Lexis-Nexis.  These early adopters have pioneered some of the latest MDM success stories.

    POV: While the press release focuses on the financial services and life science customers, Sipeiran has taken big deals away from SAP, Oracle, and IBM in high tech and retail players in North America.   A very loyal Informatica base will most likely consider the Siperian offering in short lists, as it is now part of the family.   Many of these customers also run Oracle and SAP in the back office.

  • Improved data governance. Siperian’s Business Data Director was one of the first tools in the market to address the issue of data governance.  Working with Lombardi’ s Teamworks BPM software, Siperian allowed customers to quickly manage assignment, workload distribution, state management, and event routing.

    POV: Data governance capabilities will provide a clear differentiator in the success of MDM implementations. Organizations often struggle with managing the Information Supply Chain (i.e. what data, to whom, for when, how often, and where).  Given IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi, expect Informatica to consider other BPM tools in the future.

  • Synergies with Cloud strategy and Social CRM. The Informatica Cloud and related data integration heritage provide the pipes critical to cloud strategies.  Informatica delivers data partitioning support, data processing latency, and hybrid data integration.  Siperian provides the mechanism to manage multiple sources of information, maintain the golden record, and accommodate multiple domains.

    POV: As information continues to move into hybrid deployments and public/private clouds, MDM plays a critical role in harmonizing information across various cloud strategies.  In order to prioritize and monetize social initiatives, organizations will need to match social profile information with critical customer account information

The Bottom Line For Users – Expect More Stability And Investment From Informatica

screen-shot-2010-02-01-at-84312-pm

(Source: Informatica)

Conversations with Ivan Chong, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Quality confirm Informatica’s commitment to invest in the Siperian offering.  From an organizational perspective, the Siperian product teams will remain in tact with the Toronto development and St. Petersberg offshoring offices in place.  Incoming product teams will function as a business unit within Informatica and the Siperian Release X (10) solution remains on track for launch in 2010.  Sales teams will stay as overlay subject matter experts augmenting the considerably larger Informatica sales force.  Siperian customers should find a good home at Informatica.

The Bottom Line For Vendors – Acquisition of Siperian Hastens MDM Market Consolidation

Expect more acquisitions to occur as the market consolidates.  Potential acquirers include EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.  Potential targets include Datactics, Initiate Systems, Kalido, and Talend.  SAP, despite the Business Object acquisition, still needs a strong MDM solution to complement its 4 or more point specific solutions.  Meanwhile, expect Oracle to spend the next 12 months finding ways to rip out any dependencies with Informatica in its vast number of MDM offerings.  Microsoft, EMC, and HP have been looking at entering this market for some time. Maybe now’s the time to act!

Your POV

Are you a Siperian or Informatica customer?   How do you feel about the acquisition?  Would you like to learn how to:

  • Develop an MDM strategy?
  • Select an MDM solution?
  • Negotiate an MDM contract?
  • Design a data governance program?

Please post or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwaresinsider dot org and we’ll keep your anonymity.

Related Links And Resources

Official Informatica Press Release

20100201 Inside The Biz – Jill Dyche (Baseline Consulting) “The good news about MDM market consolidation”

20100201 Ventana Research -  Mark Smith “Informatica Is The New Master In Siperian Acquisition”

20100129 Merv’s Market Strategy For IT Suppliers – Merv Adrian “Informatica Passes Half-Billion Mark, Buys Siperian, Targets Cloud”

20101028 Information Management Blogs – Rob Karel “Introducing the MDM market’s new 800lb Gorilla: Informatica Acquires Siperian”

20101028 IDG News Service – Chris Kanaracus “Informatica Plugs MDM Hole With Siperian Buy”

Copyright © 2010 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Monday’s Musings: Master Data Management – Do Styles of MDM Matter Anymore?

Published on February 2, 2009 by R "Ray" Wang

Three Architectural Styles Represent Different Technologies To Build MDM

In 2003, customer data hub (CDI), product information management, and master data management (MDM) vendors strived to differentiate themselves by architectural style.  Each approach had its advantages and disadvantages.  A religion about styles emerged overnight along with a hard core following.  Here’s a quick recap (see Figure 1):

Figure 1.  The Three Architectural Styles of Master Data Management

Three Common Styles Of Master Data Management

The bottom line – choose a style that aligns with your project’s business driver
While these approaches still exist, leading vendors such as D&B Purisma, IBM, Initiate Systems, Oracle, Oracle-Siebel, SAS DataFlux, and Siperian now have offerings in more than one style. This may make the question seem less relevant, however, its still important to understand the trade-offs while beginning your MDM journey.  In fact, it’s best to align the style and approach based on your business driver.  Here’s a high level summary:

  • Cross-referenced registry delivers rapid results for operational efficiency business drivers. This approach is best suited for rapid implementation scenarios such as POC’s that prove the value of master data.  Also valuable when data can not be stored on-site.
    Pro’s: Rapid implementation without having to agree on a common enterprise data model.  Utilize existing source systems.
    Con’s: Deduplication of source systems not addressed.  Data quality must be solved in each independent source system.
  • Hybrid harmonized reference enables compliance and regulatory business drivers. This approach allows the best of both worlds, especially when moving to a transactional operational data store is not politically feasible and data governance and stewardship activities are just starting up.
    Pro’s: Single master copy of reference data.  Uses links to access source system records.  Model allows data quality efforts to be applied to shared master  reference data.
    Con’s: Synchronization with source systems can create some complexity if changes are not made in the hub.
  • Transactional operational data store supports strategic business drivers.  This approach provides a long term path for how legacy applications utilize data.
    Pro’s: Single master copy of data.  No fussing with latency or synchronization issues.  Minimal mapping issues.
    Con’s: Requires an agreed upon common enterprise data model to be used by all applications.  History must be harmonized and requires extensive key mapping.  Assumes homogeneity and requires tons of ETL and dedupe.

Your POV.

Which MDM style are you deploying? What successes have you seen?  Post your thoughts or send me a private email to rwang0@gmail.com.

Which one MDM style are you currently using or considering?

  • Hybrid harmonized reference (44%, 46 Votes)
  • Cross-referenced registry (35%, 36 Votes)
  • Transactional operational data store (21%, 22 Votes)

Total Voters: 104

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Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.

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Event Report: Siperian Masters 2008 – Customers Confirm Multi-Entity MDM Trends

Published on October 22, 2008 by R "Ray" Wang

Registration Area for the Siperian Masters 2008 held at the Bridgwater Marriott

(Photo: Siperian Masters’08 registration area.  Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)

About 200 attendees were present as Ramon Chen, VP of Marketing, kicked off the event to the theme of adventurers and pioneers in MDM at the Bridgewater Marriott (New Jersey).   CEO, Peter Caswell, led the keynote session with a view on where Siperian has been, where Siperian is going, and then introduced the Ravi Jagannathan VP of Product Management and Manish Sood, Senior Director of Product Management.  They presented Siperian’s road map well into 2012.  Key announcements include:

  • Ongoing expansion of the partner ecosystem and alliances.
  • Announcement of semantic masters for unstructured data.
  • Focus on easier to maintain GUI
  • Continued availability of modular deployment options and other cost effective implementations
  • New state management and work flow integration tie backs to the Lombardi BPM tools
  • Visually appealing data governance dashboards.

In addition, a few key trends emerged from conversations with customers and partners:

  • Most customers who had MDM projects also were embarked on SOA projects
  • Pharma customers successfully proved ROI and justification despite being in SAP and Oracle “only” environments
  • Availability of system integrator resources has improved.
  • MDM projects need to be more pervasive and address innovation in order to gain long term political support.
  • Many customers have reached what Forrester Research considers a Level 3 and 4 MDM maturity.
  • Prospects continue to see Siperian as short listed vendors
  • Many seek more innovation from their MDM systems and are beginning to branch out of their single data entity focus.

The bottom line

Siperian customers seem to be well ahead of the pioneering stage with MDM.  Customers we spoke to remain satisfied with their decisions and have been successful in proving existing value.  Many customers have transcended past level 3 on the MDM maturity model.

Your POV

Do these trends jive with what you are seeing in MDM and CDI?  Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.  Post a comment or privately reach out to me at rwang0@gmail.com  Check it out on the Forrester Blogs.

Ramon Chen doling out the 2008 Siperian Masters Awards

(Photo: Ramon Chen presenting the 2008 Siperian Masters Awards.
Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)

Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.

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Speaking Engagement: Keynote: Moving From Pioneers to Business Innovators. The path to building pervasive MDM in your business

Published on September 24, 2008 by R "Ray" Wang

[lang_en]Title: Speaking Engagement: Keynote: Moving From Pioneers to Business Innovators. The path to building pervasive MDM in your business
Location: Bridgewater Marriott, Bridgewater, NJ
Link out: Click here

Description: We are delighted to announce that the Siperian Masters 2008 International User Conference will be held Oct 21-22 at the Bridgewater Marriott in Bridgewater, New Jersey. The location was selected based on feedback from you to ensure maximum participation and convenience. As with previous years, the conference follows on from the MDM Summit in NYC. Siperian offers participation at the Masters 2008 to our customers at no charge.

This is the 4th annual conference and we continue to grow in content by adding an extra day to conference activities, as well as offering both business and technical tracks.

The theme for this year\’s conference is \”Navigating your MDM Journey\”.

As noted by analysts and the industry press, Siperian customers and partners have some of the most sophisticated MDM deployments anywhere. The MDM Journey theme aims to bring together a variety of topics designed to allow us to share and collaborate on best practices, governance policies, technical architecture, industry specific solutions and more.

Whether you are a seasoned Siperian technical implementer, or a business owner of MDM and governance practices, this conference represents a great opportunity to learn and share your experiences to allow you to continue to be successful on your \”MDM Journey\”.

In order to optimize your value at the conference, I encourage you to pre-register for the conference today so that we may reserve a spot for you, since the number of free registrations may be limited.

We look forward to seeing you at Masters 2008!

Regards,

Ramon Chen

VP Product Marketing
Start Time: 06:20
Date: 2008-10-22
End Time: 7:00[/lang_en]

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