An analysis of the recent trends in the data management space points to the emergence of the SMB-driven master data management adaption. The ubiquitous MDM projects have always been a prerogative of the Global 5000 companies; however this has been changing throughout 2011. The tidal wave of data caused by the amount of the information heading to the SMBs and driven by increasing SMB participation in the social network ecosystem requires smaller companies to start looking at Data Quality, Data Governance and MDM within their organizations. With SaaS pricing going down and usability going up, SaaS applications like NetSuite, Salesforce and Jive are spreading through the market segment like wildfire. As SMB CIOs and CFOs start to gain the benefits of having a solid (but inexpensive) back office and sales force management systems, they inadvertently start experiencing the data management problems way ahead of their company traditional growth needs.

In a recent article for Information Management, The MDM Institute's chief research officer, Aaron Zones, outlines future MDM trends through 2013. 

For example, trend number two is “MDM Market Momentum,” but it includes all of the following trend predictions:

1.       While Global 5000 enterprises will spend an average of $1 million on MDM software, they'll spend $3-4 million more for integration services.

2.       IBM, Oracle, SAP and Informatica offer SMB's entry-level MDM for $250,000 to $500,000.

3.       Mergers and acquisitions, the drive for sales leads, and compliance will be the drivers for funding MDM.

4.       IT-initiated MDM projects will struggle to justify the business value.

5.       There will be a skill shortage for MDM and data governance projects, leading to more work for systems integrators through 2012.

We confirm these trends as we interact daily with Queplix prospects and customers. We sell our persistent metadata server to both SMB and larger companies and what we observe is that SMB’s and Global-1000’ requests for data management are essentially moving towards each other and starting to overlap. Similar features are being requested on both spectrums of the market driven by data management needs. While SMBs have a lot more interest in measuring their social outreach and networking than their larger counterparts, very similar trends and feature requirements emerge around data quality and data and application integration. Larger companies start to pay very close attention to their brand recognition and social “chatter” around their products and marketing activities, measuring people perceptions and even “friending” them directly. All these data needs to be merged and analyzed within the corporate structure. Naturally, larger companies have more data silos and larger data volumes to handle, but essentially this is where the differences stop.

Both SMBs and Global-1000s need to integrate their data from social networks, marketing campaigns, sales force and internal accounting systems to have an agile and holistic view of their data at any moment in time. Is it possible for them then to continue using 20 y.o. technologies like data warehousing or ETL to address these problems? The answer is a flat out no. The amount of data and ever-changing dynamic nature of data feeds and constant need to bring even more data for analysis renders traditional ETL and rigid mapping tools useless.

Big data management vendors i.e. IBM, Oracle and Informatica, are dropping prices to make MDM and data quality tools more affordable to the SMB segment, while trying to adapt the SaaS and cloud platforms to their traditional large enterprise offers. Their product management teams had to come to this realization by observing the market trends; they are seeing what we are seeing and their reaction is confirming our analysis of these trends. However, lowering pricing and adapting cloud platforms to products which were not designed for this is not the best approach to solve current data management problems. 

The MDM and data management industry overall is in desperate need of the next qualitative leap on its technology S-curve.We see customer environments, both on SMB side and larger companies, where several ETL tools are deployed to feed a data warehouse (or two), to create a datamart (or two) for BI; mostly just moving and shuffling data around and laying pipes. IT teams are stretched and consulting teams are brought in to close the gaps. Unfortunately, the requirements constantly change and IT departments armed with traditional tools are falling behind, causing out of budget run-aways, which never reach the destination. In the same paper above the author mentions more than a quarter of MDM expense is services. I think this is a conservative number because it is based on comparing initial estimates to the current point in time; however as MDM projects progress the amount of services required to implement traditional systems only increases. To learn more about how persistent metadata servers are addressing the SMB’s MDM market needs please go to http://www.queplix.com/solutions.html or download our software for free and give it a try. We will even configure it for you and teach you how to bake the bread, all at no charge.