This research explores technologies that are highly relevant to organizations with complex needs related to adopting master data management (MDM). None of the vendor or technologies provide MDM as such, but they all offer products and/or services that support the overall goal as well as different or unique features that could be of value to some organizations.

• No MDM vendor meets all market requirements, since they are so complex and large end-user organizations will often need to buy MDM-related technology from more than one vendor.

• Small niche vendors with MDM-related technology are being used to complement the capabilities of MDM solutions. The cool vendors analyzed in this research provide a range of specialist capability that works alongside MDM programs or helps improve the implementation of MDM.

• Users of complex BI and business application environments, even those centered on specific vendor offerings (such as Oracle, Microsoft and SAP), will struggle to rationalize, harmonize and merge their multiple master data structures. These types of user should consider such technologies to support their overall MDM programs.

• Oracle users planning to migrate or consolidate multiple Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) instances should evaluate technologies such as Eprentise to help simplify the complex task of harmonizing the underlying data structures in those systems.

• SAP users should evaluate MDM and related data governance solutions, such as Black Watch Data, to help get better value from investments in large, packaged application solutions, such as ERP.

• Users of Microsoft SQL Server who are interested in building their own MDM solutions should evaluate partners such as Profisee with a detailed knowledge of Microsoft technologies.

This research does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

MDM is a technology-enabled business discipline in which business and IT must work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of an enterprise's official, shared master data assets. The MDM software market is complex and largely characterized by specific segments focused on particular master data domains (for example, customer/party, product/thing, location/site and hierarchy).

There is increasing interest from users in relation to how MDM works with large-scale packaged applications, including ERP. Many users have finally realized that ERP systems were not designed to support a "single version of the truth" across the enterprise, only across their somewhat limited ERP domain and probably inefficiently within that scope.

Lastly, Microsoft entered the MDM market in 2010 after its acquisition of niche vendor Stratature in 2007. Its technology is focused on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and although not a packaged MDM solution, there are vendors that can help develop these services and technology into a business solution for MDM. We explore all these areas in this research and analyze several small vendors with limited resources, but interesting and cool contributions to MDM.

Atlanta, Georgia (www.blackwatchdata.com)

Analysis by Andrew White

Why Cool: Black Watch Data is a new, small vendor with a big idea. The founder spent many years wrestling with the governance of business data within an ERP environment, which most ERP vendors know is not always an easy thing to do.

Most large-scale business application suites like ERP are not designed to govern enterprise data and often don't do a good job of governing the data under their direct control. This new vendor started up with a specific mission of how to help business users formally and ideally govern ERP data automatically. Black Watch Data combines technology solutions (called a Suite of Armour, with specific modules that include Governor, Commander and Enforcer), as well as services and consulting.

The potential market for this kind of solution is vast. Specifically, the initial focus is SAP/ERP implementations, since this is where most of the Black Watch Data team has gained experience. The technology is implemented alongside ERP applications and seeks to provide the necessary support for business data stewards to do their jobs.

This means that Governor collects and stores policies (so duplicates) and procedures related to the governance of data in business applications, not just ERP and Commander enforces the rule and procedure adherence through integration techniques and analysis of data as it is used in business applications. Enforcer is for where users create data workflows and rules associated with permissions. Sentinel is the monitoring and reporting offering. Phantom is the runtime agent monitoring how data quality and consistency persist across the organization.

With the continued growth and interest in MDM and related information governance programs, Black Watch Data products will only gain in importance and popularity. The vendor is not the first to talk about governing data (including master data) in ERP applications, but it does provide a unique and experienced view of how to achieve this.

Challenges: Black Watch Data offers a very broad suite of offerings, focused on only one business application (ERP) and vendor (SAP, although it is also making some progress to address the broader non-SAP market). At present, the company has very few customers, but has a deep knowledge of how governance of data works, or should work, within a SAP/ERP environment. The suite is broad and promises much, which is a big challenge for a new start up. The knowledge the vendor brings to SAP/ERP environments is very useful, but we expect the product footprint to develop along additional lines to support non-SAP/ERP user requirements.

Governance of data in an ERP application overlaps with MDM because MDM provides an enterprise view of governance for master data and most data in ERP systems is not master data. Additionally, data governance is broader than data within ERP and broader than MDM, since it is viewed as governing all important data in the business, not just what is in ERP or master data.

This is an innovative and refreshing look at an old problem, but there remains a lot of other work to do, such as the education of new users on how this fits into the bigger picture for ERP, MDM, and data governance in general.

Who Should Care: CIOs, information and application architects, ERP design teams and MDM program managers. Organizations with SAP/ERP plans, new implementations, consolidation or migration, should ensure (by specifically adopting MDM) that master data spans how their ERP systems should be governed. As such, vendors like Black Watch Data are useful in developing support for governing not just master data, but ERP data in general.

Orlando, Florida (www.eprentise.com)

Analysis by Ted Friedman

Why Cool: With many organizations involved in application retirement, application overhaul and various other forms of modernization initiatives, demand for support in migrating, validating and resolving inconsistencies in master data across multiple application instances is increasing.

The Eprentise HD_Suite supports consolidation, upgrades, restructuring of reference data and divestiture requirements for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) users, which is unique with its one solution approach. Organizations working on consolidating instances of Oracle EBS must often deal with rationalizing inconsistent master data definitions and correcting incomplete or inaccurate master data values. The Eprentise solution analyzes metadata and data values across instances of Oracle EBS to compute the rules, properly merge the data and resolve these issues.

In addition to master data, the technology can also address the same issues for transactional data. Therefore, instance consolidation is performed in an automated way, reducing time, cost and risk of the effort.

Common approaches to data consolidation or migration projects often focus on master data and transaction data, but do not often automate the process of resolving inconsistent or conflicting configuration metadata. This is critical information that typically does not garner initial attention in these types of project.

Eprentise's technology also analyzes Oracle EBS configuration metadata to identify and resolve conflicts across instances, such as table and attribute names, report names, hierarchy structures and various reference dictionaries (such as lists of roles). Additionally, by automating the reconciliation and alignment of configuration metadata, organizations can minimize the risk of post-consolidation problems that could not be identified with a focus on master and transaction data only.

Challenges: As a startup, Eprentise will face the expected challenges of no market visibility and mind share and the usual resistance by organizations to investing in technology from an early-stage vendor. Eprentise will need to be exceptionally good at leveraging early adopter customer successes to slowly build momentum. The general tendency among organizations faced with these types of initiatives is to build data integration architectures and leverage system integrator services as a solution, which requires Eprentise to expend significant resources in the education of its users and justification of its approach.

Finally, with technology that is relevant only in the Oracle EBS space, the vendor will face competition from many established software providers offering application-independent technology that addresses the various capabilities Eprentise offers — for example, data quality, archiving and subsetting.

Who Should Care: CIO, applications leaders and other IT and business-side roles involved in planning projects to consolidate, upgrade, or restructure Oracle EBS instances should consider solutions that can reduce time and effort by automating the remediation of inconsistencies in master data, reference data and metadata configuration. By addressing all of these dimensions, as well as transactional data, rather than the typically narrower scope of traditional data migration approaches, organizations can ultimately reduce costs and risk.

Atlanta, Georgia (www.profisee.com)

Analysis by John Radcliffe

Why Cool: With its Maestro product, Profisee is one of the first software vendors to provide value-add MDM software on top of Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services (MDS). Profisee was formed from the management team of Stratature, the analytical MDM software provider acquired by Microsoft in 2007. The Stratature technology forms the basis of Microsoft's MDS.

There is increasing market interest in MDM solutions at lower price points than previously available and Microsoft has an opportunity to benefit from this trend in the long term. However, Microsoft positions MDS as a platform, requiring that end user organizations either build up necessary additional MDM functionality or that they go to the Microsoft MDS independent software vendor community (which, so far, is limited), to companies such as Profisee that provide additional MDM facilities on top of Microsoft MDS.

Profisee's Maestro is a software suite designed to deliver MDM and reference data management. It extends Microsoft MDS by providing:

• The Maestro Desktop, which includes a user interface for data stewards, supporting attribute filtering, cross-hierarchy multi-level navigation and slice/dice browsing.

• The Maestro Server, which includes facilities for matching, address standardization, deduplication, automated survivorship, model synchronization and data federation. The Maestro product integrates with MDS, as well as with Microsoft Reporting Services.

Challenges: Profisee leverages partner relationships to extend its reach in the U.S. and Europe. On the positive side, there is a growing appetite for low-cost MDM solutions, particularly if they are based on Microsoft technology. Microsoft's partner and implementation network is second to none. However, this very fact means that the MDM "ecosystem" around Microsoft is complex and fragmented.

Profisee's heritage and the Maestro product were originally geared to analytical MDM (in a similar way to Stratature). In 2010, the vendor shifted its focus to start developing the capability to support some aspects of operational MDM, which seems to be continuing in 2011.

Vendors dedicated to operational MDM still struggle to meet all market requirements, so this will also remain a challenge for Profisee — along with successive Microsoft releases being steadily improved in MDS functionality. Profisee will have the constant challenge of staying ahead of the game, providing additional value and addressing a market requirement.

Who Should Care: Organizations embarking on a MDM strategy looking for a Microsoft-based MDM solution at an economic price, should evaluate Profisee's Maestro product, particularly if their focus is analytical MDM.

For alternative operational MDM products, organizations should look to vendors such as Visionware (also based on MDS and focusing on customer data) or Riversand (not based on MDS and focusing on product data).