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See you at MDM SUMMIT Spring 2008 conference March 30 – April 1 in San Francisco.
600+ Visionaries & Vendors.  90+ Speakers, 40+ Vendors.   ONE EVENT.

 

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Oracle for MDM & Data Governance

Monday, March 17, 2008

                             

(Note: If you have trouble accessing the hyperlinked articles, please go directly to MDM Alerts )

 

This particular report is one of an ongoing series of MDM Field Reports™ that highlight the major MDM solutions providers as well as the upstart software vendors that specialize in MDM, CDI, and data governance. 

Oracle Corporation is one of the world’s leading providers of MDM solutions.   The breadth of their solutions includes: horizontal/operational solutions for Customer, Product and Financial data; an analytical MDM solution (via the Hyperion MDM acquisition); and, vertical MDM solutions for Telco, Financial Services, Retail, and Public Sector.  

As projected in the MDM Institute’s analysis of Oracle’s fall 2005 acquisition of Siebel Systems “ Siebel CDI Assets to Help Oracle Battle IBM & SAP” ) , it is now clear that Siebel Universal Customer Master (UCM) is Oracle’s lead customer mastering solution.  While Oracle will continue to develop both UCM and Customer Data Hub (CDH) under the Applications Unlimited initiative (including lifetime product support and releases), Oracle’s next generation “Fusion MDM” (beta late 2008) solution will inherit the best components of each of these current MDM offerings and will offer an automated upgrade rather than a forced migration..

For the past year, it is widely acknowledged that Oracle’s MDM product family (Oracle Customer Hub, Oracle Product Hub, and Hyperion DRM) suffered from the lack of a succinct unified marketing message and plausible Fusion product road map.  Despite these handicaps, through ongoing integration and evolution of multiple overlapping MDM solutions, Oracle has become an industry-leading provider of MDM solutions in both Global 5000 enterprises and the mid-market.  By our accounting, Oracle’s 600+ installations arguably represent the largest customer base of all the MDM vendors – certain of which are in production with 10’s of millions of customer entities.  This is due to Oracle’s progress in deploying such solutions as foundational infrastructure to both Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and Siebel CRM application sales scenarios in addition to incipient delivery of key fourth generation capabilities (see “The Fourth Generation of MDM ” DM Review, October 2007).

Note also that the MDM hub market is rapidly evolving to require support for multiple entities, integrated data quality, data governance, hierarchy management, and (evolution into) process/policy hubs (see “MDM Road Map Milestones for 2008-09 ).   To remain a leader, Oracle must invest in these key next generation MDM capabilities – both through internal development of its MDM framework/solutions as well as partnering with best-of- breed software vendors.  IT and business management understand the need to scrutinize the future road map of strategic partners – especially when it comes to mission-critical MDM capabilities.   

Furthermore, Oracle must concurrently evolve its MDM capabilities sufficiently to enable the products to succeed purely on a standalone MDM hub basis – without coming in on the back of an incumbent Oracle application package sale or installation as is often the case today.   Why? The reality of both Global 5000 and mid-market application markets is that Microsoft and SAP will remain significant forces – who in turn will also enable their MDM hubs to support more than Microsoft or SAP applications’ master data requirements.

Oracle is actually battling on two MDM fronts simultaneously – against the likes of application package providers such as Microsoft, SAP, and Teradata, as well against middleware infrastructure vendors such as D&B/Purisma, IBM, Initiate Systems, Siperian, and Tibco.   

Additionally, IBM, Initiate Systems, and Siperian have introduced unabashed “registry style” offerings which offer compelling time-to-value propositions versus the more comprehensive vision and footprint of the likes of Oracle UCM.  Oracle should re-package a “lite” version of UCM to counter this registry trend to keep its products in the game for such use case requirements (much as IBM has).

In the multi-entity/domain use case, Oracle has done well with the integration of Oracle PIM Data Hub and CDH yet still needs to provide similar level of multi-entity capabilities for UCM.  Given the manufacturing centricity of CDH, the integration of PIM Data Hub was providential.  However, given the service industry focus of UCM (especially Telco), Oracle needs to add better product catalog-level integration between PIM Data Hub and UCM or buff up such capabilities in its nascent Universal Product Master solution.  Even financial services organizations are starting to dictate multi-entity support – e.g., pricing, location and other masters in addition to information-centric rather than manufactured product mastering.

Concurrently, Oracle, IBM, and SAP are each maturing their horizontal/operational MDM solutions and have moved to using similar “MDM” and “process hubs” messaging in their marketing and product plans. 

Oracle’s differentiation lies in the degree of MDM leverage/integration of its offering across certain vertical industries via pre-built integration with other applications in the Oracle portfolio.  Moreover, Oracle MDM is more of an application than a toolkit approach.  Clearly, there is still more that Oracle can do in leveraging its Fusion middleware, database, security, governance, business intelligence, and risk & compliance capabilities via the future “Fusion MDM” solution.

Bottom line:  Given the strategic nature of MDM investments, the capabilities of such solutions providers must be given close scrutiny as a long term strategic partner – not only in effort to contain costs, but also to insure success of this vital mission-critical infrastructure investment.  Oracle is once again a leader in providing MDM solutions and it is reasonable to expect that they will continue to execute strongly on their current strategy and development plans.   While positioning remains complex because of Oracle's diverse multiple MDM products, the Fusion MDM strategy and road map is now a realistic program.  Moreover, Oracle will begin to more aggressively leverage MDM into both their application package business and middleware businesses (including BEA following the closure of this latest acquisition).

                                                 

• Oracle MDM Family Strengths & Weaknesses
• Oracle’s *New* Fusion MDM Market Strategy
• About the MDM Institute

 

“Heads up” from the MDM front lines and see you at the next semi-annual MDM SUMMIT in San Francisco this March 30^th – April 1^st.

 

Aaron Zornes

Chief Research Officer

The MDM Institute

mailto:editor@tcdii.com

 

Oracle MDM Family Strengths & Weaknesses 

The below recent field reports from the MDM Institute highlight field experience and general outlook for Oracle’s MDM products:  Oracle Customer Data Hub (CDH), Oracle-Siebel Universal Customer Master (UCM), Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Manager (DRM), and Oracle PIM Data Hub.

 

 

 

 

 

Oracle’s *New* Fusion MDM Market Strategy

CDH, UCM, DRM, and PM Data Hub will ultimately be supplanted by Fusion MDM (first customer ship in late 2008).   Given the newness of such MDM product, it is not expected that either Oracle EBS or Siebel CRM users will immediately take advantage of Fusion.  Instead, most users will probably take incremental advantage of the web services (Fusion middleware “business services”) and wait for the proposed “upgrade automation” utilities to forgo any possible migration efforts.  Fusion MDM is projected to have a new party data model derived from the best of both CDH ad UCM enabled via a unifying semantic “metadata services” layer.  Additionally, the requirements for PIM Data Hub across both CRM and SCM are expected to be rationalized at the data model level.   Lastly, the new metadata services layer is expected to insulate Web 2.0 and other user extensions from the bane of patches and upgrades sensitivity.  Note that Oracle is strategically committed to Fusion MDM as a precept enabling the ultimate goal of Fusion Applications.  

                                                     

Bottom Line Redux:  Given the strategic nature of MDM investments, the capabilities of such solutions providers must be given close scrutiny as a long term strategic partner – not only in effort to contain costs, but also to insure success of this vital mission-critical infrastructure investment.  Oracle is once again a leader in providing MDM solutions and it is reasonable to expect that they will continue to execute strongly on their current strategy and development plans.   While positioning remains complex because of Oracle's diverse multiple MDM products, the Fusion MDM strategy and road map is now a realistic program.  Moreover, Oracle will begin to more aggressively leverage MDM into both its application package business and middleware businesses.

 

 

About the MDM Institute (formerly the CDI-MDM Institute)

To provide feedback on our client's MDM initiatives we have two levels of sponsorship for IT organizations: (1) free membership (by invitation) in our MDM Institute Advisory Council providing unlimited MDM consultation by phone, and (2) free membership in our MDM Institute Business Council (survey base) which provides bi-weekly updates on key MDM trends and issues via an email newsletter.

• MDM Advisory Council™ of fifty organizations who receive unlimited MDM advice to key individuals, e.g. CTOs, CIOs, and MDM project leads
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• MDM Alert™ bi-weekly newsletter provides IT organizations, MDM vendors, and investors hard-hitting insights into best practices as well as market observations derived from interactions with the MDM Advisory Council™ and the MDM Business Council™.  Initially free to qualified individuals, the MDM Alert™ is expected to become a fee-based product 2H2008.  The intended audience includes: enterprise architects, MDM project managers, CIOs, CISOs, CTOs, chief customer officers, chief privacy officers, data quality managers, data stewards, and project teams responsible for MDM solutions and infrastructure.
• MDM MarketPulse™ monthly survey results, e.g. budgets, success/failure rates, mindshare based on ongoing surveys of the MDM Advisory Council and the MDM Business Council
• MDM Fast Track™ quarterly one day workshop – fee-based and rotating through the major North American, European and Asia-Pacific metropolitan areas
• MDM SUMMIT™ quarterly three day conference and exposition – rotating through east and west coast North America, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, and Sydney.

 

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