Oracle Acquires Silver Creek Systems, Does The MDM World Care?

Oracle announced that they acquired Silver Creek Systems on Monday. Silver Creek is a small best of breed Product Data Quality vendor. The announcement comes after several months in which Oracle has been “test driving” Silvercreek through a partnership announced early in 2009. For many in the MDM world the news is hardly surprising. Several analysts like Dan Power of Hubdesigns had predicted this move  and even Gartner said “It’s about time”. While this adds further fuel to the MDM ecosystem consolidation I previously discussed (see Lombardi acquired by IBM – More MDM Ecosystem Consolidation?), the question is does anyone in the MDM world even care?

Silver Creek has been around a while and had struck up deals with some major MDM best-of-breed vendors including Siperian (Disclosure, my former company). That deal was in fact struck over 2 years ago in 2007. While there certainly was cursory interest by customers looking at full enterprise MDM, mastering Product data types was always lower on their priorities back then and a later phase focus. That being the case, Silver Creek’s popularity appeared to be more for those comapnies looking at point solutions for PIM (product information management) prior to the beginning of a convergence of the concept of PIM into Product MDM.

As interest began to ramp for Product MDM at least as a check box of RFPs, larger data quality vendors such as Trillium Software, Business Objects (formerly Firstlogic) and now even Informatica began to offer complete data cleansing offerings for customer and product data types. I’m not making a call on whether their offerings are technically superior to Silvercreek, but certainly there were and are other options available.

Oracle’s press release states that it  “… enhances product data quality across enterprise applications including Oracle’s Product Information Management Data Hub, Agile Product Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain Management and Enterprise Resource Planning offerings” so the value proposition for them extends beyond just MDM. More significantly though it highlights that Oracle continues to have separate Hub’s for customer and product data while companies like Siperian and Initiate Systems continue to flourish as MDM platforms of choice for organizations that believe that you should be able to manage all data types in a single hub. So I doubt if anyone at Siperian or Initiate is in a panic over this.

It’s never a fun day when an innovative startup like Silver Creek gets swallowed up (unless of course the valuation is pleasing to the owners). But given that the MDM world wasn’t exactly beating down their door it was probably the most appropriate exit. I wish everyone at Silver Creek well.

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