MDM Vendor Landscape: Past, Present and Future

One of the most valuable elements of a MDM Platform is its ability to make associations and relationships once the data is matched and/or consolidated into a single hub. Often visualization of these relationships are a very sexy and practical demonstration of the possibilities once information is uncovered across contributing sources.

I blogged about how this works in a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon example last year. With all of the MDM vendor relationships and acquisitions, I thought it might be useful to show all of the OEMs, resell/referral and ultimately acquisitions that have taken place over the last 6 years in the CDI/MDM space. Enjoy!

Things that stand out from this MDM relationship map:

1) Informatica now owns and has integrated 2 very valuable OEM components (red lines) in AddressDoctor and Identity Systems, of which D&B (Purisma), Oracle, IBM and SAS are dependent. Siperian was very dependent on AddressDoctor & Identity Systems which made the fit with Informatica a natural. If this were a game of chess, I’d say Informatica has made all the right moves and has quite a few of their rivals cornered. How Oracle and IBM got themselves into this pickle is a mystery, since they obviously had their chances to make some moves. In fact it was well known that IBM had been in discussions with AddressDoctor for quite a while back in 2008 but never pulled the trigger. Oracle finally bought Silver Creek, but did that really matter? As for SAP … “Hello McFly? Is there anyone home?”

2) Siperian’s OEM (red lines) and numerous partnerships (blue lines) stand out. Credit goes to Siperian, CTO and founder Ken Hoang for establishing the majority of those relationships. Note that Siperian ended their OEM relationship with DataFlux back in 2005 and switched to AddressDoctor.

3) Valuations have really come down from 2005 as evidenced by the $225M purchase of DWL by IBM back then when DWL revenues were barely pushing $25M (as compared to Informatica’s purchase of Siperian for $130M on revenues of about $40M). But with IBM looking to acquire Initiate Systems for a rich premium soon, maybe IBM is partying like it’s 2005 again?

4) Netrics is an interesting independent match vendor that counts Kalido, Data Foundations and significantly Tibco among its OEM partners

8 thoughts on “MDM Vendor Landscape: Past, Present and Future

  1. For people working in the Intelligence and Screening Services Industry, there are a few other companies, products, and acquisitions that should be represented on your diagram:

    1) Infoglide is a company that provide non-obvious matching capabilities, with it Bladworks and Identity Resolution products. They are also a potential acquisition target in the matching/MDM market space.
    2) In addition to what you have listed, IBM also purchased SRD (now branded Global Name Recognition) and NORA (now branded Identity Insight) several years ago. These two products provide cultural name matching and non-obvious relationship matching, respectively.

  2. Sorry about the previous post. The links didn’t quite work. I’m reposting without them.
    This is a very useful map and a summary. A relatively new, but fast emerging vendor is Ataccama (www.ataccama.com). It’s product’s Ataccama Data Quality Center and Master Data Center are sold directly as well as OEM’ed by Information Builders under the iWay brand (www.iwaysoftware.com – iWay DQC and iWay MDC). Over 50 installations throughout Europe, North America and Australia.

Leave a Reply