The Heiler acquisition is still technically not complete (German securities rules in such things moves slowly) but it was evident that the Heiler staff were already working in concert with Informatica. Heiler itself grew 29% in 2012, showing a growth spurt in Q4 after the acquisition was announced. Informatica had for some time claimed that their MDM offering was multi-domain, but in reality most customer examples were based on customer data, and heavily skewed towards North America. The purchase of European PIM vendor Heiler gives more balance to this picture, and in time one would expect to see the separate MDM hubs sharing metadata etc. Informatica actually has a quite good story around managing multiple MDM hubs, but this is one that it has been quiet about, perhaps not perceiving much demand, yet its capabilities e.g. in data masking, are useful in such contexts and should enable it to do a better job than many in a federated environment. For mufti-national companies managing a federation of MDM hubs will be the reality, but the MDM market has been in denial about this. To me there is an opportunity here for any vendor that can clearly articulate a federated vision.

Informatica has clearly embraced MDM as a core technology, and indeed this make sense given the higher growth rates in the MDM market than in its traditional integration market.

The deal makes sense to Heiler, as Informatica has a far more powerful sales channel. From Informatica’s perspective they gain a solid piece of technology with a proven footprint in the product data domain, whereas Informatica, for all its multi-domain marketing, has been primarily used to managed customer data. They also gain a slice of the European MDM market, reducing their heavy US revenue preponderance. Moreover, assuming the deal goes ahead, Informatica now has several hundred new customers to up-sell its other software to e.g. its integration and data quality offerings.

The deal also shows that the M&A market is still active for MDM software, which is positive news for the shareholders of other independent MDM vendors out there.

http://www.informationdifference.com/webcast.html

It is on September 19th – register now.

There is a unified pricing model behind these editions, though this apparent step forward is rather handicapped by the pricing model being distinctly opaque. It is based on no less than four parameters: edition, industry, data domains being managed and how many records are being mastered. When something becomes this complex it gives the sales force considerable flexibility (presumably the intention) but is potentially confusing for the customers, and possibly IBM’s own staff.

Fortunately, as well as this partial step forward on the marketing side, there is some actual code in the release. The Initiate matching engine, which was well regarded, is now used across the product line for probabilistic matching (the old Quality Stage approach is still available fro deterministic matching). The workflow engine BPM Express is bundled in with the enterprise edition, meaning that very complex sets of workflow and permissions can now be handled, if need be in a real-time manner. There is a much-needed overhaul of the old PIM user interlace in the new Collaborative Edition. Other enhancements are present, such as integration with the Guardium Data Activity Monitor.

All this amounts to a significant release that at least starts IBM on a path to unifying its MDM technologies. This will be a long path, as there are still three underlying, different, server technologies here. However at least customers now have a sense of the MDM direction in which IBM is heading now even if they need to realise that it will be a long and winding road before they get there.

I will be participating in a series of MDM-related talks in this region in August, starting in Mumbai, then moving on to Singapore, Hong Kong and Beijing, then Melbourne and Australia. The topic is “customer centricity” and how MDM can help build up a better view of the customer. This is a major headache for most enterprises, who usually have multiple competing systems holding customer data (an average of six systems according to an Information Difference survey, with some companies having over 100 systems holding customer data). On a project in Australia that I was involved with some years ago one company thought that it had 25,000 customers. After a project to rationalise and combine the various systems holding customer data the true figure turned out to be just 5,000 – a huge difference.

Understanding customer profitability is important. In one project at a US manufacturer I was involved with, a careful review of the cost allocation process revealed that a significant proportion of contracts with customers were in fact loss-making to the corporation. What was worse was that many of these were larger contracts, where customers had demanded, and received, large discounts due to their scale. Following this review a number of contracts were re-negotiated, paying for the cost of the master data project within months.

It can be seen that getting control of your customer data is important and can yield significant monetary benefits.

The forum focuses on improving customer data. It is hosted by Informatica and sponsored by Capgemini. The detailed schedule and how to register can be found here:

http://au.vip.informatica.com/?elqPURLPage=9107

If you are in the region and are free on one of these dates, then I hope to see you there.

http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/enterprise/ibm-mergers-acquisitions-1062211/

While I think it is difficult to predict acquisitions, what is interesting is the sheer extent to which IBM has been buying technology in recent years. Seeing it laid out in detal in this article is certainly interesting. Of course, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft are no strangers to this route either, and it does make you wonder to what extent the giant companies have to some extent given up on relying on their own R&D, and dipped into their cash reserves when a particular trend n the market has eluded them and a smaller, nimbler company has made progress. From a customer viewpoint it is a tricky balance. It is comforting to some extent to know that a key technology is in “safe” hands, yet this can be illusory. When a company is small and independent it is very focused on what it is doing, but a giant vendor with dozens or hundreds of products is only going to give so much attention to a particular niche product. It is also common for energetic founders of a small company to move on at the point of an acquisition, preferring to avoid the loss of control that big company life brings.

What would be interesting would be for someone to step back and assess the success of acquisitions by major companies, to see which ones really worked and which ones just faded away into the background, in particular if it was possible to work out any common lessons from the successes and failures. This is not an easy thing to do, as large public companies frequently resist breaking out their component businesses in terms of financial figures, but it is an interesting topic.

In the areas that The Informaton Difference concentrates on, M&A activity can be seen here:

http://www.informationdifference.com/mergers_and_acquisitions.html

All comments welcome.

This turned out to be an inspired change of marketing strategy, and the company went from layoffs to hiring again, growing rapidly over the last three years, far in excess of the 9% annual rise in the general data quality market that has been seen recently. Datanomic has had positive customer references in our regular annual surveys, and it seems to me a well-architected solution. From Oracle’s point of view, this complements their purchase of Silver Creek, which was a specialist product data quality tool. These two acquisitions suggest that Oracle is changing its view of data quality – previously they relied on partner arrangements with companies such as Trillium for their data quality solution. Now it would appear that they see data quality as a more integral issue. The price of the deal was not disclosed, but given Datanomic’s rapid recent growth, it will have doubtless been at a healthy premium.

Aster’s strengths (and its intellectual propertty, patent pending) were around its support for intergated MapReduce analytics. MapReduce is the distributed computing framework pioneeed by Google, which inspired the open-source framework Hadoop. This framework is suited to highly compute-intensive analytics, particularly of high volumes of unstructured data. This includes use cases like fraud analysis, but has found a particular niche in social networking websites, who have to deal with vast and rapdily increasing volumes of data. Certain analytic queries such as social network graph analysis, signal analysis, network analysis and some time series analysis are awkward for conventional SQL, involving self-joins and potentially multiple passes through a database, which is a big deal if the database is hundreds of terabytes in size. The MapReduce appoach can offer significant perfomance advantages for such use cases, though it typically requires specialist programming knowledge.

Aster’s customers included companies like LinkedIn and FullTilt Poker,and its SQL-MR technology had a good reputation in such situations. Aster was a relatively small company, so this purchase is loose change for Teradata but buys it a jump-start into this fashionable area of analytic processing. Aster of course gains access to the channels and deep pockets of Teradata. Conservative buyers may have been unwilling to jump into these waters with a start-up but will be reassured by the legitimisation of the technology by a big software brand. Hence it seems like a win-win for both companies.

This leaves very few stand-alone independent data warehouse vendors: ParAccel, Kognitio and more obscure players like Exasol and Calpont can continue to plough an independent path, but I suspect that this will not be the last acquisition we will see in this market.

In principle HP’s vast sales channel should be very beneficial to spreading the Vertica technology further. Nervous buyers need no longer be anxious about buying from a start-up, and HP clearly has a vast marketing channel. Yet success is far from guaranteed, as HP’s previous debacle with its Neoview data warehouse offering showed. Now at least HP has a proven modern data warehouse offering with traction in the market. It remains to be seen whether it can exploit this advantage.

This business line orientation seems a sensible mmove to me. Most vendors talk about almost entirely about customer and product data as that has been their heritage and comfort zone, but there are plenty of opportunities fro MDM solutions to be applied outside these two domains. Indeed I recall that the very first MDM deployment of Kalido MDM, in 2002, was actually for finance and accounting data (general ledger etc) at a Dutch bank. Given the vast scale of an enterprise-wide MDM solution it seems to me wise to pick off specific domain areas where there is “low hanging fruit”, and at present most of the industry has been ignoring these other domains, at least in their marketing.