For sometime I had been wondering which company Microsoft would buy to enter the MDM market. This is a key area in the broader business intelligence arena that they aspire to progress in, and was a major gap in their offering. Stratature was their choice, and it was a smart choice. Stratature plays in the analytical MDM area rather than being an operation transaction hub (like Siperian, say). It had built up a good reputation for flexible hierarchy management, an important feature of most MDM applications. They competed directly with Razza (an excellent tool which Hyperion purchased but Oracle seems to have now buried) and Kalido.
Stratature is the kind of bite-sized (16 employees) acquisition that Microsoft likes. It prefers to catch a company when it is small so that it can easily absorb the technical staff and mould them into the Microsoft way of doing things. When it has deviated from this rule (Great Plains, Navision) it has discovered why this was a good rule in the first place.
Congratulations to Ian Ahern, who impressed me on the several occasions I met with him. He also supports my (possibly biased) thesis that all the best MDM people are Brits. The terms of the deal are not public, and it would have been interesting to see what valuation a good MDM vendor achieved; I am sure it worked out well for Stratature’s shareholders. This now leaves Kalido as the main remaining independent analytic MDM vendor. This is not necessarily a bad thing for Kalido. Informatica has shown how you can thrive once your competitors get swallowed by the behemoths. Being stack-neutral in data management carries advantages.
Thanks for the kind words. Insightful commentary.
I look forward to meeting you again in the future.