Being an Information Manager...

Master reference data management tools

A few weeks ago I have seen demo's of the new Master data management (MDM) solutions of SAP and Microsoft. And it is interesting to make a quick comparison. Let's start with a quick description:

SAP has been trying for some time now to come up with a good offering. It has been a struggle ... Their current product is based on a catalogue type of tool, where there is a central master table (e.g. Product or Customer) - designed for fast performance, which you can relate to a number of hierarchies of classes. The tools has its origin in vertical markets (e.g. eProcurement and CRM). The tool allows data cleansing and some basic workflow for maintenance (although it does not allow iterations), but it does not really do any integration (e.g back into R/3, surprisingly this is not available out of the box). In general I see the tool as a difficult and not so useful tool, but having said this - the new release is promising a lot more, with support for more complex data models as the biggest improvement.

Microsoft has no history of data management, so therefore I treat any development in this space with interest. All I have seen is a pre-release (based on the product Stratature, which they bought some time ago) - but it seems like they've got a good strategy in mind. 1) the tool is made compatible with the other products (Sharepoint, Biztalk etc) and 2) they treat it as a piece of infrastructure, i.e. they see a set of foundation elements (generic for each type of MDM service) and on top of that they allow vertical solutions.

Could it be that Microsoft is going to outperform the big old ERP vendor when Microsoft MDM finally gets released? Personally I think this will be an interesting game, since Microsoft owns the desktop and can become the key to content management (Microsoft MDM may start to power the taxonomies of Sharepoint). While SAP owns the back-end, but if does not get its own act together on putting SAP MDM center stage with R3, then it will fail in the long run.

Labels: master reference data

posted by Evert Ruijs @ 11:38 AM