Ravi Shankar

We often hear from our Informatica MDM customers about the main benefits they’ve realized from master data management (MDM)—smarter, faster decision-making and greater productivity though timely and reliable data. What’s less widely recognized is that MDM is proving to be a powerful cost-saving engine, as well.

For instance, a global investment bank saved millions of dollars by using Informatica MDM to virtually eliminate maintenance and support costs for a complex web of point-to-point integrations. If you’re using or considering MDM, it’s a smart idea to assess the costs of unintegrated data systems and examine cost-saving strategies and tactics available through a multidomain, model-driven MDM solution.

We’ve just published a new white paper, “Seven Ways to Reduce IT Costs with Master Data Management,” that drills down into using MDM to...

Further, in discussions with conference attendees after my talk and in the days following, I got the strong impression that MDM is generating pretty intense interest in the U.K. and the larger EMEA market. While the MDM space in the U.S. has crossed the chasm from early adopters to nearly general use, I feel that Europe isn’t far behind. The interest is to the point where it feels like IT and business executives across quite a few industries are looking at MDM as a means to address a...

OK, where were we… Oh right! Sorry for the interruption in blogging. We’ve all been busy getting acclimated to our new surroundings in Redwood Shores and getting to know our new colleagues in the Informatica family. The process has been really smooth and we’re all excited about continuing to move MDM forward backed by the Informatica brand.

Way back in December I promised a post on the differences between the application approach versus the platform approach for cross-industry, multidomain MDM use cases. So, let’s take up that subject to inaugurate the new Informatica MDM Blog. The impetus for the original blogpost was the claim, made in Gartner’s 2010 predictions for MDM, that the number of companies shopping for multidomain MDM solutions would increase in 2010. It’s a completely understandable prediction, and one that I...

Just this week, leading research firm Gartner, Inc. published its 2010 predictions for MDM. There is one prediction related to multidomain MDM that I found particularly interesting. It mentions that the number of companies shopping for multidomain MDM solutions has increased. Now, why is that?

To get some insight into MDM purchasing and implementation trends, we simply need to look at companies that began their MDM journey in the past five years, especially those companies that started off with a single domain, such as customer data.  Many of these MDM pioneers have since expanded their implementation to other domains such as finished products, materials, price, employees, and so on. But how did they do that? By using the same multidomain MDM platform? Or by separately implementing distinct single-domain MDM applications, such as one for customer data and another for product data?

Gartner contends that no vendor has a comprehensive multidomain MDM technology...