Microsoft buy lifts MDM profile

Microsoft’s recent agreement to acquire Stratature is likely to help the nascent market for master data management (MDM) to grow up, according to experts.

On 8 June, Microsoft agreed to buy Stratature, a small US company with just 16 staff, for an undisclosed sum. Although a small transaction, the deal underlines Microsoft’s desire to move deeper into business intelligence and its entry into the sector should pique interest in MDM.

MDM is the name given to the discipline of managing data shared between IT groups, business functions and geographically dispersed departments. It is sometimes seen as the means to unify ERP and analytics by storing underlying data in a consistent format. This data might include bar codes, parts numbers, customer names and job roles, for example. Some proponents also say that MDM will be critical to maintaining order in service-oriented architectures.

John Hagerty, an analyst at AMR Research, said Stratature’s strength was in managing hierarchies that describe how a business operates. He expects the purchase to bolster Microsoft’s business intelligence and transaction-orientated pushes.

Prakash Nanduri who heads up Tibco’s MDM business, said, “Microsoft coming into the market can only endorse the criticality of MDM but being able to support multiple hierarchies is a very small part of what MDM is.”

Others agreed that Microsoft is, for now at least, only taking a small stake in MDM. The deal only addresses analytical data and others are “way ahead of the game when it comes to fully-fledged operational MDM solutions”, said Ovum analyst Helena Schwenk.

Andy Hayler, who co-founded data management firm Kalido and is now an independent consultant, said that the MDM market is still very immature but Stratature could help Microsoft go deeper into more enterprise deployments.

“Stratature has people who understand MDM and Microsoft doesn’t have an applications base [unlike SAP or Oracle] to defend so they can take a neutral approach, but nobody has a total solution. Stratature does a part of the MDM puzzle quite well but does not have much in the way of workflow and data quality.”

Ovum’s Schwenk added that she expects more acquisitions to follow. Oracle recently agreed to acquire Hyperion but appears to be following its own MDM development rather than using Hyperion’s Razza tool, described by Hayler as “a hidden gem”. IBM has also made a series of acquisitions, including Trigo Technologies and DWL.

However, most experts agree that Microsoft’s entry will be a positive in that it will encourage more firms to look at MDM.

“In 2003 when we pitched the concept of MDM the uniform feedback we got from the analysts was that this was never going to happen,” said Hayler. “They can’t say that now.”