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Organisations are at last getting to grips with data management and vendors in the space are anticipating a bumper year. But can their tools really resolve the chronic mistrust of corporate data?

It seems almost redundant to assert that one critical role of the IT department is to help the business make use of its data. Somehow, though, that objective has not always been the direct focus of IT projects; infrastructure upgrades, application deployments, hardware refreshes and the like have often taken precedence over data management. 

“Improving the quality of data has always been priority 11 out of ten,” jokes Rob Karel, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “It was something that everybody knew was important, but something else would always come up that people thought was more important.”

There are signs, though, that this might be changing. One is Information Age’s own Effective IT survey, conducted at the end of 2009. It found that master data management – whereby organisations establish a system of processes to ensure that a clean, reliable copy of critical data is maintained at all times – is the IT strategy that most respondents intended to deploy in 2010.

One might also view the flurry of activity in the data management market in recent months as a rapid reaction to changing customer priorities. This activity includes acquisitions: IBM acquired MDM vendor Initiate Systems in the last week of February 2010, and data integration supplier Informatica bought another MDM vendor, Siperian, the very next week. It also includes product launches; data quality vendor DataFlux announced a new data management platform in February 2010, only weeks after open source integration supplier Talend introduced its own MDM product. Clearly, suppliers in the space believe there is demand to be met.

However, Karel sees this activity not as a knee-jerk reaction to recent changes, but as a series of moves that have been in the works for months, if not years, and that were postponed by the economic downturn.

"A lot of the expensive IT systems haven't acheived the promised return on investment. One of the root causes was the fact employees did not trust the data that was flowing through the systems."
Rob Karel, Forrester Research

The process that Karel believes may have at last pushed data management into the top ten list of priorities has in fact been a long one. “A lot of the IT investments made in the past were very expensive, long-term investments such as massive ERP implementations or data warehousing and business intelligence projects,” he explains. “But they often didn’t receive the kind of cross-enterprise adoption that was required to get the promised return on investment, and one of the key root causes for that was the fact that employees did not trust the data that was flowing through the systems.”

The growing adoption of data management technologies seen in recent years has been, Karel argues, motivated by a desire to “rescue those strategic invests”. And the economic downturn has for many organisations acted as a “compelling event” that has driven them to launch such rescue missions. 

Mastering data

As far as software vendors are concerned, master data management is where the action currently lies: Forrester Research estimates that the MDM market will be worth $1 billion in 2010 and is growing at a rate of 20% a year. This help explains why vendors from surrounding disciplines are encroaching into the MDM space.

According to Tommy Drummond, VP of product marketing at Informatica, the company’s $130 million acquisition of Siperian was prompted by high demand for MDM among its own customers. “Many of our customers are implementing MDM solutions at the moment to solve their challenges around compliance, better reporting and reducing cost,” he says.

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