Don’t You See the March of MDM Democratization?

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In several countries, 2011 has seen dictatorial governments fall, and new democracies emerge. And in most cases, these governments, and political analysts, have been taken by surprise.

The same thing is happening in the MDM space. Exactly two years ago, Talend introduced the first open source MDM solution. It’s been seeding its roots since then. Until it started to really blossom. And yet, this is mostly happening under the radar.

In a recent post MDM in 2012: What Was, What Will Be… And What Won’t Be, Forrester’s Rob Karel addressed many of the changes in the MDM market in 2011 – and he is right on the money on all of them (data governance, multi-domain MDM, BPM & MDM convergence, etc.). But a major piece is missing: the march of democracy.

In the same vein, two Gartner Magic Quadrants (MDM of Customer Data by John Radcliffe, MDM of Product Data by Andrew White) were released late last year. And again, they fail to see the march of democracy.

Now, the goal of this post is not to take shots at Rob, John or Andrew. Primarily because I have already exposed my views about the way these major analyst firms follow, and don’t lead, major market trends, and everyone got a chance to comment on that topic. And also because it would be counterproductive. If political analysts around the world failed to see the uprisings of democracy until revolutions were under way, how can I blame industry analysts for not seeing what is happening under the radar in IT organizations? Frankly, it’s also because we, as a vendor, did not do a good enough job of showing them proof points.

The truth is, enterprise open source has democratized data integration & data quality – nobody is questioning this today (although a few years back, it was an uphill battle!). The march of democracy is under way for MDM as well.

In the past year, we have seen many midsize firms deploy Talend Open Studio for MDM (formerly Talend MDM Community Edition) in less than 3 month for real-life projects. Of course we also have references with larger firms such as The Weather Channel that selected Talend Enterprise MDM for single customer view, or Berlingske Media using Talend Enterprise MDM to get a single version of the truth, or B-process leveraging Talend Enterprise MDM to increase productivity. And these are only a few examples, many more references are under way and/or are available under NDA.

Democracy is coming to MDM. The good news is that nobody will get killed during this revolution.

Since this is the season, I’ll conclude this post with a few predicts:

• This blog post will create a controversy, just how big I don’t know (.5 probability)
• Open source MDM will continue to explode in 2012, bringing enterprise grade MDM technology to more and more companies, without forcing them to sell a kidney to buy their Kalashnikov (1.0 probability)
• Methodology teams at major analyst firms will see the light and change the way they are looking at the market (.01 probability)
• I am going to get spammed by advice from AR firms on how to leverage references with analysts (.99 probability)

Yves




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