Event Report: Siperian Masters 2008 - Customers Confirm Multi-Entity MDM Trends

(Photo: Siperian Masters'08 registration area. Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)

About 200 attendees were present as Ramon Chen, VP of Marketing, kicked off the event to the theme of adventurers and pioneers in MDM at the Bridgewater Marriott (New Jersey). CEO, Peter Caswell, led the keynote session with a view on where Siperian has been, where Siperian is going, and then introduced the Ravi Jagannathan VP of Product Management and Manish Sood, Senior Director of Product Management. They presented Siperian's road map well into 2012. Key announcements include:

• Ongoing expansion of the partner ecosystem and alliances.
• Announcement of semantic masters for unstructured data.
• Focus on easier to maintain GUI
• Continued availability of modular deployment options and other cost effective implementations
• New state management and work flow integration tie backs to the Lombardi BPM tools
• Visually appealing data governance dashboards.

In addition, a few key trends emerged from conversations with customers and partners:

• Most customers who had MDM projects also were embarked on SOA projects
• Pharma customers successfully proved ROI and justification despite being in SAP and Oracle "only" environments
• Availability of system integrator resources has improved.
• MDM projects need to be more pervasive and address innovation in order to gain long term political support.
• Many customers have reached what Forrester Research considers a Level 3 and 4 MDM maturity.
• Prospects continue to see Siperian as short listed vendors
• Many seek more innovation from their MDM systems and are beginning to branch out of their single data entity focus.

The bottom line

Siperian customers seem to be well ahead of the pioneering stage with MDM. Customers we spoke to remain satisfied with their decisions and have been successful in proving existing value. Many customers have transcended past level 3 on the MDM maturity model.

Your POV

Do these trends jive with what you are seeing in MDM and CDI? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Post a comment or privately reach out to me at rwang0@gmail.com Check it out on the Forrester Blogs.

(Ramon Chen presenting the 2008 Siperian Masters Awards.Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)

Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Event Report: CDI-MDM Summit, SF, CA

I recently moderated a track with a colleague of mine (Rob Karel) at the CDI-MDM conference this March 26h and 27th at the San Francisco Marriott. Though master data management penetration in the enterprise still hovers in the high single digits, its obvious the energy, activity, and investment around MDM continues to grow. Some quick observations at the event:

• Hierarchy management and data governance remained the most sought after topics
• Vendors seemed to outnumber clients (We found this later not to be the case)
  
• Clients who were there remained at the technical level
• Projects were beginning to require a higher level of executive sponsorship
• Effective change management was beginning to become a critical success factor in all sizes of projects
• Customer projects (given the bias of the event) dominated discussions though other entity types such as products and location became ancillary requirements.
  

In general, this event was a great chance to catch up with others pursuing the development of MDM tools and solutions. And as always it was great to see my familiar faces from Siperian, Initiate, DataFlux, Purisma, IBM, Oracle, VisionWare and, i2 at the event.

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2007 by R Wang. All rights reserved