These days I am attending the Gartner MDM summit in London.
MDM (Master Data Management) initiatives and MDM solutions are not created equal and different ways of slicing the MDM world were put forward on the first day.
Gartner is famous for the magic quadrants and during the customer master data quadrant presentation I heard Bill O’Kane explain why this is a separate quadrant from the product master data quadrant and why there are no challengers and no visionaries.
In another session about MDM milestones Bill O’Kane for this context sliced the MDM world a bit differently based on moving between MDM styles. Here we had:
- Business-to-consumer (B2C) Customer Data Integration (CDI)
- Business-to-business (B2B) customer MDM, Product Information Management (PIM) and other domains.
The vendors in general seems to want to do everything MDM.
Stibo Systems, a traditional PIM vendor, presented the case for multidomain MDM based on how things have developed within eCommerce. Stibo even smuggled the term omnidomain MDM into the slides. A marketing gig in the making perhaps.
The megavendors has bought who ever they need to be multidomain.
Some new solutions are born in the multidomain age. Semarchy is an interesting example as they are so the evolutionary way.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
Is Gartner playing dumb? Seriously, how can you possibly put pure PIM players and MDM for Product in the same quadrant?
In fact, in the CRM quadrant you won’t find MDM for customer. Why PIM is in the MDM quadrant then?
The Multidomain thing is great but still MDM and not PIM.
Shall we write a 101 article to explain the two different worlds?
Intriguing slicing indeed. Thanks for bringing it up.
Multidomain seems to be the approach that gives the most freedom to expansion beyond silos of MDM and Governance Practices.
I hope to hear it live in Vegas at the next Gartner and I look forward to seeing you there Henrik.
There is a small typo – B2C should be Business-to-Customer.
Or am I not understanding some nuance in the description?
Thanks Shiva. You are right. Corrected.