Two recent posts on the Gartner blog is about databases in the cloud. The Future of Database Management Systems Is Cloud by Merv Adrian ponders why cloud is now the default platform for managing data and The Future of Database Management Systems Is Cloud by Donald Feinberg does the same. Well, the two posts are identical.

This will also mean that the default platform for Master Data Management (MDM) will be in the cloud. Add to that, that the other disruptive MDM trends also will work best in the cloud.

• We increasingly see Extended MDM Platforms that also handles reference data and big data. Both these data types are predominantly external in nature and therefore they are better collected, or even better connected, in the cloud.
• Services for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Master Data Management (MDM) is delivered by vendors as cloud solutions.
• Encompassing IoT and MDM means collaboration between many parties and this is, with all the relationships to take care of, only possible with cloud platforms.
• We will see several other use cases for business ecosystem wide cross company sharing of master data in what Gartner coins as Multienterprise MDM.

A recent post on this blog was called Five Disruptive MDM Trends. One of the trends mentioned herein is MDM in the cloud and one form of Master Data Management in the cloud in the picture is Data as a Service (DaaS).

Using Data as a Service in the cloud within MDM solutions is a great way of ensuring data quality. You have access to real-time validation and enrichment of master data and you can also use third party and second party services in the on-boarding processes and then avoid typing in data with the unavoidable human errors that else is the most common root cause of data quality issues.

Some of the most common data services useful in MDM are:

Address Verification and Geocoding

When handling location data having a valid and standardized description of postal addresses and in many cases also a code that tells about the geographic position is crucial in MDM.

Postal address verification can either be exploited by a global service such as Loqate from GB Group or AddressDoctor, which is part of the Informatica offering. Alternatively, you can use national services that are better (but also narrowly) aligned with a given address format within a country and the specific extra services available in some countries.

Geocodes can either by latitude and longitude or flat map friendly geocoding systems such as UTM coordinates or WGS84 coordinates.

Business Directory Services

When handling party master data as B2B customers, suppliers and other business partners in is useful to validate and enrich the data with third party reference data and in some cases even onboard through these sources.

Again, there are global and local options. The most commonly used global is Dun & Bradstreet, who operates a database called WorldBase that holds business entities from all over the world in a uniform format and also provides data about the company family trees on a global basis. Alternatively, many countries have a national service provided by each government with formats and data elements specific to that country.

Citizen Directory Services

When handling party master data as B2C customers, employees and other personal data the third-party possibilities are sparser in general, naturally because of privacy concerns.

In Scandinavia, where I live, these data are available from public sources based on either our national ID or a correct name and address.

Data pools and Product Data Lake

When handling product master data and product information there are for some product groups and product attributes in some geographies data pools available. The most commonly used global service is GDSN from GS1.

Alternatively (or supplementary), for all other product groups, product attributes and digital assets and in all other geographies, you can use a service like the one I am working with and is called Product Data Lake.

A while ago the trend of having the possibility to deploy a Master Data Management (MDM) solution in the cloud was covered in the post The Rise of Cloud MDM.

The latest Gartner MDM Magic Quadrant report has some numbers on that trend as mentioned in the post Who Will Make the Next Disruption on the MDM Market? Cloud based deployment has increased from 19% in 2017 year to 24 % in 2018 among Gartner’s respondents. While the organizations included here are the larger ones, I will guestimate that the cloud portion of MDM implementations are higher among midsize and smaller organizations.

As mentioned in the Gartner report there are however some confusion about what a cloud MDM solution really is. Does it come as SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)? In this spectrum the vendor will provide most things in a SaaS solution, lesser stuff as PaaS and only the ability for the software to be hosted somewhere out there as IaaS.

One “as a Service” component in relation to master data you could expect in SaaS, but not necessarily in IaaS, is DaaS (Data as a Service) as for example out-of-the-box address verification and business directory integration services. A common address verification service is the one from Loqate, while Informatica though have their own solution based on their AddressDoctor acquisition. The most common business directory provider is Dun & Bradstreet.

Else the difference follows the general difference between SaaS, PaaS and IaaS which is about what the organization has to do themselves (or through system integrators) around software updates, configuration, maintenance, monitoring and more.

On the brink to 2019 my guess is that we will see more MDM in the cloud next year as well as a movement from IaaS over PaaS to SaaS. This will include more DaaS covering more master data domains not at least in the product data space – a reason of being for the Product Data Lake service I am involved with.

Cloud as a deployment method for Master Data Management (MDM) solutions is on the rise.

In the latest MDM vendor selection activities I am involved in cloud is not an absolute must but certainly the preferred deployment method.

The MDM vendor market is responding to that trend. Some of the new players offers purely cloud based solutions. In a recent post on this blog I wrote about Three Remarkable Observations about Reltio. The fourth will be that this is a cloud-based MDM (and more) solution – called Reltio Cloud.

Another example of going the cloud path is Riversand. Their new release is put forward as a cloud-native suite of Master Data Management solutions as told in an interview by Katie Fabiszak with CEO & Founder Upen Varanasi of Riversand. The interview is posted as a guest blog post on The Disruptive MDM List. The post is called Cloud multi-domain MDM as the foundation for Digital Transformation.