Your organization’s master data on products, customers, assets, employees, locations, and suppliers is a key asset of your company. Central to utilizing best practices to manage your master data is instituting an overall master data management strategy to manage these multiple data domains.
This technology-enabled discipline ensures consistency and uniformity across an enterprise’s data management systems. An error in master data can wreak havoc in all of the applications that use it. Moreover, today’s highly dynamic environment of business application delivery—such as cloud computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and software-as-a-service (SaaS)—not to mention the need for accurate reporting, make MDM a top priority for business.
Magic Quadrants Clarify the MDM Landscape
Gartner recently released Magic Quadrants for two discrete MDM disciplines: product data and customer data solutions. These Magic Quadrants provide a deep view into these constantly evolving packaged MDM system segments, positioning relevant technology providers on the basis of their completeness of vision relative to the market, and their ability to execute on that vision.
Gartner Magic Quadrant 2013 for Master Data Management of Product Data Solutions
This Magic Quadrant provides important insight into the segment of packaged MDM solutions that focuses on managing product data. In this Magic Quadrant, “product data” includes a range of “things,” such as finished products, parts, assets, services, materials, and financial instruments. 
It covers a wide range of MDM requirements to synchronize product information across business processes; create a central database for master data; provide a single dashboard for all business stakeholders; and support ongoing master data stewardship and governance requirements.
Gartner Magic Quadrant 2013 for Master Data Management of Customer Data Solutions
This Magic Quadrant provides insights into the segment of packaged MDM solutions that focus on managing customer data to support CRM and other customer-focused strategies. MDM of customer data solutions requirements include focusing on customer data in the design and running of information architecture and business processes; creating a global centralized database; maintaining one golden record of customer master; and accessing customer master data with low latency in real-time, legacy batch mode.
You shouldn’t reinvent the wheel, according to Gartner. “Many organizations have now invested in creating a new central system to master their customer data, with the majority (an estimated 80%) of organizations buying packaged MDM of customer data solutions, as opposed to building the capability themselves.”
Spanning the Broad Functional MDM Spectrum Between Customer and Product Data
TIBCO MDM is positioned as a Leader in both the Gartner Magic Quadrant for MDM of Product Data and Customer Data. We differentiate from other vendors by providing a unified MDM platform that supports a broad functional MDM spectrum between customer and product data. At the product end, we see emphasis on data model complexity and flexibility, governance process and workflow flexibility, and user interface adaptability. At the customer end, we see emphasis on sophisticated, configurable data quality; data de-duplication; and data survivorship with high volume integration requirements. As customers expand their MDM initiatives, TIBCO’s MDM platform provides them the flexibility to address a wide variety of future use cases in multiple data domains.
