I had a laptop “near death experience” over the past few days. It actually started on Saturday (which was Halloween). So I guess that makes this a “Halloween Hard Drive Horror Show”.
First, my Sony Vaio, which I’ve had for two years, got a little wobbly. Windows Vista wanted to run the dreaded CHKDSK utility. Things went down hill from there very quickly.
Monday night, I went back to my hotel room after working at my client’s offices all day, and the laptop refused to boot up at all. I gave it my best “I am not a techie” try, and realized this was not something I was going to be able to resolve on my own. No problem, I thought. I bought this laptop at Best Buy and was smart enough (I thought) to purchase a three-year extended warranty at the time (for an additional $600).
So yesterday morning, I showed up when the local Best Buy opened their doors, with my service plan number in hand. After a brief wait, I spoke with a member of the Geek Squad. He regretted to inform me that neither hard drive failure or reinstalling Windows Vista were covered by my extended warranty. But they were kind enough to let me borrow their Yellow Pages.
I got really lucky finding D&D Computers in Huber Heights, Ohio.
Brian Dean, the Chief Tech, told me to come right over. I got there a little after 11:00 am, and was there until just after 4:00 pm. Brian took extremely good care of me and my laptop. At my request, he replaced my failing 150 GB hard drive with a brand new 500 GB drive, bumped my RAM up from 2 GB to 4 GB, and installed Windows 7 on the new drive.
I had to reinstall all of my applications, which took a few hours last night. But to be back up and running in less than 24 hours, and to have gotten a major laptop upgrade out of all this, was a great outcome. I even got my old hard drive installed in a little enclosure so I could hook it up to my laptop using a USB cable, to access all of my data.
The total cost was $885 ($321 at Staples for the full version of Windows 7 Professional, $500 at D&D Computers for the new hard drive, new RAM and their labor, and $64 at Best Buy for the USB drive enclosure).
The moral of the story: read the fine print of your extended warranty, let your fingers do the walking and make sure you’re current on backing up your hard drive!
At the Gartner MDM Summit conference three weeks ago in Los Angeles, I sat down with Anurag Wadehra and Ravi Shankar from Siperian. I usually go to Siperian’s user conference, which was held last week in Princeton, NJ. I couldn’t make it this time but had a great time at their Spring 2009 event.
So instead, I thought I’d do a blog article on Siperian’s momentum in the last year or so, based on the briefing that Anurag and Ravi were kind enough to give me in Los Angeles.
Siperian’s ambition is to be a leader in multi-domain master data management and since their product is not tied to a specific data model, that’s a realistic goal. Many of their customers find the business problem they’re initially trying to solve does in fact involve multiple domains (or areas) of master data.
Siperian’s most recent fiscal year ended May 31st, and they wrapped up the new year’s first quarter on August 31st. Impressively, their license sales more than doubled over the last 4 quarters, and overall revenue almost doubled.
The reduction in dependence on services revenue and the corresponding increase in license revenue, indicates a positive trend that Siperian continues to shift its implementations to its alliance partners.
One of the reasons Siperian wanted to sit down with myself and others in the MDM space was to dispel some rumors that have been floating around about the company. The economic downturn that began in the fall of 2008 has been widely felt, to be sure, and Siperian had significant exposure at that time to the financial services industry, which was one of the hardest hit industry sectors.
But Siperian has done a good job diversifying its customer base into other verticals, more than a dozen total to date, and is continuing to close deals with new customers, extending its footprint at existing customers, and building significant relationships with global systems integrators.
With customers like Johnson & Johnson, Merrill Lynch, and Cephalon speaking on behalf of Siperian at events like the Gartner MDM Summit and Siperian’s own user conference, there definitely seems to be a pattern emerging of large organizations with challenging MDM requirements turning to Siperian.
Another trend worth mentioning is that a large portion of Siperian’s revenue is repeat business – customers who have done a successful project with the company and are expanding their MDM footprint into another domain, geography, etc. This speaks volumes about the success of Siperian customers’ current implementations.
Siperian’s “Business Data Director” (BDD) product, launched at the spring user conference, has already signed up more than a dozen customers, with 2-3 already “live” and more going live in the next few months. I was there for the launch of BDD and remain impressed with it.
To a large degree, Siperian’s strategy of scaling through alliances is paying off. Ninety percent of its revenue in the last 4 quarters was partner influenced, with its top four partners accounting for 60% of that business.
I’ve followed the company closely for the past couple of years, and I think their company strategy and product roadmap is solid. Siperian helps keep the “Big Three” of MDM (Oracle, IBM and SAP) on their toes, and has generated a lot of innovation in this space.
I’m sorry to have missed their user conference last week, and I continue to expect great things from Siperian. Please share your thoughts on the company and their products here using the Comments feature.
The Oracle Applications Users Group conference, COLLABORATE 10, is being held April 18-22, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
But the Master Data Management (MDM) track of COLLABORATE 10 needs YOUR help!
This is your final invitation to share your MDM and Data Governance success story, knowledge and expertise by presenting at the conference.
The MDM Track’s call for papers has been extended to 11:59 pm EDT on Monday, October 26; this deadline will not be extended further.
More than 5,000 users, technology leaders, Oracle executives and solution innovators will gather for the event April 18-22, 2010, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.
We hope we’ll see you there — as a speaker!
If you’re interested in presenting, all you need at this point is a title, a short abstract of 520 characters summarizing your idea, and up to five “bullet point” objectives.
If you’d like to submit a paper, just send an e-mail to info (at) hubdesigns (dot) com, giving me a brief sketch of your idea. I’ll respond with the URL you’ll need to submit it.
Another strong session at Oracle OpenWorld this afternoon.
Alison Schofield, the Product Strategy Director at Oracle for PIM Data Hub, lead off the session by talkking about the business challenges in improving the data quality of product information, calling it the “greatest threat to your PIM initiative.”
Items are formatted inconsistently, misclassified, with overloaded description fields and lots of non-standardized data.
Martin Boyd from Silver Creek Systems took over to talk about the DataLens product, which Oracle is now selling on an OEM basis on the Oracle price list.
Martin pointed out that 10% of the total effort will be on the MDM software implementation, 40% on establishing governance and documenting the master data architecture, and 50% on data remediation (according to AMR Research, “MDM Strategies for Enterprise Applications, April 2007″).
Data mastering is about “getting your data right” and “keeping it right”.
And there are very few standards governing product data (outside of your product information management system) – all of your legacy systems and outside trading partners are going to feed you a lot of product data of questionable quality.
Martin presented Silver Creek’s DataLens capabilities “at a glance” – the ability to standardize and validation of attributes and descriptions, translate between languages, assignment to popular product classification schema, enrichment with internal and external data. matching and merging, and re-purposing so data can be published in any format for use by downstream systems.
Martin differentiated between tools designed to handle customer data quality and those handling product data.
Name and address data has a relatively fixed syntax, but product data has no fixed syntax. And there are only about 200 or so country address formats, while there are tens of thousands of product types.
Two thirds of companies use manual efforts or custom code, but they say it’s too unreliable (75%) or too slow (64%).
Gartner (and many other analyst firms) have given great reviews to Silver Creek in the last few months.
Oracle’s Product Data Quality Server (DataLens bundled into and pre-integrated with Oracle PIM Hub by Oracle) has been used at large retail, manufacturing and health care companies.
The product’s capability starts with semantic recognition – recognizing the product within the current context – and then you can standardize, match, enrich, and repurpose the data, although those things are quite different for product data than for customer data.
The session wound up with a demo of DataLens, and the integration with Oracle’s PIM Hub.
I’ve spent the last six months on the product side of the master data management world, so I’ve found Silver Creek’s DataLens product very interesting, as it solves a major problem in the product MDM space. It was great seeing the Silver Creek folks presenting with Oracle at OpenWorld today.
This afternoon at Oracle OpenWorld, I attended a great session led by Darrin Pohlman, Enterprise Architect at LexisNexis and MK Rizwan from Infosys.
They talked about the enterprise transformation program at LexisNexis, and the strategic use of technology to enable and drive that transformation effort.
MK started by pointing out the constraints of the single, global instance application strategy. You’re constrained by the vendor’s application architecture, and not all the functionality is best-of-breed across the entire suite. There are inevitable customizations and extensions which pile up over time, which leads to ever-increasing Total Cost of Ownership. It’s difficult to introduce industry-specific functionality, and it takes a long time to introduce new business models or capabilities.
The trend recently has been toward unbundling of the packages through SOA integration such as Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture (AIA) and the accompanying Process Integration Packs (PIPs). Further trends include vendor consolidation – Oracle acquiring Siebel, Hyperion, BEA, etc.
Interestingly, MK mentioned the important of prioritizing master data management, which got my attention, and he mentioned that would be particularly as people started to migrate in the future to the Fusion Applications products.
They went on to talk about AIA, particularly foundation packs, process integration packs and direct integrations. The foundation pack provides shared services, design patterns and standards. It runs on Fusion Middleware.
Darrin discussed the pro’s of AIA: good reference model for building composite applications, standards-based, extensible for unique characteristics of your business, and where Oracle is eager to demonstrate successful implementations. On the con side, PIPs can be tightly coupled, and the versioning of the AIA foundation pack can depend on specific versions of Siebel and other Oracle applications. Also, there are change management considerations of the IT team. There are licensing and maintenance considerations as well.
LexisNexis is an early adopter of this technology but has to plan for multiple upgrades over the next 12-18 months.
The audience was very engaged and asked some great questions during the session.
I found the session very helpful in better understanding the underlying enterprise architecture and technology strategy that LexisNexis is pursuing, and how Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture fits into that strategy, and Darrin and MK did a great job in explaining the pro’s and con’s of the approach and the experience that LexisNexis has had with it so far.
I’ve always enjoyed the depth and quality of Aaron Zornes’ analysis on master data management. I’ve been attending the MDM Summit conferences that he organizes in the U.S. with SourceMedia since 2006, and I’ve spoken at quite a few of his events.
Today I had the pleasure of hearing him speak on enterprise data governance. Here are some of his major points:
- Don’t settle for “passive” / downstream data governance; instead demand “active” / upstream data governance (please see my white paper with Siperian on this at http://forms.siperian.com/content/PowerGovernancePR).
- Don’t expect data governance maturity assessments to solve all your problems and provide a roadmap out of data governance anarchy.
- Today’s “data stewardship consoles” are substantially less than true enterprise data governance.
- Vendor viability does matter.
- Be prepared to spend $250k-$500k for an initial data governance solution.
Aaron styles himself as the “godfather of MDM” and today was a good reminder of why he deserves that title.
Oracle showed a funny video today in Thomas Kurian’s keynote address on Day 2 of Oracle OpenWorld.
Using a fictional company with lots of systems and applications issues, Thomas walked everyone through how Oracle would solve a lot of those problems.
There were some great customer cameos from companies like Ingersoll-Rand and Office Depot. It was a little on the sales-y side, as Oracle keynotes can sometimes be, but it was well done and wasn’t over the top.
This session was a good reminder of the breadth and depth of Oracle’s offerings in the technology and applications space, and frankly it made my head hurt. I’m glad that Hub Designs specializes in master data management – the Oracle universe has gotten so big, it’s a little overwhelming for most people.
I’ll write more later today on the MDM track sessions.
Having a dedicated MDM track at Oracle OpenWorld this year makes a big difference, in terms of being able to find the sessions more easily and in the focus and energy in the sessions.
First up today was a panel discussion on Hyperion Data Relationship Management (DRM). It was moderated by my friend Rahul Kamath from Oracle, and included Dongyan Wang from NetApp, Anand Raaj from Halliburton, and Nimish Mehta from Lumendata. It was very well done, and gave some good insights into the role that DRM can play as a hierarchy management tool in an MDM environment.
Next was Pascal Laik, VP of MDM Product Strategy at Oracle, who co-presented with Cisco’s Kin-Ching Wu. Pascal talked about the reality of complex, heterogeneous environments, and the difference between “push mode” and “pull mode”. He discussed the business drivers of growth, efficiency, IT agility and compliance, and the hard work Oracle has been doing over the past couple of years to help its customers to create their business cases and document the ROI that MDM has been realizing for them. Pascal laid out Oracle’s end-to-end data quality, pre-built integration and data governance strategies, and announced the new Data Governance Manager as a way to Define, Operate, Monitor and Fix data in the hub. Interestingly, 95% of the applications that Oracle customers integrate with are non-Oracle applications.
KC Wu from Cisco discussed their Customer Registry program, which draws data from 40 source systems and publishes it to about 80 downstream systems. She described a fascinating 10-year journey up the MDM maturity model.
The highlight of the next session for me was Bill Miller, a senior IT person at Oracle whom I’ve known for several years, who recently successfully implemented Oracle Customer Hub 8.0 at Oracle. It was very interesting to hear him describe how Oracle has put in place a lot of customer MDM and data governance best practices.
The last session of the day was Vanessa Hsu from Oracle, along with Kelle O’Neal from First San Francisco Partners and Angie Couron from Symantec. They did a great session on enterprise data governance, and gave a “first look” at Data Governance Manager.
I just arrived in lovely San Francisco for the latest edition of Oracle OpenWorld.
I’m particularly interested in the Master Data Management (MDM) track this year, as it looks as if the Oracle team has done a great job putting together a roster of Oracle employees, customers and partners to speak on its MDM products for managing master data on customers, products, financials, sites and suppliers.
I ran into several Oracle people like Pascal Laik, David Butler, and Rahul Kamath at last week’s Gartner MDM Summit conference in Los Angeles (more on that later), and as always, it was great to see them.
I’m really looking forward to this week’s sessions on the state of the art in MDM and data governance, and will be speaking myself on Thursday, Oct. 15th at 3:00 pm PDT. So if you’re interested in MDM and you’re attending OpenWorld this week, please stop by and say hello.
For that matter, if you’re in San Francisco and want to get together, send me an e-mail at powerd (at) hubdesigns (dot) com, or call my office number (781-749-8910) – it’s forwarded to my cell phone.
Hope to run into you in the City by the Bay!
Kraft Foods, an SAP MDM customer.
Hub Designs has two additional passes to the Gartner MDM Summit conference next week in Los Angeles. You will be responsible for all of your own travel, lodging and meals, but your conference registration would be covered.
Please contact me via the “Contact Us” page on our web site. To be fair, the first two people (using the time stamp on your request) will get the passes.
Please provide the following:
- Your first and last name (as you’d like it to appear on your badge)
- Company Name
- Title
- Phone Number
- E-Mail Address
- Mailing Address (please put in Message field on web site)
Only complete entries will be considered.
For more information on the conference, please see http://www.gartner.com/us/mdm.
“Master Data Management: The Sliding Scale Between Build and Buy”
Replay of the webinar with Dan Power and Marty Moseley
Please join industry experts Dan Power, Founder and President, Hub Solutions, and Marty Moseley, CTO, Initiate Systems, for this webinar where we’ll outline the best practices that have evolved to support organizations in making the critical “build vs. buy” decision.
Master data management (MDM) transforms data integration and business processes. Many organizations are exploring an MDM solution and will eventually have to answer the build vs. buy question. The combination of build and buy for MDM depends on the individual organization’s circumstances, goals and objectives. As MDM has evolved, so have the best practices for considering how much should be built and how much should be bought.
Some key considerations include:
- What are your current data volumes? How will they change in the near and distant future?
- Are customer relationships one-dimensional? Are you concerned with multiple domains of data and managing the corresponding hierarchies?
- Will you implement Web services? How will they be used?
- Do you augment your internal data with information from external vendors?
- What are the time, budget and resource limitations?
- Is MDM intended to eventually provide an enterprise data platform?
Please click here for the on-demand replay.
As I’ve written in the past, Hub Designs is a corporate member of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), and your trusty author, Dan Power, is the OAUG Education Committee’s track manager for Master Data Management.
Believe it or not, we’ve already started planning the May 2010 conference. So we’re looking for good papers on Oracle’s current MDM products: Oracle Customer Hub, Oracle Product Hub, Oracle Site Hub, and Hyperion Data Relationship Management.
This will be the second year where we will be combining the Customer MDM and Product MDM threads in a single Master Data Management track. Feedback on this was very good at last year’s conference.
Here’s the scoop from the OAUG on the Call for Papers:
Share Your Knowledge at COLLABORATE 10!
Proposals are due by Tuesday, October 20.
You are invited to submit a presentation proposal and share your approach to Oracle Applications in an education session at the premier annual conference for Oracle customers — COLLABORATE 10: Technology and Applications Forum for the Oracle Community, presented by IOUG, OAUG and Quest. More than 5,000 users, technology leaders, Oracle executives and solution innovators will gather for the premiere user-driven education and networking event April 18-22, 2010 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.
If you are an Oracle Applications professional with an interest in Oracle Fusion, Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Agile, Hyperion, Oracle Communications and Siebel product families, as well as applications technology, please submit through the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG). Proposals are now being accepted. The deadline is Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. EDT.
As a selected presenter, you’ll have the chance to:
- Share your best practices and tested solutions for Oracle technologies and applications
- Enhance your own knowledge through new conversations with your peers
- Attend a full week of education sessions to learn from other Oracle users, experts and leaders
Get more information about presenting at COLLABORATE 10, including tracks, specific industry- or product-related areas of emphasis, presenter requirements and the presentation submission and selection processes.
Submit your proposal through the OAUG
Note These Important Presentation Submission Dates and Deadlines
- October 20, 2009, 11:59 p.m. EDT: Presentation abstracts due.
- December 2009: Accepted presenters notified by the OAUG.
- January 21, 2010: Acceptance of the compliance agreement due.
- March 9, 2010: All presentation materials including white paper and presentation slides are due.
- April 18 – 22, 2010: We look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!
IOUG, OAUG and Quest strive to provide top-quality content at COLLABORATE, emphasizing user-driven education sessions that truly benefit attendees and their organizations. We will monitor sessions and feedback from attendees to ensure education sessions are not focused on a sales-centered topic. Presenters in violation will be noted and may be prevented from speaking at future COLLABORATE conferences. This does not apply to any purchased vendor activities, which are clearly communicated to attendees as sponsored events.
Attention Team Oracle! All Oracle employees interested in speaking at COLLABORATE 10 are to contact Lisa Stuart at lisa.stuart@oracle.com prior to submitting papers through the official COLLABORATE 10 call for papers engine.
| Connect with COLLABORATE 10 — OAUG Forum on Twitter for conference news, reminders and networking. Use hashtag #C10. |
Regular readers of this blog are, of course, aware of the benefits of Master Data Management (MDM) as a means to enable the organization’s customer and supplier facing employees with accurate, complete, timely and consistent information. Many companies find themselves in the predicament of having multiple versions of the truth. Employee productivity is often reduced by using inaccurate data while servicing customers, patients, vendors, investors, etc.
The cost and disruption introduced by adopting an MDM solution shouldn’t be minimized. While the benefits of these environments are well documented, the road to implementing MDM can be challenging. Hub Solution Designs’ partner, AMB, a leading vendor in the data governance industry, is presenting a simpler path, where the benefits can be reaped without the sometimes difficult implementation and the costs normally associated with MDM. AMB calls its approach “MDM on a Shoestring”.
AMB is presenting a short webinar on this topic. Using service-based profiling tools that can reach data wherever it resides, plus a virtual MDM registry constructed using an open repository and easy-to-use query tools, allows for building a much simpler roadmap to benefiting from MDM.
AMB has partnered with industry veteran Mark Albala to offer an informative 30 minute webinar on this topic. Attendees will learn about a new, affordable approach to MDM, including Mark’s seven key attributes to using the right tools and how information profiling forms the basis for MDM success.
This 30 minute program is designed to be brief and informative, and is available at 12:30 pm EDT on either August 27th or September 15th. To register, just visit to the AMB website at http://www.ambpdm.com/mdm_on_a_shoestring.html.
A new white paper by Dan Power of Hub Designs is available on Siperian’s web site.
The white paper underscores the importance of a proactive data governance approach, and is designed to help organizations develop a sound and sustainable data governance initiative.
Data governance is a vital component of any master data management effort, since it defines who owns the data, who establishes policies, and who the decision-making authority is when it comes to an organization’s critical data assets. However, many companies tend to take a limited and reactive approach to data governance.
In this new report titled, “When Data Governance Turns Bureaucratic: How The Data Governance Police Can Constrain the Value of Your Master Data Management Initiative”, we outline the limitations of a reactive data governance strategy and urge organizations to adopt a proactive data governance approach, whereby master data is corrected and validated right at the source and often by the business user. This removes potential data stewardship “bottlenecks” and eliminates critical time lags that may occur between the initial entry of a new master record, its certification/ publishing, and its ultimate availability to the rest of the enterprise.
To access the full report, visit http://forms.siperian.com/content/PowerGovernancePR.
