by Angela Guess
David Linthicum of Informatica recently shared why he believes the Cloud is the perfect place for MDM. He writes, “There are those who look at the emerging world of cloud computing as a trend to efficiency. It gives them the ability to leverage resources using much more cost effective models, where those resources are provisioned and shared amongst many consumers. However, in the quest for efficiency, we often overlook the functionality of ‘the cloud.’ Or, the usefulness of placing core features in a centralized location, which thus provides better control and governance, as well as efficiency. This leads to the placement of core enterprise data management services in the cloud, such as Master Data Management, or MDM.”
He goes on, “Cloud-based MDM is a multitenant service that’s able to reach out from the cloud to manage any number of instances of enterprise data. Features you should look for include: (1) The ability to improve customer data using data standardization mechanisms, as well as address and e-mail validation to ensure that the data is in the best and most accurate state possible. Moreover, you can leverage other clouds to augment the data, such as providers that provide financial and news data that may be valuable in the context of existing business data. (2) Duplicate data management, such as culling through years of customer information to consolidate the data. This creates a single version of the truth for who a customer is, something that most enterprises have yet to accomplish. Moreover, this provides the ability to spot and deal with duplicate data before it’s entered into the core enterprise application, such as salesforce.com.”
