Informatica Recognized as the #1 Master Data Management Vendor by Dresner Advisory Services

This is an exciting time in master data management (MDM) at Informatica. I’m excited to share that we were recently named the number one vendor in the 2023 Dresner Advisory Services Master Data Management (MDM) Market Study, which is part of the Wisdom of Crowds® Series. The report rates 24 vendors in six solution categories based on research done with global organizations of all sizes, locations and types: 

1. Analytics 
2. Architecture 
3. Data quality / data governance / collaboration 
4. Data integration 
5. Embedded machine learning (ML) / artificial intelligence (AI)  
6. Packaging and deployment options 

Why is this recognition significant? Master data management is at the heart of digital transformation, providing the necessary context for business transactions. MDM solutions can enable the most important strategic goals of an organization, such as growing revenue, lowering costs and improving the customer and employee experience.  MDM can help organizations modernize IT architectures, update back-office applications on the cloud, streamline business processes and use advanced analytics and AI models.  

Success in digital transformation requires critical business data that’s consistent, clean, enriched, governed and connected. Without it, companies risk confusion, chaos and conflict by relying on siloed data that is lacking integrity, incomplete and inaccurate. Sound familiar?  

This is why MDM stands out as a growth area. In the Dresner study, 76% of respondents said that MDM is critical or extremely important to their companies. The study also showed a high correlation between the importance of MDM and measurements of data leadership and data literacy. As well, 90% of the people who think their BI is completely successful agree that MDM is very important or critical.  

When backed by a sound master data management solution that helps ensure data is of high quality, integrity and trust, organizations can focus on what matters, leading to better decisions. It’s very encouraging to see.

Most data leaders will tell you they believe that data should be a shared asset across an organization. According to the study, 80% of the participants deploy MDM as a shared resource either across their company or globally. With data that’s created and scattered across the hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of systems and applications used to run a business, MDM creates a trusted global view of data across departments, lines of business and regions.  

Today’s organizations need to move at the speed of business. And, as more teams align around the same data, they are empowered to spend more time identifying opportunities and less time trying to find, reconcile and correct data. With new AI and operational models, how — and how fast — you can manage and correct your data is becoming increasingly important.  

It's critical to choose a partner that can accommodate a fast time-to-value, provide the ability to scale with today’s data volumes and support the multidomain demands of today’s global environment. At Informatica, we are accelerating MDM implementations through pre-built content designed for specific industries, data sources and common use cases; connecting domains in a single solution; and offering MDM as a service on clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.  

Our CLAIRE metadata-driven AI and ML engine underlies many of these capabilities. CLAIRE learns your company’s data landscape, automates manual tasks and makes recommendations, along with providing insights about your data. Informatica continues to add new features to CLAIRE, including data discovery, smart tagging, schema validation, integration mappings, classification recommendations and entity matching. 

Of the four deployment models surveyed, there was also a notable increase in favor of public cloud deployments, rising from 29% in 2022 to 38% this year, while on-premises decreased to about one of every five MDM deployments. Cloud deployments of MDM provide easy, efficient and cost-effective master data management capabilities for virtually everyone, everywhere — helping to free up resources from costly and time-consuming maintenance and upgrade tasks. Cloud deployments can also scale with little effort to meet increased demands, such as adding a new data source or data domain when needed.  

Master records are most commonly created for the domains that are essential to a business, such as product, supplier, reference, location, employee and customer — in forms such as a healthcare provider or a patient, a consumer or a business, a student or alumnus, etc. The number of different data domains can be virtually limitless. The study shows that while a single domain remains the most prevalent at 37%, this is in a decline year over year, with growth planned for more than one domain. Multidomain master data management solutions can help you link customer to product to supplier to location information in a game-changing way.  

For example, consider a weather event in a specific location like the Pacific Ocean that shuts down raw material shipments from a supplier. These materials are used in your top-performing product sold to your customers in the North American location. MDM can easily manage and connect the data used to evaluate the situation for a fast response. If you know a supplier might be impacted, consider how easily you could find another supplier and maintain production before your competitors do. MDM can easily manage and connect the data used to evaluate the situation for a fast response.  

This shows how master data management provides the necessary context for business transactions and helps organizations transform their processes. 

Because of the value MDM brings to an organization, Informatica aims to make MDM easier and faster to implement. We do this as the only all-in-one AI-powered master data management solution designed on the cloud.  

Informatica Intelligent MDM and 360 Applications provide the necessary services required to implement an MDM solution, end-to-end, in a single data management cloud, the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC). IDMC capabilities include data discovery, data catalog, data integration, application integration and API management, data quality, data profiling, data enrichment, data verification, data governance, data marketplace, business process management and data mastering. We believe our strategy and focus are the key reasons we are recognized as the leader in this report. 

We believe IDMC offers key strengths that make Informatica an ideal partner, including the ability to: 

• Build a trusted data foundation for analytics, AI, ML and data science initiatives that supports both batch and streaming data  
• Solve problems and inform critical business decisions that accelerate innovation 
• Operationalize virtually any AI/ML model to put AI into action 
• Improve productivity and resource allocation by simplifying the architecture and data environment with cloud services 
• Take advantage of support for modern data frameworks, such as data observability, data mesh, data fabric, data lakehouse and modernization to super clouds  
• Gain elastic scale to meet business demands and optimize, govern and control cloud costs with FinOps 
• Employ simplified, scalable pricing that fits your master data needs as you grow records, domains and data sources 
• Choose virtually any cloud service across IDMC as your requirements change with Informatica Processing Units (IPU)  

We offer broad ecosystem support with the flexibility required in today’s multi-cloud and hybrid technology landscape. Cloud-agnostic and vendor-neutral, IDMC supports virtually any cloud ecosystem, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Snowflake, Oracle Cloud, Databricks and more. 

Because master data assets are the critical data assets of a company, they must be protected. IDMC is built with performance, reliability and security at its core to protect your most valuable asset, your data. We continuously add to our list of externally validated certifications, assessments and standards to keep your data safe. 

Informatica empowers organizations to realize transformative outcomes by bringing their data to life. Through IDMC, you can turn your data into a trusted resource — which then delivers dependable information and fuels the actionable insights needed to guide your teams, inspire innovation and drive business outcomes.

It’s clear there’s a growing demand for master data management. Get on board or risk falling behind the competition. Download your copy of the 2023 Dresner Advisory Services Master Data Management Market Study for an in-depth analysis of trends, use cases and vendor ratings.