Data Management Software Revenue To Grow 21 Percent This Year

Worldwide master data management (MDM) software revenue will reach $1.9 billion (£1.2bn) in 2012, a 21 percent increase from 2011, according to IT research firm Gartner. And the market is forecast to reach $3.2 billion (£2.1bn) by 2015.

The Forecast: Master Data Management, Worldwide, 2010-2015 report found the overall MDM market is dominated by three major players – IBM, Oracle and SAP – although within the overall MDM market, more than half the revenue is driven by products from small and best-of-breed vendors, as the market continues to favour specialised products over “generic” offerings.

Cost optimisation

From a regional perspective, Europe and North America will drive the demand for MDM, and both regions will grow at a steady pace to reach the billion-dollar mark – in 2013 for North America and in 2015 for Europe. In 2013, MDM software revenue will see faster growth in the Asia/Pacific region, where revenue will increase by 30 percent from 2012 to reach $209 million (£134m).

“This is the biggest annual growth we’ve seen for this market since 2008,” said Colleen Graham, research director at Gartner. “Pressures to optimise costs and efficiencies in a heterogeneous IT environment are driving organisations to turn to MDM as a more efficient way to manage and maintain data across multiple sources. In addition, the increasing governance, risk and compliance regulations are forcing organisations to focus on MDM to support these initiatives.”

The largest domains of the MDM software market are MDM of customer data and MDM of product data, each of which is predicted to more than double in size over the next four years. MDM of customer data helps an organisation cross-sell and cross-market, as well as retain customers and provide a consistent high-quality customer experience. “MDM has become a critical discipline required for dealing with the challenges of social data, ‘big data’, and data in the cloud,” Graham said.

The market for MDM of customer data is expected to reach $644 million (£413m) in 2012 and to exceed $1 billion (£640m) in 2015.

The market for MDM of product data, which helps an organisation store product-related master data, metadata or both, is projected to reach $688 million (£441m) in 2012 and to surpass $1.1 billion (£704m) in 2015. “In the next four years we expect larger vendors will continue to acquire for this specialisation while smaller vendors will acquire each other to build market share and increase the functionality within their portfolios,” said Chad Eschinger, research director at Gartner.

However, the variety of technologies that can be applied to an MDM initiative leaves the door open for data integration and data quality providers in particular, Eschinger noted. As more midsize organisations adopt MDM in the course of the next four years, they are demanding lower prices and more flexibility from vendors. As a result, many new MDM vendors and offerings capturing this market will be focused on areas such as open source, as well as cloud computing and software as a service.

“The increased demand for more effective decision-making and a focus on improving the timeliness and accuracy of business decisions makes MDM paramount for organisations,” said Graham. “MDM supports these goals by ensuring the high quality of key data needed at the point of decision, removing uncertainty and increasing confidence.”