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G00261695
Cool Vendors in Information Governance and
MDM, 2014
Published: 6 May 2014
Analyst(s): Debra Logan, Alan Dayley, Bill O'Kane, Andrew White
Information governance and master data management initiatives are
complex programs that require participation from a broad range of
constituents in the enterprise. Smaller and more innovative vendors may be
required to fully support information governance and MDM goals.
Key Findings
Ŷ
As organizations seek to digitalize their relations with their customers, how information (for
example, structured and unstructured data) is synchronized and shared with trading partners
and customers will become critical.
Ŷ
Cloud-based MDM systems offer an agile alternative to the on-premises approach to MDM and
big data integration.
Ŷ
In several vertical industries, particularly when they are heavily regulated or are rich in
intellectual property, demand is growing for assessment and integration of internal and external
big data sources with structured master data in multiple domains. Newer vendors are emerging
that can meet these needs with a significantly smaller footprint than the more-established MDM
vendors.
Recommendations
Information managers, IT legal professionals and records managers who are involved in MDM and
information governance programs — for example, data stewards, storage management leaders,
chief technology officers and chief data officers:
Ŷ
When there is a need to integrate large internal and external datasets with master data, consider
an MDM cloud solution provider as a more agile approach to the challenge.
Ŷ
When faced with legacy information cleanup or other data disposition activities, use automation
to aid in the discovery, classification and disposition of unstructured data.
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Ŷ
If you are unable or unwilling to change or manipulate underlying data stores or faced with short
time frames for data integration projects, use the approach of providing that data as a service to
front-end or user-facing processes.
Table of Contents
Strategic Planning Assumption............................................................................................................... 2
Analysis.................................................................................................................................................. 2
What You Need to Know.................................................................................................................. 2
Acaveo............................................................................................................................................. 3
Ostia.................................................................................................................................................4
Reltio................................................................................................................................................5
Gartner Recommended Reading............................................................................................................ 6
Strategic Planning Assumption
By 2017, 35% of MDM software sales prospects will purchase on the basis of candidate vendors'
solutions for linking structured master data to big data sources.
Analysis
This research does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but
rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services.
Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any
warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
This document was revised on 12 May 2014. The document you are viewing is the corrected
version. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.
What You Need to Know
Massive data growth, new data types, litigation, regulatory scrutiny and privacy/information risks
have all created an urgent need for information governance. The value of information cannot be fully
exploited — because the information itself cannot be trusted if it is not well-governed. Although
information governance is always a people-driven initiative, it also requires a broad range of
technologies to support it.
Information governance is not a single market but a composite one, and an information governance
program will require the use of multiple vendors and platforms for the foreseeable future. Master
data management (MDM) is one of the most important and popular types of information governance
initiatives. MDM projects lend themselves well to setting up governance structures, roles and
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policies, in addition to dealing with the technical issues of reconciling data definitions across
multiple systems.
While more and more organizations are talking about information governance, they are also realizing
that governance is technically complex, organizationally challenging and politically sensitive. The
heart of the matter is that it is difficult to locate accountability and responsibility in the organization,
and it is also a difficult thing to measure. For more about what works to drive information
governance programs forward, see "Information Governance Best Practice: Adopt a Use Case
Approach."
An approach to information governance based on specific use cases is one way to break through
barriers to adoption. But even single project, program or use case approaches to information
governance can be technically complex and require multiple vendors. As the disciplines of
information governance and MDM mature, specialized vendor software solutions are emerging to
support requirements for capabilities such as:
Ŷ
Integrating large internal and external datasets
Ŷ
Automating the discovery and classification of unstructured data
Ŷ
Providing data as a service to a front-end or user-facing process without changing or
manipulating the underlying data stores
This Cool Vendors report will be of interest to information managers, IT legal professionals and
records managers who are involved in MDM and information governance programs — for example,
data stewards, storage management leaders, chief technology officers and chief data officers.
Acaveo
Ottawa, Canada (www.acaveo.com)
Analysis by Alan Dayley
Why Cool: Acaveo delivers solutions to assist organizations dealing with out-of-control
unstructured data stores. Acaveo Smart Information Server (SIS) crawls file shares, Microsoft
Exchange, SharePoint, Office 365 and Box data stores providing reporting and visualization of the
metadata to assist organizations in achieving the following project goals:
Ŷ
Reduce costs and improve storage management with reporting and migration tools to
selectively move data to less expensive storage tiers and provide a workflow for defensibly
deleting data that no longer provides value to the organization.
Ŷ
Enhance security through identifying and tracking intellectual property and personally
identifiable information (PII) data and by allowing user-created rules that can identify possible
data access and data proliferation issues.
Ŷ
Implement dataset classification and the ability to inject workflow including taking action on the
data, such as legal holds.
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Ŷ
Perform static or dynamic custodian searches through the correlation of users, groups and
other identity attributes from Active Directory to the permissions inside the data repositories.
This includes mailbox delegates, folder sharing, public folder permissions in Exchange, and all
permissions in SharePoint, file servers and other supported data sources.
Note that Gartner does not believe that these tasks can be fully automated, as they require IT and
business leaders to create rules for the retention and disposition of data, determine the value of
data and implement a set of roles and responsibilities for data. However, having done these critical
and difficult upfront tasks, we know that automation is necessary, as the volume of data that most
organizations hold is too great for these tasks to be accomplished manually.
SIS is Acaveo's flagship product. Acaveo has also released DataClassifier, an add-on to SharePoint
for data privacy and autoclassification. DataClassifier acts as an extension to SharePoint indexing
for classification policies and applying custom metadata tags. Regular expression pattern matching
is also available through dozens of included templates. An enhanced search interface generates
custom reports from result sets, with all results and data statistics available in a very user-friendly
dashboard.
The user-wants-and-needs profile for file analysis is still emerging, and the market does not as yet
have any clear definition. What makes Acaveo stand out in this crowded and emerging field is the
user-friendly administration console, the interactive reporting dashboard, the ability to crawl and
classify data in Box, and tight integration with SharePoint, Exchange and Office 365. In addition,
Acaveo utilizes native search indexes in Exchange, SharePoint, Box and other products and then
federates these searches in a single console. Finally, Acaveo provides unified view and control
capabilities across Exchange, SharePoint and file server data.
Challenges: Acaveo provides tools in a crowded market for unstructured-data management.
Vendors of storage, security, e-discovery, information management and other solutions are
introducing tools that crawl, classify and report on metadata and content. As a smaller player,
Acaveo has not yet rolled out a comprehensive go-to-market strategy, instead spending the most
energy on product development up to this point. It is also almost exclusively focused on Microsoft
data environments. Acaveo's permission management is weak compared with vendors that
specialize more in data access governance. Although the ability exists to identify duplicate data, the
ability to deduplicate the data from within SIS does not exist. User audit reports (reports of what
users do within the Acaveo console) are not available outside of the console itself.
Who Should Care: All organizations struggle with high growth and unmanaged unstructured data.
Any organization that is looking to improve storage management, migrate old file shares, implement
information governance, or secure access and control of unstructured data will benefit from file
analysis tools such as provided by Acaveo. Typically, storage administrators, compliance officers
and security administrators are buyers of these tools.
Ostia
Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland (www.ostiasolutions.com)
Analysis by Debra Logan
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Why Cool: When clients are considering MDM and information governance projects, the challenge
is to locate data and translate it from its current format into something that can be used in multiple
ways by multiple systems. Ostia's Portus accesses data from disparate systems and legacy
applications, making it available as a standard set of services. This allows for data to be used as a
service that is then made available to other devices and applications. Ostia's Intelligent Discovery
and Dependency Mapper tool enables users to create a data map of systems to give a holistic view
of an organization's information assets without making changes to the underlying systems. This is a
task that any organization wishing to embark upon information governance must carry out. The
functionality can also support business processes like e-discovery, in which identification of where
custodian data might lie is a crucial step that must be completed under strict deadline pressure.
Challenges: Ostia's solution is designed to access traditional structured data applications — so
anything with a database or legacy application is in scope. When looking for information, however,
many enterprises also want to manage unstructured information. Partnering with a vendor that
focuses on information governance of unstructured data would allow a potential buyer to start with
one or the other, depending on its need. As a company, Ostia has the issue that many small
technology vendors face, which is vertical market focus. With a technology that can be many things
to many people, picking a set of business problems to focus on is key to market success.
Who Should Care: Clients looking to understand structured data assets or legacy applications for
information governance, e-discovery or system integration projects should consider Ostia as a
potential solution to the identification of data assets in structured systems.
Reltio
Palo Alto, CA (www.reltio.com)
Analysis by Bill O'Kane
Why Cool: In the vertical industries that have historically been heavy adopters of MDM and
information governance (for example, financial services and healthcare), there is increasing interest
in the ability to rapidly assess, enrich and integrate large source datasets (both internally and
externally generated) with the organization's traditional structured master data. While several
established MDM software vendors now offer functionality in this area (via either MDM-based
applications or tools that enable the extension of existing MDM platform functionality), Reltio
provides a nimble, cloud-based platform that supports a more agile approach to MDM and big data
integration. A Reltio client recently reported completing the first phase of a multiple-domain MDM
program in just a few months, at a price point significantly below the norm for a traditional MDM
approach, all while providing additional analytical functionality. Several more phases are currently
planned, based on Reltio's approach.
Founded in 2011 and led by former members of the MDM teams at Siperian and Informatica,
Reltio's Quantum MDM platform provides a cloud-based "NextGen MDM + Business Graph" set of
capabilities to assess, master and integrate data from enterprise applications, third-party data feeds
and social media. In a public or private cloud environment, Reltio provides both mainstream MDM
functions (such as matching, hierarchy management and real-time data integration) and additional
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capabilities for both master and nonmaster data, such as in-memory search and analytics, and data
visualization components. Reltio then provisions information convergence applications to business
users in sales, marketing and compliance through an intuitive, visual user interface. Content from
data enrichment providers is available as preintegrated subscriptions that are continually updated
by providers including Dun & Bradstreet, Enclarity, Health Market Science, MedPro Systems and
Loqate. Reltio also has implementation partnerships with several system integrators and consulting
firms. A REST API with access to both data and metadata is available for custom client and partner
application development. Vertical-specific implementations are available for life sciences and
financial services for users in sales, marketing and compliance business functions.
Challenges: Reltio provides a compelling vision for the convergence of MDM and big data
necessary to support both new and traditional operational and analytical requirements. But in order
to grow significantly, it will need to overcome some of the current reluctance of many organizations
to store their master data (particularly customer data) in the public cloud. Moreover, organizations
that have invested heavily in traditional on-premises solutions may not be ready to move to the
cloud due to those relatively recent investments. It may also have to consider demand for an onpremises version of its offering, especially if enterprise customers are willing to work with the
required infrastructure stack. Additionally, Gartner client interactions in our inquiries and at events
show that organizations continue to struggle with the construction of concrete business
justifications for implementations involving MDM and big data. As capabilities and adoptions of this
type increase, competitive advantage will be recognized across Reltio's target verticals, and
business value will be more readily estimated and accepted.
Who Should Care: MDM leaders and information architects who desire a leading-edge, cloudbased solution to managing master data, integrating it with internal and external big data sources,
and providing additional services around disciplines such as analytics would do well to evaluate
Reltio.
Gartner Recommended Reading
Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.
"The Impact of Cloud-Based Master Data Management Solutions"
"Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Customer Data Solutions"
"Information Governance Best Practice: Adopt a Use Case Approach"
"Cool Vendors in Big Data, 2014"
More on This Topic
This is part of an in-depth collection of research. See the collection:
Ŷ
Cool Vendors 2014: The Digital Age Forces Everyone to Confront 'Big Change'
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