Key takeaways: The 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Master Data Management Solutions

Recently, renowned analyst firm released its first event Market Guide for Master Data Management Solutions. It features solution overviews (like ours), must-have features (guess who has them all), rankings (spoiler alert: we're a pack leader), and Gartner's recommendations for data leaders considering a purchase.

Here’s our take on the key takeaways from this inaugural guide.

Evolving Challenges Are Reshaping The Master Data Management (MDM) Landscape

Despite the maturity of the market, the market continues to change and respond to the demands of modern businesses that are demanding more tangible business outcomes from their enterprise data management investments. 

The need for faster time to value

In 2020, the average implementation time for a master data management platform was nine months. Today, the average implementation time is 10 – 12 weeks. We don't like to brag, but since it only takes as little as five weeks to implement CluedIn, it’s likely that we’ve contributed to bringing that average down in a big way.

In the guide, Gartner advises organizations to focus on mastering the smallest set of master data possible to deliver against an objective with the most impactful results. It’s no surprise that in today’s tumultuous climate businesses will want to see those results quickly. Naturally, products that are built on technology that can support that pace are very popular.

Speaking of which...

Newer technologies can bring the business into the data supply chain

Gartner is well-known for giving expert guidance on how well particular solutions are positioned to address current business challenges. One of the biggest problems associated with MDM has been that despite its status as a business tool, the truth is that most MDM platforms can only be deployed and managed by technical experts.

This is changing, thanks to Cloud-native systems like CluedIn which allow business users to wrangle with data directly through the use of technologies like graph, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML).

As a graph-based system, CluedIn exemplifies many of the benefits highlighted by Gartner:

• Augmented data modeling: using graph completely eliminates the need to model your data upfront, saving organizations months of preparation before they even get to use their MDM systems. This means you can deliver projects and win over stakeholders much more quickly.
• Information quality and semantics: unlike traditional SQL-based solutions, graph databases can incorporate unstructured data like emails and PDFs just as easily as data found in tables and rows. The result is that it's much easier to identify, link, and semantically reconcile master data from different sources to create a golden record that business users can trust.
• Better enablers for Large Language Models (LLMs): AI and LLMs need quality data to be effective. Broadly, Master Data Management solves this, but graph databases' relationship-centric nature enhances AI decision-making by giving models access to a wider pool of more relevant data.

Another key characteristic of augmented MDM is that it’s born in the cloud, to work with the cloud. As Gartner rightly points out, many MDM providers have adapted their solutions to offer a cloud-based alternative to on-prem. However, in most cases, these solutions have been retrofitted and were not initially designed to take advantage of the economics and scalability of the cloud.

In CluedIn’s case, as well as being IT-friendly by eliminating the need to manage and upgrade software - integrations to other cloud-native solutions like Microsoft Power Platform, let business users access Master Data Management functionality on-the-go through mobiles and tablets.

Even better, businesses can self-deploy cloud-native master data management solutions to their tenant effortlessly through platforms like Azure Marketplace. 

Gartner even highlighted that CluedIn is the only MDM vendor to offer a trial version via the Azure Marketplace. In doing so, we’ve made sure that businesses can explore whether our solution is a fit for their business before they buy (and without ever having to go through a lengthy sales process - something that simply was not possible even a few years ago).

Generative AI has landed

Gartner expects generative AI to become part of many master data management solutions in the future and rightly points out that CluedIn is the first to integrate with Azure OpenAI. With it, we've shown businesses everywhere that it's now possible to cleanse, standardize and enrich data in minutes - not weeks.

We've also demonstrated how to perform powerful tasks like automatically mapping new source systems and enforcing new data governance policies as soon as they are created. 

These are just the early signs of the influence that generative AI will have on Master Data Management solutions. Now platforms like ours have shown businesses what's possible - Gartner expects other solutions to attempt to quickly innovate with AI soon.

Conclusion

The Market Guide goes into much more detail about the state of the MDM market and what organizations can expect in the months and years to come, but what's clear is that 2023 is witnessing a major shift in master data management technology. Gartner has cited CluedIn as being a front-runner in that innovation, and that's something we're extremely proud to offer our customers.

To learn more about Master Data Management, CluedIn and what can be achieved with innovative platforms like ours - check out our upcoming webinars, including our Summer of Data 2023 webinar series covering a broad range of topics such as reference data, zero upfront modeling, hierarchy management, and more.