Andrew WhiteAfter my blog on When is SOA, DOA? When it’s without MDM!, a vendor kindly sent me an email that explained how they too had similar ideas regarding the important link between MDM and SOA. Oracle wrote a white paper entitled, MDM as a Foundation for SOA, in November 2007. The SOA Magazine published in July this year an extract of the white paper, called Data Management: The Missing Link in Your SOA Strategy. I have to say that the extract is well written, and in fact includes a nice, and more importantly, simple business example, of how MDM and SOA work together.
I single Oracle out with this blog, but other vendors do “get” the link between MDM and SOA. I would characterize the vendors that do “get it”, as those that typically have sold offerings into complex areas, where business applications or business intelligence applications intersect with other applications (pre application consolidation toward ERP), or where there is a lot of application to application interaction for complex business processes. This is quite common in Supply Chain Management, and so many SCM vendors “get” the connection between supply chain oriented master data (products, parts, bills of materials, constraints) and how the “single view” of them are required when composing new business applications.
I have not linked to many vendor white papers so far in this blog, and I don’t anticipate linking to all that I see or hear about. But Oracle was quick in replying – so they get the coverage today. Thanks Avi.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Vendor’s “get” the link between MDM and SOA | AppsInsight.net December 19, 2008 at 5:53 am
[...] reading these, Andrew updated his blog highlighting this (see post http://blogs.gartner.com/andrew_white/2008/12/18/vendor%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cget%e2%80%9d-the-link-bet...) and called out Oracle’s understanding of this [...]
2 Tim Harvey December 30, 2008 at 3:13 pm
First, it has been many years since we have spoken ( I was the President of SynQuest in Atlanta) and hope you have been well.
More importantly and while I don’t often comment on blogs, yours is especially insightful and I hope more people will see the importance of MDM to successful SOA. I have been in the software industry for more than 20 years now and I am not easily swayed but technology unless there is tangible value to the business. I believe SOA has the opportunity and have seen how SOA utilizing MDM solutions have been able to deliver substantial new functionality to businesses faster and at a lower cost than ever before. While the supply chain is a great example of the requirement for MDM, we have also seen the importance of it in financial services, government and healthcare organizations. These industries have large numbers of legacy applications with critical data that is trapped and not easily accessible for creating new business processes required by the businesses. In addition, too often BPM or BPEL or code based solutions don’t have the tools or solutions for creating data services at the right level of granularity that are required for effective MDM. At XAware, we don’t claim to solve the whole MDM problem but we are focused on providing an open source data integration solution that enables organizations to reduce the time and effort required to create composite data services, which we believe is a key requirement for successful MDM. And, since making our product available in March 2008 under a GPLv2 license, we have had more than 1.7 million visitors to our site, 175,000 downloads and more than 6,500 members join our community, making us one of the fastest grown open source projects for the Enterprise. So, while a lot of people still don’t understand the importance of MDM, thanks to you and others the word is getting out.
Warm regards,
Tim
Tim Harvey
tharvey@xaware.com
CEO, XAware