Andrew White

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Archives for January, 2009


Social Software to help enterprises to outperform?

by Andrew White  |  January 30, 2009  |  1 Comment

A few Gartner analysts compared notes after reading this blog by Craig Roth at Burton Group Blogs.  The take away from the blog, aptly named, The Elephant in the Social Software Room, was that many firms do not like the idea of organizational; and departmental boundaries being broken down in the name of “free information [...]

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Category: Business Drivers Social Software     Tags: ,

Best of Breed MDM versus Generalist MDM – which is best?

by Andrew White  |  January 29, 2009  |  4 Comments

I took a briefing from Orchestra Networks yesterday, a French based MDM vendor, that allowed me to explore again the comparison between the idea of what a best-of-breed or specialist MDM vendor can do versus a generalist MDM vendor.  Of course, the answer is in how these vendor categories are defined.  And once we have [...]

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Category: Analytical MDM Operational MDM Orchestra Networks     Tags: , ,

More on ERP and MDM – apples and oranges?

by Andrew White  |  January 28, 2009  |  7 Comments

I received a newsletter from Hub Solution Design, an MDM services vendors, and in that newsletter was an invitation for a webinar hosted by Siperian, an MDM vendors, and Hub Solutions.  The title of the webinar was, “Top 5 Reasons Not to Master Your Data in SAP ERP”.  The invitation said that the webinar will [...]

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Category: ERP Master Data Lifecycle MDM Siperian     Tags: , , ,

What value MDM to business-to-business (B2B)?

by Andrew White  |  January 27, 2009  |  Comments Off

Yesterday I had the good fortune of attending the sales kick-off meeting for Inovis, a B2B vendor.  I was invited in order to get an update on the vendor and to hear the vision for 2009 from the management team.     MDM was very prominent in the vision.  In fact, several of my favorite topics [...]

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Category: Business to Business (B2B) Multienterprise Product Information Management (PIM)     Tags: , , ,

FT articles highlighted; how to get credit markets moving again

by Andrew White  |  January 21, 2009  |  Comments Off

Warning – Personal Views Follow!   I read the FT, and in the last coupe of days I saw a couple of great quotes I had to lift.  On Monday, January 19th, there was an article called, “Obama team to make credit flow a priority”.  The article talked about how the credit crisis is not [...]

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Category: Economy     Tags:

Where did MDM “come from” in the first place?

by Andrew White  |  January 20, 2009  |  3 Comments

I was sent a link to a story in December, Winning over the MDM Chief Procurement Officer with MDM, (thanks Debbie) that I found interesting.  The article is based on some vendor (Bristlecone Inc.) content (not always a bad thing), but the thing that I found most interesting was the source link referred to in [...]

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Category: Customer Data Integration (CDI) IBM Product Information Management (PIM)     Tags: , ,

New Research Published – Inforum 2008: The Infor Brand Emerges?

by Andrew White  |  January 19, 2009  |  Comments Off

Some of my colleagues just published a note updating users on Infor’s recent user group (see Inforum 2008: The Infor Brand Emerges?) .  Did you say, “who’s Infor?”  Despite its age, Infor is a $2bn+ business applications vendor that has, over several years, acquired multiple ERP, CRM, SCM and PLM offerings.  See archived research Infor [...]

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Category: Business Applications ERP SOA     Tags: , ,

What did you read over Xmas?

by Andrew White  |  January 15, 2009  |  Comments Off

I was lucky enough to read two books over the Holidays.  One I recommend; the other I don’t. :   Boeing versus Airbus: The Inside Story if the Greatest International Competition in Business, by John Newhouse, 2007, Knopf.  Too often Newhouse leaves the logic of a chronological analysis of the story and focuses instead on several [...]

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Category: Competition Economy     Tags: ,

“Dark Inflation” to Stalk the Global Economy in 2012 – is the Force with you?

by Andrew White  |  January 9, 2009  |  2 Comments

Just to show you that my blogs are not all MDM related (so that you know I am not an automaton), I wanted to share an idea with you.  I was reading today’s FT and in there was an article entitled, “State Shores Up Commerzbank”.  The article was describing how the German government was pumping [...]

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Category: Economy     Tags: , , ,

SaaS moves the process boundary, does not necessarily change the process, and can make integration of master data more complex.

by Andrew White  |  January 6, 2009  |  1 Comment

I took a fascinating briefing today from a vendor that has announced a SaaS-based Order Management offering.  I took the briefing in order to discover how the vendor had solved the problem of integrating the use of master data across the enterprise firewall; this has to be an issue for any user of SaaS-based business [...]

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Category: Business to Business (B2B) Cloud MDM SaaS     Tags: , ,