Andrew WhiteYesterday 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 were central to the strategy: MDM, and multienterprise, and B2B. Inovis is historically what many would call an EDI-VAN but today the vendor has moved “up” a stack of technology (we ultimately call this a multienterprise business process platform) in order to provide value add to its customers. Such value add includes analytics, order/supply chain visibility, business process improvement/design, and ultimately, full blown multienterprise business applications for B2B collaboration. It is not easy to assemble this stack; not is it easy to make money from selling the stack – not least because prospects are not really aware of the solution that best fits their problem’.
One part of MDM emerged from the B2B space. Some years ago a number of firms “doing” B2B figured out that the data they shared with each other in the EDI and XML transactions were out of sync; that is, the data being pushed and pulled was never always in alignment with either the sender or recipients (or both) internal systems. It either took to long to keep the systems in sync; or the timing was OK but the quality of the data was not fit for purpose.
This business impact of this desynchronizing of commonly used data are legion: out of stocks are higher than they should be since recipients are not able to process good received that were not expected (according to the ‘system’); users were not able to develop effective business plans since they were never looking at the right data; customers would create confusion and loss of good will when arguing with suppliers over charge backs that were a result of out of data systems. The list is endless. The justification to do something about it was obvious. So Global Data Synchronization (GDS) was born.
However, as GDS got going, it was obvious to a few more firms that the basic data inside the firm was so messed up that sending it on to clients was hopeless – until and if the data inside the business was cleaned up. So achieving a “single view” of product, location, and customer become important.
So MDM has many drivers, and can offer many benefits to the business, but it is also a pre-requisite to many B2B initiatives. That is why Inovis is working hard in this area, and some of their earlier acquisitions are beginning to add a lot of good IP to the vendor. QRS was acquired in 2004 and that vendor had an MDM like engine that was cleaning up, reconciling, and managing apparel information for large swathes of the US apparel industry, in a SaaS based manner. Between Markets was acquired in 2007 and that vendor was focused on a multienterprise data model centric set of B2B applications. The current CTO, Erik Huddleston, comes from Between Markets. These two building blocks, and the rest of the Inovis stack, and existing customer hubs, provide an interesting runway for Inovis in 2009.
My colleague, and collaborator, Benoit Lheureux, also covers Inovis but more from the enterprise and multienterprise integration perspective. See Q&A: Hot Questions for Multienterprise (B2B) Integration.
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Category: Business to Business (B2B) Multienterprise Product Information Management (PIM) Tags: B2B, Data Synchronization, Inovis, Multienterprise
