Blog post

Master Data Management (MDM) Goes Open-Source

By Simon Walker | December 05, 2019 | 7 Comments

Until now enterprise master data management (MDM) solutions have required a perpetual software license, or a subscription. However, this has now changed. Unidata an emerging MDM solution vendor has taken the decision to offer its core MDM product as open-source. To my knowledge, this is the only open-source enterprise MDM solution presently available. It is possible that open-source MDM could disrupt the enterprise MDM solutions market.

Who are Unidata, and why did they make this decision?

Unidata is an emerging MDM solution vendor with offices in Russia, Germany and Switzerland. Unidata evolved out of an MDM external service provider. As the MDM market has well established vendors, they needed to differentiate their own MDM solution. Hence, the decision to offer their core MDM solution as open-source. They additionally offer commercial licensed extensions to their core open-source MDM solution.

What could open-source MDM mean for the market?

Open-source MDM offers end-user organizations a an additional alternative option to commercial MDM solutions. Rather than buy vs. build, its now buy vs. build, vs. open-source. It also offers software vendors with applications that would benefit from embedding MDM capabilities a new opportunity. As already stated, it is possible that open-source MDM could disrupt the enterprise MDM solutions market.

Unidata MDM open source community link: https://community.unidata-platform.com

Unidata Community Edition download link: https://gitlab.com/unidata-community/unidata-platform

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7 Comments

  • ANDREW WHITE says:

    Hi Simon,

    There have been two previous open source MDM offerings in past years that I know about. Sun offered such a product many years ago, before they were acquired by Oracle. Talend also offered an open source version of their enterprise MDM offering. In the first situation the product had little impact on the MDM market other than being a cool, cheap, took to play with. Talend was able to use its open source offering to drive leads for its sales team to build an enterprise license business. It had little community based approach outside of Talend. Do you think this new offering is different? Will this time be different?

  • Talend already tried the same move & decided it was not a viable market proposition – good luck to Unidata, they will have to find extremely capable & patient prospective clients…

  • Jos Schreurs says:

    Hi Simon, it would be great if you can also tell something about functional and technical strengths and weaknesses of Unidata MDM in relation to commercial MDM solutions.

  • thanks for sharing this article with us

  • Colm McCaffery says:

    Hi Simon, its interesting when you go to their site and the “Community” the article on MDM leads to one on Metadata Management – https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U9VjrBPtUZVOPGKmTxgNGBghjOFRGyiv/view
    Which doesnt mention Mastering of Data … are there crossed lines here ? isnt their community software based on Metadata ?

  • Hi Simon!

    Many thanks for your message. From all the Unidata I would like to thanks everyone who has registered in our Community.

    We are to collaborate. Ready to share. Ready to move forward. If anybody has further questions- I would be very happy no answer.

  • Alex says:

    Hi Simon!
    I followed the link https://gitlab.com/unidata-community/unidata-platform
    I did not find open source there. Where is open source code?
    I did not understand anything.