CHAPTER 18
MDM Vendors and products Landscape

Up until this point in the book, we have discussed the architecture, design, and implementation approaches of MDM solutions in a vendor- and product-agnostic way. This was done in order to have a better focus on the essence of MDM from inception and justification, to design, implementation, and deployment, covering major domain areas, concerns, issues, and risks. This vendor-agnostic approach is effective in helping MDM practitioners with common tasks and activities (such as building the business case and the roadmap), the architecture and design for an MDM solution, decisions related to buy vs. build, what vendor to partner with, in which area, and how. In other words, we need to know what features and functions are available today from what vendor, what is the vendor product roadmap, what pitfalls to look for when planning to establish a partnership with a particular vendor, and a host of other very relevant questions. Therefore, this book would be incomplete without an overview of the primary MDM vendors and their products.

Note We recognize that the information about specific vendors and their products is extremely volatile, and most of it may become quickly outdated. We also recognize that the list of vendors discussed in this chapter is far from complete. We focused on several key players that were either leading or gaining market share at the time of this writing. Nevertheless, we believe that the choice of vendors discussed here provides a good snapshot of the current MDM market landscape for a reader who wants to get to the key pieces of information quickly, which may lead to more detailed research in some specific area of MDM interest.

Note This overview is presented in the context of major MDM product/vendor categories, including

MDM Data Hub products for the Customer domain, MDM Data Hub products for the Product domain, information quality vendors, data providers, and delivery accelerators. However, even this high-level categorization of vendors and their solutions may be somewhat misleading. Indeed, as we show in Chapter 19, several key market trends in the MDM space, including market consolidation and multidomain MDM engines, result in a situation where a given vendor may provide solutions in several of the listed categories, depending on the point in time when a particular vendor is reviewed. Examples of these multifaceted evolving vendors include IBM, Oracle, SAP, Informatica, SAS, Tibco, and D&B Purisma. Of course, the MDM market is large and new entrants arrive on a reasonably regular basis, thus increasing market diversity and growing the number of specialist vendors that focus on a particular aspect of MDM. Most of these new entrants are not discussed here to maintain our focus on the major direction-setting MDM players.

MDM Market Consolidation

Over the three years that passed since the first edition of this book, the MDM product market has matured significantly. A wave of acquisitions that peaked in the first half of 2010 brought a significant consolidation of the market around a few key players in the MDM space. For example, let’s look at what happened with major vendors that were considered in the leadership position at the time when the first edition of this book was published in 2007. Key acquisitions in the MDM space include a new home for Initiate and Exeros, which have become IBM companies, and Siperian, which is now part of Informatica. Also, Business Objects (First Logic) was acquired by SAP, Purisma was acquired by D&B, and Sun’s SeeBeyond is now a part of Oracle. Finally, Netrics was acquired by Tibco Software.

This consolidation, however, does not change the fact that Master Data Management is a complex, multicomponent integrated platform that involves numerous technical, organizational, and business process areas of concerns (refer to Figure 13-1, which shows the MDM “ecosystem”). Like any large and complex computer system, MDM solutions represent an attractive and lucrative target to large and small vendors, some of whom attempt to develop integrated product suites that are designed to provide an “MDM in the box,” whereas others concentrate on particular aspects of the MDM challenge or focus on providing supporting or enabling functionality. The MDM market opportunity continues to be strong, and drives the technology innovators and established vendors to actively participate in this market. Thus, we fully expect more players and more consolidation activities driven by MDM. But, to understand the long-term view of the MDM vendor landscape, we need to establish a baseline of where various types of MDM vendors and their products are today. Clearly, discussing all vendors that offer MDM-related products is well beyond the scope of this book. Therefore, the sections that follow discuss only a few leading MDM Data Hub vendors and their products. In doing so, and where appropriate, we’ll indicate whether a given product addresses a single MDM data domain or an MDM-specific feature, or has a broader, multidomain and multifunctional coverage.

Lastly, the information presented in this chapter has been synthesized from various sources, including vendor briefings, analysis of publicly available research reports, and the authors’ practical experience implementing MDM solutions using a number of mature and new vendor products. However, this chapter is not intended to be a substitute for comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the MDM vendor market and the products available from these sources.

The Gartner Group and Forrester Research provide excellent industry market overviews of the vendors and products in these areas.^1–5

Major MDM Vendors

As stated earlier, recent market consolidation has caused a significant landscape shift, and as a result relatively few established companies dominate the MDM market. The list of these companies includes IBM, Oracle, Informatica, SAP, SAS, Tibco, and D&B Purisma. We added to this list Acxiom as a leading provider of reference data for MDM solutions primarily in Customer domain. These companies and their products are discussed in the sections that follow.

IBM

After the acquisition of Initiate Systems in 2010, IBM ended up with three key MDM products: InfoSphere Master Data Management Server (MDM Server), InfoSphere MDM Server for PIM (Product Information Master), and Initiate Master Data Service (MDS).

MDM Server evolved from Web Sphere Customer Center (WCC), which in turn was developed based on a CDI product from DWL, which IBM acquired in 2005. WCC and the MDM Server inherited their party domain focus with out-of-the-box data structures for customer, account, and product domains.

MDM Server for PIM evolved from the MDM product built by Trigo, a company that IBM acquired in 2004. MDM Server for PIM concentrates on the product data domain and focuses on support for workflows critical for PIM. Hence, even though both MDM Server products can deal with product data, they focus on different aspects of MDM. Rob Karel of Forrester Research compared PIM with an “Enterprise Application,”⁵ and MDM Server for PIM’s capabilities can serve as an illustration of Karel’s point.

Both MDM Servers are considered leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Customer and Product Data Hubs, respectively, which points to the niches each of the MDM Servers occupies. Although highly desirable, it is less obvious to many experts how the MDM Server and Initiate MDS will coexist if left unchanged. Despite the fact that the MDM Server and Initiate MDS had been fighting in the same MDM space prior to Initiate’s acquisition by IBM, the products pursue very different MDM philosophies. It is appropriate at this point to refer the reader to Chapter 7, where we described different data-modeling styles that dominate the MDM market. The Initiate MDS does not have any business data model out of the box. A business data model is built by the meta-model configuration. This yields the Initiate solution optimized for entity resolution and relationship management. In Initiate architecture, business data services and other types of services have to be developed by MDM implementers or vendor-supplied expert consultants.

In contrast, the MDM Server comes with a pre-built data model and a few layers of packaged services on top of the data model out of the box. It is logical to assume that rather than aim for coexistence, an approach that merges the capabilities from both products will create a combined product with strong probabilistic matching and data services capabilities. For complex MDM projects, both products can work jointly within a single MDM solution that requires strong probabilistic matching, entity resolution, relationship resolution, flexibility of the data model, and business services for customer, account, and product domains. These services support real-time transactions such as managing core customer data, address and contact information, customer grouping and aggregation, financial information, customer roles and relationships, alerts, matching, and duplicate suspect processing. More complex services known as “composite transactions” can be built using the basic MDM Web Services.

Key points regarding the three IBM MDM products follow.

The InfoSphere MDM Server

This solution suite includes several levels of services and components to support the flexibility of the business service model:

• Coarse-grained business services

• Fine-grained business services

• Business object model

• Database

The InfoSphere MDM Server offers multiple access methods, such as Web Services, EAI publish-subscribe interfaces, and object-level interfaces. The ability to build composite transactions by calling coarse-grained, fine-grained, and business object components at run time makes this product even more flexible.

The InfoSphere MDM Server provides data visibility functionality using its Rules of Visibility (RoV) engine. This includes a menu-driven interface for managing Rules of Visibility that determine what data end users can see and what they can do with that data in the system. Batch Framework is available to support batch processing when real-time synchronization is not required or not feasible.

Initiate’s MDS

This product was rated as a “leader” by the Gartner Group’s “Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Integration Hubs,” in the second quarter of 2009. Initiate provides strong matching capabilities that enable its clients to create a single trusted view of the customer profile data. Initiate supports management of organizational hierarchies for institutional customers, and provides a set of APIs and Web Services that can effectively support application integration. The main components of the Initiate solution include:

• Initiate Master Data Service The core MDM engine designed to deliver a single master data view

• The Workbench (Eclipse based) Used as a Data Hub management and administration tool

• Initiate Inspector Used as a data stewardship web-client interface

• Initiate Enterprise Viewer Enables users to view linked records across lines of business and systems

InfoSphere MDM Server for PIM

This product’s key components and capabilities include the following:

• Data model flexibility to support product categories and hierarchies/taxonomies

• Data aggregation, syndication, and standard protocols for the import and export of product data

• Collaborative MDM functionality and workflows for PIM

• Granular access to product data

In addition to core MDM products, IBM offers a comprehensive suite of data quality and ETL tools, including WebSphere ProfileStage and WebSphere QualityStage, which provide data profiling and data quality capabilities, and the WebSphere DataStage ETL suite. These tools are often used in conjunction with the MDM Data Hub products for MDM implementations.

Oracle

Oracle approaches the market with Oracle Master Data Management Suite. The suite includes a number of data-domain-specific MDM Data Hub products:

• Oracle Customer Hub

• Oracle Site/Location Hub

• Oracle Supplier Hub

• Oracle Product Hub

• Oracle Higher Education Constituent Hub

In addition to the pure MDM Data Hub products, Oracle’s MDM suite addresses master data quality with domain-specific cleansing and standardization tools. On specific project implementations, one or more Oracle MDM Data Hub products can be used. Oracle Corporation positions its Data Hub products as part of its open architecture middleware family of products. Each of the Oracle Data Hub products operates as a Transaction Hub with appropriate data structures and services customized and configured to support particular data domains. Oracle MDM Data Hubs are integrated through services to ensure the integrity of the MDM solution across data domains.

Oracle’s MDM Products for Customer Domain

Let’s start with an Oracle product that is based on Siebel UCM, which was often rated by analysts as the leader in the CRM space. After Oracle’s acquisition of Siebel, the company was identified as a leader in the MDM for Customer domain by the Gartner Group’s “Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Integration Hubs” in the second quarter of 2009. Oracle/Siebel Universal Customer Master (UCM) has well-developed customer-centric data structures and modules for a number of industries. Oracle/Siebel’s MDM solution consists of three modules:

• Universal Application Network (UAN) Enables organizations to deploy business processes. UAN includes UAN Integration Processes, UAN Common Objects, and UAN Transformations.

• The Data Quality module Provides matching capabilities in real-time and batch modes. It supports integration with other data-cleansing tools. These capabilities are available for multiple countries, languages, and character sets.

• Universal Customer Master (UCM) A Customer Data Hub that provides prebuilt components that integrate customer data from multiple systems.

Oracle Customer Data Hub (CDH) is another MDM product for the Customer domain. It assembles a broad set of components, including data quality, matching, customer key management, data enrichment, data synchronization, and analytics. The product was ranked as a niche player by the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the second quarter of 2009. CDH is primarily positioned for and used by E-Business Suite customers that focus on manufacturing products, often in combination with Oracle Product Data Hub and Oracle Site Hub.

Other MDM Products in Oracle Portfolio

Oracle offers and supports several additional products in its MDM portfolio:

• Oracle Financial Consolidation Hub integrates financial data from multiple sources.

• Oracle Product Information Management Data Hub integrates product data by creating a centralized product database. This product is known as Oracle Product Hub (Oracle PH).

It was ranked a “leader” by the Gartner Magic Quadrant published in the third quarter of 2009. Oracle PH enables its customers, especially those leveraging Oracle E-Business Suite, to achieve a single view of product data across the enterprise.

• Oracle data quality solution for the product domain includes sophisticated semantic-based technology required to properly parse poorly structured product data.

Data Relationship Manager

Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion enhanced its MDM portfolio by adding the Data Relationship Management (DRM) tool, which is a full-function, comprehensive hierarchy management tool that supports a wide variety of hierarchy management operations, including support for alternative hierarchies, custom aggregations, data lineage, and many other features required for complex hierarchy manipulations typical for global, multinational, geographically distributed, and diverse organizations.

Informatica

Informatica, a leader in the data integration space, has been moving to the MDM market gradually. With the acquisition of Similarity Systems in January of 2006, Informatica took a significant step toward getting a leadership position in data quality as it relates to the MDM, especially the Customer domain. Similarity Systems expanded the traditional Informatica offering in the ETL and data integration areas by bringing strong data profiling, data standardization, and matching capabilities. The Informatica Data Quality Suite is built on Similarity Systems’ ATHANOR product, and it delivers data standardization, data matching, and data quality monitoring capabilities to its users.

The acquisition of Identity Systems in 2008 continued Informatica’s expansion into the MDM market.

Siperian

With the recent acquisition of Siperian in 2010, Informatica has become one of the leading players in the MDM space. The Siperian solution was considered “visionary” by Gartner Group’s “Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Integration Hubs” for the second quarter of 2009. The Siperian Hub is designed as a metadata-driven J2EE application that can work with any data model. This flexibility positions Siperian not only as a customer-centric solution but also as a platform applicable to wider MDM data domain coverage. The Siperian Hub includes the following primary high-level components:

• Master Reference Manager (MRM) Creates and manages record location metadata to support data synchronization in batch and real-time modes.

• Hierarchy Manager (HM) Manages relationships and hierarchies.

• Activity Manager (AM) Manages a unified view of transaction and reference data across systems. It is used to continually monitor and evaluate data and act on data events.

The Siperian Hub has its own cleanse and match capabilities. Alternatively, external engines can be used to cleanse and standardize the data (for example, Business Objects/First Logic or Trillium). Typically, a data-cleansing engine, whether internal or external, cleanses and standardizes the data whereas Siperian Hub performs matching and linking. Siperian licenses MetaMatrix Data Services Solution (acquired by Red Hat in 2007), which supports on-demand federated access to associated customer activity data not stored in the customer master. MetaMatrix provides Siperian with additional capabilities to implement the Registry-style solution even though initially the Siperian Hub was developed with the Transaction-style Hub in mind.

Informatica Data Quality Suite

This set of products enables enterprise data stewards and data governance officers to establish and maintain data quality rules. These rules and associated capabilities cover name and address parsing and validation for all countries, and data validation and corrections for various business domains such as Product, Inventory, Assets, and so on. The product provides robust matching and householding capabilities. In addition, the Informatica Data Quality Suite offers industry-specific libraries of data quality content for financial services and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. The suite provides Unicode-compliant technologies important for global projects because Unicode allows all writing systems and languages of the world to be represented and handled consistently.

Informatica Data Quality Suite uses an integrated data repository shared by the following components:

• Informatica Data Quality Designer Provides an interface used to build information quality rules and plans.

• Informatica Data Quality Server Provides the platform for the development, testing, and execution of the information quality rules and plans.

• Informatica Data Quality Runtime Enables the enterprise to schedule and run data analysis, profiling, and other information quality processes.

• Informatica Data Quality Realtime SDK Provides real-time capabilities for information quality processes such as data validation, corrections, standardization, and enrichment.

• A library of reference data This is a section of the repository that maintains synonyms, aliases, and other data required to support the tool’s navigational capabilities.

SAP

SAP started out as a premier vendor in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market. It has rapidly evolved into a major player in Master Data Management. SAP offers a well-known and widely deployed suite of business applications. One of them, MySAP Customer Relationship Management, is designed for customer-centric solutions, including MDM capabilities that are optimized for Transaction-style implementations. SAP solutions provide an integrated set of information management capabilities, including catalog and content management as well as product life-cycle management (PLM), with a particular focus on marketing, merchandising, and promotions (these features came from the acquisition of A2i in 2004).

The Gartner Magic Quadrants for Product and Customer data published in 2009 ranked SAP MDM as a “challenger” in the product domain and a “niche player” in the customer domain. SAP MDM solutions are based on NetWeaver technology, which provides a service-oriented architecture approach to integrating business processes, software components, information, and organizational entities. NetWeaver is designed to be “platform agnostic” and thus can interoperate with Microsoft .NET and a J2EE platforms such as IBM WebSphere. In recent years, SAP has made significant improvements in its NetWeaver MDM technologies by integrating data-domain-specific repositories and enhancing data model management flexibility. The power and flexibility of the NetWeaver platform and the size and influence of SAP as a leader in ERP solutions help position SAP to become one of the leaders in the MDM space. In the product domain, SAP leverages its ERP installed base. In the customer domain, the primary SAP focus is B2B MDM solutions.

With the acquisition of Business Objects and First Logic, SAP strengthened its positions in MDM data quality, matching, and BI capabilities. Acquired by Business Objects in April 2006, First Logic is a specialist data quality product vendor. Its solution is designed to integrate with most leading Data Hub vendors. The capabilities commonly used for customer-centric MDM implementations include data cleansing and standardization for names and addresses, and entity match and merge (consolidate).

With the acquisition of Sybase in 2010, SAP has further improved its position in data management space, and we may see a Sybase-based MDM engine from SAP that can fully leverage Sybase and Sybase IQ capabilities.

SAS DataFlux

DataFlux is a division of SAS. DataFlux complements SAS core competencies in business intelligence software and services by providing solutions aimed at information quality and data profiling.

As per the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Quality tools, DataFlux was a recognized leader in the data quality space. DataFlux “officially” entered the MDM space in 2008 with the introduction of the qMDM product. The product has a primary focus on the MDM for Customer domain. Its data modeling flexibility has the potential to expand in the Product domain and other MDM areas.

DataFlux focuses on some foundational MDM capabilities such as reference data, code semantics reconciliation, pattern recognition and standardization, and data standardization. Key DataFlux components used in its MDM suite include:

• Master Customer Reference Database Stores customer information.

• dfPowerStudio Enables data stewards and Data Governance professionals to monitor and profile data across the enterprise, analyze the data quality, and take corrective actions using a single interface. Data quality features are based on libraries that enable address standardization and enrichment in line with U.S. Postal Service standards, party-type recognition (individual vs. organization), gender recognition, and other critical MDM data quality functions. Data integration features allow users to match, link, and merge records across systems.

• DataFlux Integration Server Provides a single mechanism for batch and real-time data synchronization. It reads the business rules from the metadata created by dfPowerStudio and enforces the rules for data synchronization, taking advantage of parallel processing to support higher throughput. The product is capable of running batch jobs and exposes interfaces to its data quality functions and algorithms, which can be called from many languages. Otherwise, the functions and algorithms can be invoked as Web Services.

Being a part of SAS, the DataFlux products are well positioned to leverage their data quality and MDM strengths with SAS’s capabilities in the business intelligence and marketing analytics areas.

Tibco

Tibco has entered the MDM market with a position of strength in Enterprise Information Integration based on its recognized name in SOA and ESB technologies. These areas of strength determined Tibco’s focus on collaborative MDM and PIM. In the 2009 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Product data, Tibco was placed high in the “visionary” quadrant, almost on the border with the “leader” quadrant occupied by IBM and Oracle.

Tibco Collaborative Information Manager (CIM) serves mostly the Product data domain. Its flexible data model positions CIM for penetration into other domains, especially when collaborative MDM capabilities are stated as business and technical goals. CIM was originally based on a PIM product developed by Velocel, acquired by Tibco in 2005.

Tibco demonstrates a high focus on MDM in conjunction with SOA, which, as we discussed throughout the book, benefits both MDM and SOA. SOA-enabled MDM solutions are agile and can accommodate real-time data management requirements and a hub-and-spoke solution architecture, whereas SOA benefits from MDM implementations due to an alignment with core data strategies—an alignment that is key to ensuring a meaningful business impact and positive ROI of SOA.

Tibco augments the collaborative MDM capabilities of CIM with a B2B gateway functionality. Tibco has been continuously growing its Customer domain MDM and data quality capabilities by integration with leading data quality technologies such as Trillium. Tibco’s investments in the Customer domain include the open-source Lucene fuzzy matching technology.

In 2010, Tibco reemphasized its focus on MDM by acquiring Netrics. Netrics provides unique matching capabilities based on graph theory, specifically on the Bipartite Graph Matching (BGM) algorithm. This algorithm makes it possible to incorporate a human-like intelligence into the matching process.

These matching capabilities significantly exceed the capabilities provided by more traditional fuzzy algorithms such as SOUNDEX and NYSIIS. The algorithm scales as N*log N, where N is the number of records in the matching record set. Also, the algorithm works well with sparse data. Sparse data is a common problem when matching heterogeneous records sourced from multiple systems and lines of business. Most traditional algorithms are not optimized to handle this problem.

With the Netrics acquisition, Tibco can utilize a learning algorithm that can accept manual user input to refine the matching rules. This empowers the user to manually change match groups for a small sample data set and use the learning algorithm that will automatically interpret the manual input and define it internally as a generic rule that it will apply on the next matching iteration.

Dun & Bradstreet Purisma

Dun and Bradstreet (D&B) maintains a global commercial database that contains over 100 million business entity records. Therefore, a partnership with D&B can make a difference for MDM projects focusing on commercial customers. Such a partnership can be particularly helpful for sales and marketing, credit management, and managing the company’s suppliers.

Technically speaking, D&B entered the MDM software market in 2007 with its acquisition of Purisma. Purisma Customer Registry is a “thin” Registry-style Customer Data Hub solution that enables the company to align multiple applications from the perspectives of customer data accuracy and data quality. The product offers strong matching capabilities and supports complex hierarchical relationships between customers with a focus on institutional entities. The support for hierarchical relationships includes systemic relationship correlation capabilities. Purisma stores relevant data in a module known as the Master Customer Identity Index. The product consists of the following three tightly integrated components:

• Purisma Correlation Engine This component is at the core of the solution. It manages matching and association metadata, and ultimately maintains customer identity.

• Purisma Data Stewardship Engine This component provides views and user interfaces that allow the user to analyze the data, manage exceptions, and perform audit, hierarchy management, and other manual control functions.

• Purisma Integration Services This component provides Web Services–based utilities for third-party integration.

Purisma supports Transaction Hub capabilities that enable enterprises to use the Purisma Hub as the Master Data Hub that provides bidirectional synchronization with multiple systems.

Purisma technology is combined with the D&B database that contains global business profile information. This creates a powerful combination of D&B database and Purisma software in the B2B market. The information includes company name, headquarters address, phone and fax, primary office or site locations, corporate executives, stock index, parent company information, year of establishment, approximate or reported net worth, current financial information, credit risk information, lawsuits against the company, history of slow payments, and many other data attributes. D&B creates and maintains a unique global identifier (DUNS number) for each entity (company) that it recognizes and maintains information on. D&B also maintains the company’s credit ratings and D&B PAYDEX scores.

In addition to its MDM-related offerings, D&B offers a number of packaged solutions, including Risk Management Solutions (which assists in mitigating project risks), Sales and Marketing Solutions, E-Business Solutions (which help in market research), and Supply Chain Management Solutions.

D&B continues to improve its market position in the MDM space, especially in MDM for Customer domain. The company established a Product and Technology Outsourcing Agreement with Acxiom on August 2, 2006. This agreement is aimed at improving matching rates by using Acxiom technology.

Acxiom

Acxiom is the leading MDM data provider with a unique customer knowledge base for individual customer data. This is a significant solution player in the MDM space for the Customer domain, and although it is more a data than a software provider, our discussion of the MDM vendor market would not be complete without at least a brief look at Acxiom.

Acxiom’s primary focus is customer information management and customer data integration. Acxiom’s Knowledge Base contains records of customer information collected from and verified by multiple sources. Acxiom’s Command Center supports over 850 terabytes of customer information. Acxiom provides a very broad coverage of individuals residing in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. It licenses U.S. Postal Service information, and in particular its National Change of Address (NCOA) file. This enables the company to store and maintain up-to-date name and address information. Therefore, if a company is going to implement an MDM solution that needs to use name and address to match its corporate or individual customer data, a partnership with Acxiom can provide significant benefits to data quality and confidence of the match process. Some of the Acxiom products frequently used on MDM projects are as follows:

• AbiliTec This product provides batch and near-real-time matching and data enrichment information. AbiliTec receives an information request for customer name and address and returns the AbiliTec links that represent the event of matching this name and address data against Acxiom’s Knowledge Base. Specifically, if the match has been found, the link type is referred to as “maintained.” Otherwise, a “derived” AbiliTec link is returned.

• AddressAbility This product verifies, corrects, and standardizes addresses to USPS specifications, which includes ZIP codes, city names, state abbreviations, resolution of vanity addresses, and so on.

• DSF² This product stores all valid addresses recognized by the USPS. The product can also differentiate between residential and business addresses. This product can assist in party type identification. We discussed the importance of party identification in Chapter 14.

• NCOA (National Change of Address)⁶ Provides change of address information. From the MDM perspective, this information can be used to bring together two individual records at different addresses, recognizing them as one individual record.

• LACS (Locatable Address Conversion System)⁷ Provides information about permanent address conversions resulting from renumbering, street or city name changes, and so on. This is a critical piece of information that helps in matching customer records.

References

1. Radcliffe, John. “Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Customer Data.” Gartner Research, June 16, 2009.

2. Friedman, Ted and Bitterer, Andreas. “Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools.” Gartner Research, June 9, 2009.

3. White, Andrew. “Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data.” Gartner Research, July 9, 2009.

4. Wang, Ray. “The Forrester Wave: Customer Hubs.” Forrester Research, August 4, 2008.

5. Karel, Rob, et al. “Product Information Management (PIM).” Forrester Research, July 21, 2009.

6. http://www.usps.com/ncsc/addressservices/moveupdate/changeaddress.htm.

7. http://www.usps.com/ncsc/addressservices/addressqualityservices/lacsystem.htm.