Supernova Award Category
Data to Decisions
The Problem
Master Data Management (MDM), while a necessary enterprise data technology, was expensive, slow to implement, inflexible, and unwieldy. Companies that needed to master their data were looking at a year-long, million-dollar MDM project that would hopefully deliver the business value that they needed. The result was a high-risk, medium-reward endeavor that could only be seriously considered by extremely large, well-funded, and patient data teams.
However, the need for MDM is almost universal amongst enterprise companies, and is only continuing to become more necessary. Any company with critical business data coming in from different sources and being updated in different systems will need to have that data mastered if they hope to use that data to their advantage. Tasked with the need for mastered data, what is a company to do if they can’t risk a high-budget year-long plus process that will hopefully achieve their needed value? This is what Semarchy was created to solve.
The Solution
Semarchy’s founding team originally founded Sunopsis, which was later purchased by Oracle. At Oracle, they pioneered the Oracle Data Integrator product, and they saw first hand the need for a more agile, intelligent, and affordable MDM technology. Thus, Semarchy was founded.
We created an MDM technology that could handle any data domain within the same platform (previously unheard of), could be implemented in an agile manner, and could be managed by a simple, approachable interface that would empower not just the IT-users, but the actual business-side data users with ownership and assurance that their data was correct. Additionally, this technology can be deployed both on-premises and in the cloud.
For the interface, we used principles of Google’s material design to make the most intuitive and approachable enterprise data management software interface in the world. Additionally, we created a language called SemQL which enables colloquial data searches.
The results
Before, MDM was viewed as a stagnant technology and a necessary evil for enterprises who needed mastered data. Things had been done the way they had always been done, and if you wanted to master any segment of your data, you had to be prepared to sink excessive time and money into a risky project where it would be at least a year before you knew the results.
Now, MDM is experiencing a renaissance as the next generation of MDM can help those companies realize value in weeks to months with decreased costs, and decreased risk due to agile implementation that reveals value throughout the overall MDM project. Any domain can be mastered within the same platform, and your MDM implementation can now evolve as your business needs and challenges evolve.
Additionally, new factors like the Internet of Things, Big Data, and regulations like GDPR in the European Union pose new business challenges that Semarchy xDM is uniquely capable of addressing. The increasing flow of data to many companies that IoT and Big Data promise means that companies need to be more proactive on mastering their critical data. Otherwise, they will be looking at a massive data lake and missing out on the value they can extract from that data. Regulations like GDPR also bring to light the need for mastered data, especially customer data, as all companies with business in the EU will need to be able to delete all instances of a customer’s data upon formal request.
Metrics
80 percent of Semarchy customers have gone into production in 10 weeks. This is a stark departure from the previous status-quo in the MDM space. We also have the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) of any MDM solution. Semarchy is also the number 1 cloud-based MDM solution on Amazon Web Services.
The Technology
xDM: xDM is unique in its breadth of ability to master any kind of data –customer B2B and B2C data, product data, reference data, metadata, location, organization, supplier, etc. As such, xDM is a true evolution of the Semarchy multi-vector MDM solution for integration, management and governance of enterprise information. This iterative approach to how and who manages data, resolves the most pressing challenge of data-driven organizations, which is to give more control to business users.
Disruptive Factor
Semarchy has, in a way, democratized MDM. By making MDM cheaper, agile, multi-domain, and available both in the cloud and on-premises, more companies than ever before can benefit from Master Data Management. We led the march demanding more intuitive and flexible MDM software, and the market has taken notice.
Now, all the legacy MDM vendors are beginning to tout their multi-domain capabilities, and their cloud-solutions. However, many of the legacies fall short for a few reasons. First, the vast majority of those multi-domain MDM solutions have been put together through acquisition of single-domain MDM technologies. While they are able to master all data domains, their solutions are usually still spread out amongst different products, and are thus siloed. They haven’t been purposefully designed to be on the same platform, and thus they truly lack the multi-domain capability of semarchy.
Next, companies are taking an all-or-nothing approach on cloud MDM solutions. While having a cloud solution is necessary, a vendor should be able to support any implementation that a customer needs - whether that be in the cloud, on premises, or some combination of both.
These companies are taking narrow approaches to make a showing for buzzwords that Semarchy takes for granted. In doing so, they are missing the forest for the trees.
Shining Moment
The Semarchy xDM launch in April of 2017: Semarchy xDM introduced a new way to look at Master Data Management (MDM). 100% re-designed UI, based on Material Design drives an unparalleled UX. Simplicity, graph analytics, interactive search capability, advanced collaboration, match and merge, enhanced survivorship capabilities and guided data authoring enable data stewards to support complex data management patterns. This is where Semarchy truly empowered data users to become data champions.