Intelligent Enterprise

One indication that the customer data integration (CDI) space isn't a very mature is that there are only 11 vendors in Gartner's just-released Magic Quadrant for the technology. Another indication is that just two vendors, IBM and Oracle, are in the "leaders" quadrant, and they just barely make it into that top-right sector. Two other vendors, Initiate Systems and Siperian, are within striking distance in the "visionaries" quadrant, but most vendors are stuck down in that lower-left, "niche player" quadrant.

You can build systems for CDI on your own, but Gartner says demand has been growing for packaged solutions since 2003, thanks to pressure to improve revenue, profit and customer loyalty, on the one hand, and a desire for cost savings, risk management and regulatory compliance on the other hand.

"All [these demands] require a single customer view, but most large organizations continue to have a heterogeneous application portfolio with fragments of often inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistent data residing in various silos," states Gartener's report. "Many organizations thought CRM and ERP systems would solve this problem, but sometimes they created additional silos."

As detailed in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for CDI Hubs, these products support global identification and synchronization of customer information across heterogeneous sources by creating and managing a central customer database of record. Once established, the hub delivers a single customer view to all systems and stakeholders while ensuring data quality through monitoring and cleansing techniques.

The report reviews products from IBM, Oracle/Siebel, Intitiate Systems, Siperian, SAP, Sun Microsystems, D&B, DataFlux, Purisma and VisionWare. Siperian, which offers the MDM Hub XT SP2, has made Gartner's report available as a free download.