Experts have long confirmed that MDM is a genuinely different approach than past methods used to integrate enterprise data. MDM, customer data integration (CDI) and product information management (PIM) platforms are designed to help organizations truly gain a "single view of the truth" about their data, often incorporating functions for data integration as well as hierarchy management, data quality, data stewardship and more. This is especially critical, as according to IDC, the average company has 49 applications that operate on 14 different customer databases and, on average, no more than 20 percent of customer data resides in a single location. That means organizations must deal with huge volumes of data that are often siloed and inconsistent -- and that sometimes, traditional data integration methods alone aren't enough. But, since MDM and data integration both help organizations combine data, and since SearchDataManagement.com received multiple MDM product nominations in the data integration category, we included these products in the scoring.

Initiate Master Data Service 8.0 earned high marks for innovation, performance, ease of integration, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value. The MDM platform is designed to deliver single, trusted and complete versions of critical data assets in real-time to the people, processes and applications. An advancement of Initiate's Identity Hub software, it serves as a platform for organizations to apply master data management techniques to the business problems of specific markets such as healthcare, financial services, retail, hospitality, high tech and national intelligence.

Our judges called Initiate Master Data Service 8.0 "the innovation winner" out of all of the categories' nominations. The platform provides identity or data matching and management, data modeling, data sharing, relationship and hierarchy management and information quality management (though judges noted room for improvement on the data quality functionality.) The platform also provides multi-lingual, integration, and synchronizing capabilities. Using the Initiate Master Data Service platform, with intuitive graphical interfaces, organizations can develop master data applications for many types of data, such as consumers, organizations, patients, providers, vehicles, locations, incidents, suspects and citizens.

The vendor also touts its proprietary probabilistic matching and linking algorithms that create master data from disparate, heterogeneous data sources. The system can perform thousands of transactions per second in environments involving hundreds of millions of underlying records and scale to handle rapidly increasing data volumes, according to the vendor. Further, Initiate claims their approach to MDM does not require organizations to maintain complex, deterministic, matching and linking rules. It also enables organizations to leave their data in place rather than centralizing and standardizing it in a monolithic data hub.

Initiate Master Data Service 8.0 pricing is based on the number of records and number of sources to be integrated from source systems. Base level pricing starts at $100,000. Learn more about Initiate Master Data Service 8.0 here on Initiate's Web site.

Learn more about master data management technology and evaluating systems in this informative All-in-One Guide.

Editors, SearchDataManagement.com