As I predicted in my earlier post on the recent Informatica – Siperian acquisition, the Master Data Management (MDM) / Customer Data Integration (CDI) market was poised for more takeovers and turmoil and so it has happened. Today IBM announced the takeover of Initiate Systems and introduced a new layer of confusion.
While it was to be expected that Initiate wouldn’t go on its own much longer and the deal at the outset seems to make sense for IBM, I am left a little perplexed by how IBM is positioning Initiate as a healthcare data integrity solution.
While Initiate had its first successes and significant market share in healthcare, its product is a general purpose CDI solution and it has expanded its customer base over the last years into insurance, financial services and retail – one of its biggest clients is Microsoft.
The question is why is IBM painting Initiate in this corner? I can think of two reasons – either IBM is internally confused about its CDI strategy or leadership wants to keep their current or near future Websphere Customer Center customers in the dark about a potential shift in CDI strategy.
IBM acquired CDI vendor, DWL, in 2005 when the three most prominent players in CDI were Initiate, Siperian and DWL. DWL had a different style of CDI than the other two – it aspired to be more than a registry style CDI solution and I have always thought of them as a ‘Multi Channel Integration’ platform rather than a CDI solution. This ambition comes with a price and DWL/ Websphere Customer Center implementations are typically more complex than an Initiate or Siperian deployment.I wonder if IBM realizes that a lighter CDI solution would nicely integrate both with their its Webshere product line as well as with its data movement and cleansing solutions in the InfoSphere domain.
In conclusion it seems to me that IBM’s CDI strategy at this point is muddled at best – Websphere Customer Center, Infosphere Master Data Management Server and now Initiate’s product offer somewhat similar and overlapping functionality. For Initiate’s product one can only hope that IBM stays committed to development and support and doesn’t simply let it die slowly as a vertical niche product. Initiate Systems as a product and as a fine company with bright minds deserves better than that, and IBM can create superior products by integrating them into its mainstream product platforms.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Oliver,
Could it be that IBM needed a good healthcare data model? From what I understand the current on is financial services driven. Sure seems like a brute force way to get it!!
Thoughts?
Kevin
Kevin,
I don’t think it was the primary motivation. Initiate typically doesn’t store a vast amount of data; their ‘model’ largely centers around the demographic information about a person or organization that allows to match them to another identity. All other data is typically resolved via lookups to the original data sources. So Initiate acts like really smart white pages where you can find someone and see all their references in other systems.
I really think that IBM got tired of losing opportunities to Initiate and either bought them to bury them or to replace the former DWL product at the core of their CDI strategy.
Let me know if you want to chat about this more,
Oliver