"This is the biggest annual growth we've seen for this market since 2008," said Colleen Graham, research director at Gartner. "Pressures to optimise costs and efficiencies in a heterogeneous IT environment are driving organisations to turn to MDM as a more efficient way to manage and maintain data across multiple sources. In addition, the increasing governance, risk and compliance regulations are forcing organisations to focus on MDM to support these initiatives."
"MDM has become a critical discipline required for dealing with the challenges of social data, 'big data' and data in the cloud," Ms Graham said.
From a regional perspective, North America and Europe will drive the demand for MDM, and both regions will grow at a steady pace to reach the billion-dollar mark, in 2013 for North America and in 2015 for Europe. In 2013, MDM software revenue will see faster growth in Asia/Pacific, where revenue will increase by 30 per cent from 2012 to reach $209 million.
Within the overall MDM market, more than half the revenue is driven by products from small and best-of-breed vendors, as the market continues to favour specialised solutions over "generic" offerings. However, the overall MDM market is dominated by three major players - IBM, Oracle and SAP.
"In the next four years we expect larger vendors will continue to acquire for this specialisation while smaller vendors will acquire each other to build market share and increase the functionality within their portfolios," said Chad Eschinger, research director at Gartner.
However, the variety of technologies that can be applied to an MDM initiative leaves the door open for the entrance of data integration and data quality providers, in particular. As more midsize organisations adopt MDM in the course of the next four years, they are demanding lower prices and more flexibility from vendors. As a result, many new MDM vendors and offerings capturing this market will be focused on areas such as open source, as well as cloud computing/software as a service.
The largest domains of the MDM software market are MDM of customer data and MDM of product data, each of which is predicted to more than double in size over the next four years. MDM of customer data helps an organisation cross-sell and cross-market, as well as retain customers and provide a consistent high-quality customer experience. The market for MDM of customer data is expected to reach $644 million in 2012 and to exceed $1 billion in 2015. The market for MDM of product data, which helps an organisation store product-related master data, metadata, or both, is projected to reach $688 million in 2012 and to surpass $1.1 billion in 2015.
"The increased demand for more effective decision-making and a focus on improving the timeliness and accuracy of business decisions makes MDM paramount for organisations," said Ms Graham. "MDM supports these goals by ensuring the high quality of key data needed at the point of decision, removing uncertainty and increasing confidence."
Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Forecast: Master Data Management, Worldwide, 2010-2015." The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/....
About the Gartner Master Data Management Summit 2012
The Gartner Master Data Management (MDM) Summit is specifically designed to drive organisations at all MDM maturity levels toward realising benefits - from those just getting started with MDM, to those looking to move up the maturity curve, to those seeking advanced insight into the future of master data. Gartner analysts will help organisations to identify where MDM creates growth opportunities, shortens time to market, improves the accuracy of decision-making and addresses regulatory compliance.
The Gartner Master Data Management Summit 2012 in London will take place on 8-9 February at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge hotel. For further information about the Summit, please visit www.gartner.com/eu/mdm. Members of the media can register for the event by contacting Laurence Goasduff at laurence.goasduff@gartner.com.
The Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Los Angeles is being held 4-5 April at the JW Marriott at LA Live. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/us/mdm. Members of the media can register for the event by contacting Christy Pettey at christy.pettey@gartner.com.
Additional information from the event will be shared on Twitter at http://twitter.com/... and using #GartnerMDM.