The IT rulebook is being rewritten and big data is accelerating business execution. But concerns on how master data management (MDM) can be integrated with big data have emerged. Big data discussions have been gaining momentum and substance, but not much distance has been covered when it comes to management. The value proposition is to bring MDM into big data analytics providing unique identities to entities.

The amount of comments that are collected and collated by product marketing teams, for example, is humongous. These comments can be found across the Internet in discussion forums, personal blogs and other places. All this data, however, follows a typical big data pattern. It is large in size and builds quickly, it is semi-structured and comes in fast and furious posing a challenge to extract, transform and load it to architectures and relational databases. In order for all this information to be useful, free-form comments need to be tied in with product catalogs. There is potentially important information in all this consumer feedback and the product forms the central point of intersection of MDM and big data.

In order to make sense of the free-from comments at one end and have an accurate and consistent product master at the other end, a classic both-ends-to-the-middle approach-technologies and techniques are needed, and MDM becomes the enabler here. In other words, mastering identity to support consumer analytics is the way to go. MDM lays the foundation for big data analytics but current challenges of defining this integration framework limit what leading vendors can do. Data governance challenges that limit what organizations can do with this data include a shortage of budget and resources that is particularly driven by a lack of executive-level interest in data governance.

Two MDM and big data product offerings that seem to be maturing and are worthy of attention include Orchestra Networks and Talend. Orchestra Networks models your data and makes it more manageable particularly for smaller MDM implementations. Talend, on the other hand, is a cloud-based open source product that is expanding and maturing fast and offers an alternative to IBM, Oracle (News - Alert) and SAP stack MDM strategies.

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