Recently, I've been asked by one of our customers about what is Microsoft doing in the spaces of EII and MDM. Usually, customers who seek for these solutions have multiple data sources and they wish for an integrated view and queries of the entities in the organization.
Before I answer these questions, here's a short recap about the terms:
EII – Enterprise Information Integration - A software that combines various data sources at an enterprise level in order to support applications that present or analyze the data in new ways. EII provides a service that allows administrators, developers, and end-users to treat a broad array of data sources as if they were one large database or data service. EII is software infrastructure not an application. However, it does support the creation of applications.
MDM – Master Data Management - A discipline in Information Technology that focuses on the management of reference or master data that is shared by several disparate IT systems and groups. MDM can be described by the way that master data interacts with other data. Master data can be described by the way that it is created, read, updated, deleted, and searched. For example, in transaction systems, master data is almost always involved with transactional data. A customer buys a product. A vendor sells a part, and a partner delivers a crate of materials to a location. An employee is hierarchically related to their manager, who reports up through a manager (another employee). A product may be a part of multiple hierarchies describing their placement within a store. This relationship between master data and transactional data may be fundamentally viewed as a noun/verb relationship. Transactional data capture the verbs, such as sale, delivery, purchase, email, and revocation; master data are the nouns. This is the same relationship data-warehouse facts and dimensions share.
Btw, if you're confused about the main difference between MDM and EII, I'll state that in MDM the data is shared or duplicated while in EII it is about fedeated data.
So, what does Microsoft has to offer for EII and MDM?
(1) SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) for EII
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) together with our SQL Server Reporting and Analysis services can provide a premier EII solution. In SQL Server 2008, there have been some significant features added for the EII capabilities such as:
- Enhanced support for different adapters for different data sources in Distributed Query.
- Possibly extend existing set of adapters.
- Improved tool support for Distributed Query.
- Comparable tool support between a solution using consolidation and one using federation.
- Ease of maintenance of simple extensions to the source data.
- Allows definition of the metadata of the complete “integrated view”
- Make it easier to incrementally maintain caches of data.
It is important to note that the adapters allow access to data sources which are not only SQL Server.
(2) Stratature +EDM for MDM
Another solution Microsoft acquired, specifically for the MDM space is Stratature with its +EDM solution.
The current Stratature +EDM solution has a significant set of capabilities such as: a central management of data entities and hierarchies using a master data hub, Data modeling for entities, attributes, hierarchies, and business rules used to store and validate master data and additional capabilies like Thin Client UI, Business Rules, Human Workflow, Versioning, Transaction Logging, Hierarchy Mangement, Subscription Interface and Security.
The next version, codenamed "Bulldog" is about making Stratature +EDM a Microsoft product. Bulldog will remain almost identical to +EDM with some enhancements. Microsoft plans to improve the out of box experience, simplify setup and perform the full suite of prerelease processes such as security reviews. In addition, Microsoft will extend +EDM with improvements to the API, better integration into other applications, and better integration with the Microsoft data platform. The solution is expected to become more integrated with the current solutions including SQL Server and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server.
For more information about Microsoft's roadmap in the MDM space, visit here.