The Size of the Global Master Data Management Market

My good data friend Henrik wrote a blog on the size of the MDM market. You can read the blog by clicking here.

The blog points to the research provided by Andy Hayler of The Information Difference in The MDM Landscape report. Andy estimates that the market for MDM software was worth $1.6 billion. The breakdown – pure software license revenue for MDM software at $885 million, maintenance revenue at $273 million and MDM professional services revenue of the software vendors at $450 million.

The report suggests these numbers came from MDM-related revenues of all the software companies operating in the market. It is vital to understand what the word “All” meant here. Is it all as in every vendor they evaluated in the report? Is it all the vendors who sell MDM software in one or the other form? Who else are we missing?

Also, the report says, the $1.6 billion does not include systems integration and consulting revenue associated with MDM implementation. However, it does include the professional services revenue of the software vendors.

So, there is a lot to digest here, and I am happy Henrik always puts helpful little charts to understand the data.

My point of view:

While there are different ways to look at data to arrive at a number for a given market, I feel we will never know the actual size of the market. I say this for the following reasons.

There are pure-play MDM vendors, and there are equal or more non-MDM vendors who still offer MDM like solution. There were about 40 vendors when I started listing names.
Not every vendor reports their revenue. So, it is hard for any analyst to come up with an accurate estimate of their income generated from sales and services.
A well-established vendor has a maintenance revenue that matches or exceeds the license revenue. It is mostly because of the sticky nature of MDM solutions.
There is an adjacent solutions market (ex: Customer 360) that provides additional revenue opportunity for the vendor and often overlooked.
Customer and product data constitute a significant portion of the use cases, but there is a long tail of domains where organizations struggle. These include supplier, location, employees, asset, IoT devices, etc. There are tools available to address these challenges, and functionally overlap MDM capabilities.
Many non-MDM vendors still sell solutions to MDM use cases (Albeit half-baked and sloppy). These vendors include CRM, ERP, and data warehouse solution providers. I still see organizations talk about having a data warehouse, and hence, they do not need MDM.
Services revenue coming from global and regional system integrators, pure-play MDM partners, boutique consulting companies, and industry-focused companies that have tie-ups with MDM vendors.

All these reasons make it hard to estimate the real size of this market. In my view, it is safe to assume it is much bigger than the numbers we have seen here. So, there you have it.

In all honesty, I am not sure if we will ever know the exact size of the MDM market. But what I do know is that I will continue to get “research reports” from several market research firms. They will sell me insights about this market for a large sum of money. I say, no thanks.

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MDM – A GEEK'S POINT OF VIEW