IBM Filling Up on Data

The problem is even tougher when businesses merge, or have units operating in multiple countries with varying cultures and regulatory requirements. One major complication: Getting systems to agree on common definitions. Indeed, describing data in a standardized way is so complex that Oracle has turned to research on the "semantic web" pioneered by Tim Berners-Lee, widely known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, says Oracle vice president Robert Shimp. The semantic web is geared toward creating a universal medium for information exchange among machines.

Oracle claims an advantage in MDM because it not only supplies the database to its customers, it also offers a growing package of applications, which IBM does not, while SAP supplies the applications but not the database. "Having both sides of the equation allows us to understand the data much better, says Shimp.

SAP's MDM efforts have met with little success so far says Aaron Zornes, chief research officer for The CDI Institute, an industry consulting and research company. However, analysts for Gartner, a market research and consulting company, disagree, saying SAP efforts appear to be on track.

IBM fired the latest shot in the MDM battle shortly before Thanksgiving, launching a portfolio of data management products that will be sold along with the company's WebSphere middleware. IBM's Drucker won't say how much revenue MDM is producing, but he claimed that year-over-year sales grew by about 100%.

Oracle too declines to break out MDM revenue, but Shimp says the technology, which his company calls "customer hubs," is now one of Oracle's most important. "We're growing our database business by making the databases richer and more functional," he says.

It's not clear if IBM's reinvigorated approach to MDM is stronger than Oracle's says IDC analyst Carl Olafson. He says that both companies have shored up areas of weakness; IBM is better than it was at integrating its technologies, rather than leaving it to the customer, while Oracle has become more conciliatory toward customers who run rival databases as well as its own.