Alternatives to Legacy MDM Solutions
As we indicated in our prior blog post, we were trying to solve our customer data management issues and accomplish the following objectives:
- Improve our understanding of product ownership and white space across our global customer base
- Mitigate sales team overlap in account coverage (and therefore mitigate expensive rep conflict)
- Reduce manual data manipulation and long-term maintenance needs for analytics, data warehouse, and sales ops teams
We identified three primary paths forward, each with its own set of benefits and considerations to evaluate:
| Approach | Estimated Cost | Why it made sense | Considerations |
| Invest in a traditional / legacy MDM solution (Informatica, Profisee, etc.) | $2+ million license, services, and FTE costs | Well-known and reliable products and partners to deliver master data solutions Strong integrations with existing systems in our ecosystem | High total cost of ownership, with significant up-front investment Long time-to-value, with “completion” in 18+ months Rigid rules (for some entities), with potential friction in selling process to maintain data cleanliness Required cross-organization buy-in, with multiple competing priorities |
| Integrate/ consolidate Salesforce orgs | $1+ million in up-front consulting costs and $100K+ ongoing FTE maintenance costs | Ensure go-to-market teams were all seeing the same data at the same time Complete remaining post-merger integration steps that impacted go-to-market approach | Each Salesforce org supported a different go-to-market process; consolidation would require broader changes to approach (before organization was ready) Other approaches not mutually exclusive to this – still an option longer term High expense in both initial consulting costs, but also in hidden FTE costs (and opportunity costs for those resources) |
| Create a virtual integration | < $1 million in 5-year total costs | Offered flexibility and ability to preserve long-term optionality Lowest likely total cost of ownership among options Opportunity to build around our needs while determining broader market needs for the product Could leverage service offerings of a consulting firm that was solving this problem repeatedly with their clients | Not likely to be a home-grown effort given other priorities – would need to invest with a partner Option to pursue with startup entity – so may be taking solvency risk with vendor May not have 100% of functionality at the onset – could we live with that and let the product grow into our needs? |
The next post will outline our final decision process and how we moved forward with Linq Analytics.