Reltio captures IT analysts' attention for master data management

In a newly released market research report, Forrester Research (New York) puts Reltio in the “leader” category of its trademarked Forrester Wave analysis, which is based on reviews and surveys of customers. Reltio, a relatively new company to the master data management (MDM) space, is in heady company with longtime MDM providers like Informatica, IBM and SAP, according to Forrester.

At the same time, Redwood Shores, CA-based Reltio has announced its latest iteration of its platform, called Reltio Cloud 2016.1. Besides enhanced workflow, collaboration and search tools, the company is offering separate module called Reltio Insights, which it says “connects data, mastered and managed within Reltio Cloud, to Apache Spark, one of the most popular big data processing environments today. Reltio Insights also includes on-demand access to Apache Spark through Reltio’s collaboration with Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark.”

“We continue to bridge the divide between analytical insights and operational execution,” said Anastasia Zamyshlyaeva, VP of platform product management, in a statement. “Reltio Insights delivers faster correlation between accurate profiles, relationships and transactions, enabling companies to realize the true value of their data.”

Forrester and others are grappling with appropriate ways to characterize MDM. In its analysis, Forrester subdivides the evolving MDM field into integration, logical, contextual and analytic “models,” based on the systems’ abilities in structure data, handle nonobvious data relationships, and, with machine learning, to provide analytics of the data. These categories are somewhat fluid; different vendors approach each of these capabilities in a different way. Last fall, Gartner Group, another leading market research outfit, grouped Informatica, IBM, SAP, TIBCO and Oracle in their “magic quadrant leader” category (relatively speaking, the highest ranking), but excluded analytical capabilities (and perhaps for this reason, did not consider Reltio) as being a “downstream” requirement as opposed to the “operational” requirements of an MDM system. For most life sciences applications today, MDM offers a way to compile comprehensive information on customer lists, the better to coordinate multichannel marketing campaigns, salesforce targeting and the like. There are many other MDM IT companies, and there are many other companies that compile customer MDM data (notably Veeva, which is a competitor to Reltio in the cloud-based IT space). But few companies in either category are building out resources for MDM at a comprehensive, enterprise level the way Reltio is for life sciences.

For its part, Reltio prefers not to think of itself as a MDM player, but emphasizes (in at least some of its literature) the concept of “modern data management.” Says Reltio CEO Manish Sood, “We are focused on simplifying all aspects of data management for IT … by combining MDM with multi-channel interaction data, predictive analytics, machine learning, all within a unified modern data management platform that operates at Internet scale leveraging big data."