David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

Organizations today are working with multiple applications and systems, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and other systems, where data can easily become fragmented and siloed. And as the organization increases its data sources and adds more systems and custom applications, it becomes challenging to manage the data consistently and keep data definitions up to date. This increases the need to use master data management (MDM) software that can provide a single source of truth to drive accurate analytics and business operations. MDM software, like most business applications, was initially developed as enterprise software that was installed on-premises. But enterprise applications have been moving to the cloud right along with an organization’s data in general. Our research shows that, already, nearly one-quarter (24%) of organizations have most of their data in the cloud and 86% expect the majority of their data to be there eventually. Reltio has been working for more than a decade to bring master data management capabilities to the cloud. Reltio Connected Data Platform is its cloud data-management platform that can manage big data in real time for operational, analytical and data science use cases. Reltio claims the platform can support billions of customer profiles with thousands of attributes, relationships, transactions and interactions from hundreds of data sources. It uses machine learning (ML) to discover data insights and improve data quality. The built-in workflow management system also helps simplify compliance the compliance process. Earlier this year, Reltio announced the availability of Reltio Identity 360, a cloud-native service built on Reltio Connected Data Platform that provides a single source of truth for identity data about customers, contacts and other persons such as patients, sales representatives and employees in real time and at scale. It helps eliminate inconsistent, duplicate, incomplete and fragmented customer data by consolidating, deduplicating, enriching and validating customer profiles. Organizations can use Identity 360 to improve business processes including sales, marketing and customer service by offering personalized customer experience, privacy protection, and fraud monitoring. For organizations with more complex customer data-management requirements, it offers Reltio Connected Customer 360 that creates richer master customer profiles with real-time transaction, interaction and third-party data and access to more features such as Connected Graph technology for relationship insights, data governance and enhanced security. Reltio’s platform provides capabilities including identity resolution, data quality, dynamic survivorship for contextual profiles, a universal ID across all operational applications, hierarchies, and data governance capabilities. The platform also includes Connected Graph to manage relationships and Progressive Stitching to create richer profiles over time. It supports customer, organization, employee, asset, location and product data masters within the same instance. It also offers the functionality to cleanse, match, merge and unmerge data of any type and domain, including customers, suppliers, employees, locations and products. The platform combines rule-based and machine learning-based matching to verify and accept match criteria, training the MDM platform to optimize matching and continuously improve predictions. Reltio recently raised $120 million in funding, increasing its valuation to $1.7 billion. The company plans to invest in expanding its global go-to-market efforts and to grow its cloud Connected Data Platform. Reltio recently also launched its data integration platform - Reltio Integration Hub - part of its latest Reltio Connected Data Platform release 2021.3. It offers more than 1,000 pre-built connectors for various SaaS applications and cloud services such as Salesforce, Slack, Box and Snowflake. The platform can connect and transform data across applications and can create intelligent process automation recipes or pipelines to reduce manual tasks. It enables personnel to build, operate and manage automated end-to-end integration flows and utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) across applications and platforms. Traditional on-premises data processing solutions have led to a complex and expensive set of data silos where IT spends more time managing the infrastructure than extracting value from the data. We assert that through 2025, 7 in ten organizations will migrate on-premises workloads to cloud data platforms, shifting focus to solving business needs rather than maintaining systems. I recommend that organizations looking for a master data management platform with integration capabilities across multiple domains should examine Reltio when evaluating vendors. It supports a cloud-enabled multidomain MDM product that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure. Its platform enables business personnel to create a single view by blending and relating trusted data from a range of internal, external and third-party sources, references, transactions, interactions and social channels. And there are no inherent limits on the number of attributes and relationships it can store and index from structured and unstructured data sources, including data from disparate systems. Regards, David Menninger

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