Details on Ibm Initiate Product

IBM Initiate Master Data Service

- Part of Infosphere family of products

- Strong in Operational MDM

- Ranked highly in Gartner Magic Quardant for MDM

- Assembles single view of Customer, Patient, Product, Account and Location and their relationships.

- Prebuilt offering to specific industry

o (Initate Patient) Healthcare information sharing.

o (Initiate Provider) Healthcare provider ecosystem

- IBM Initiate Master Data Service

o Provides a framework that allows MDM powered solutions to be built.

- There is a great white paper on their site which they like to use in positioning MDM to customers in Public Sector : Citizen Centric Solutions.

Challenges with IBM Initiate

- Industry is unsure why IBM acquired Initiate causing uncertainty amongst customers.

o IBM has multiple MDM offerings, many through acquisitions and are not integrated, in the list below only MDStage is integrated into InfoSphere. This acquisition was completed in 2005.

 InfoSphere MDM Server from DWL

 InfoSphere MDM for Product Information Management (from Trigo)

 Cognos Business ViewPoint

 MDStage from Ascential.

 IBM Initiate Master Data Service

o Initiate has good momentum in healthcare and public sector (law enforcement and threat management), most analysts believe that IBM acquired Initiate to get into these 2 verticals

o But IBM has existing customers using InfoSphere MDM Servers, it is unclear what IBM’s plans are in merging these 2 offerings. This has caused uncertainty amongst existing InfoSphere customers and Initiate customers.

o During the press conference, the first question was how IBM view this acquisition would play in IBM’s MDM strategy,