Kalido shares their insights into metadata, master data management, and data governance. Leading the discussion were:
Bill Hewitt, president and CEO,
Winston Chen, VP of Strategy and Business Development and
Stephen Pace, Senior Pre-Sales Consultant.
Corporate Overview: This is a company with a long heritage as a spin-out from Shell Oil in 1985. Their approach is 'generic data modeling' which resulted in the standard ISO 10303 to define product data throughout the life cycle of a product. Currently the company has 85 enterprise customers, 275 installations in 100 countries, and 100 employees in Burlington MA and in London development center. Pricing ranges from $5,000 per month subscription to several million dollars for a global enterprise project.
Corporate Vision: Kalido have merged all their previous products into Information Engine, which includes Kalido DW and Kalido Master Data Mgt. Bill summarized their vision in this
cartoon. "
Kalido is refocusing on data governance (DG), which they define as "high level policies and enforcement". Part of this is the Master Data Management (MDM), which is a major part of DG. Setting and enforcing rules and policies.
They claim that they are the only vendor that provides a fully governed BI infrastructure. It seems that the validity is based on your definition of DG. Since this is not my area of expertise, I am struggling about where the boundaries for DG are.
Go-To-Market Strategy: Points cited are:
- industry-specific solutions in pharma, insurance, CPG
- port to the Netezza platform
- subscription pricing for Microsoft mid-market
- partnership with Accenture
Solutions: Kalido offers pre-built solutions that provide 80-90%
of the business requirements for a particular industry, such as
Pharmaceutical, Insurance, and Sustainability Reporting. In addition,
the remaining 10-20% can be customized using their extensible modeling
framework.
Demonstration: Stephen rocked! Cover a lot of ground on data quality in an insurance company. By the way, the Information Modeler product is free! But the free version can not publish the model changes to the database.
Thoughts: Kalido faces a tough sell process requiring an internal champion who really understands the technical issues with enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and can effectively argue their implications to the business. Partnerships with management consulting firms like Accenture could be pivotal to Kalido's future.However, I have no doubt that the issues that Kalido is solving with their current products are critical to the adaptability of the EDW (and the entire IT infrastructure in many ways) to the business changes in the global economy.
Postscript: Over lunch (
see pic) we discuss the situations in which DG would be critical. My take-away over lunch is that DG becomes more critical and more difficult as a company diverges from traditional EDW architectures. In particular, multiple data sets that are maintain outside the data center for outsourcing services (call centers and various SaaS suppliers) require extra oversight as to data quality and other data-related SLA.
