Informatica Named a Leader

In their inaugural review of metadata management solutions, analyst firm Gartner named Informatica a Leader—appearing highest on the axis for “ability to execute” and furthest to the right on the axis for “completeness of vision.”

Our metadata management helps businesses standardize and share metadata, helping to exploit the value of all your organizations’ information assets. Read this report to understand the major metadata management solution vendors, including Informatica, and their strengths and weaknesses.

Informatica Metadata Manager provides core metadata management capabilities essential for

broader enterprise initiatives such as:

Data governance: Offering end-to-end data lineage, a collaborative business glossary and

enterprise information catalog to manage all your data assets

BI and analytics: Integrating and preparing virtually all types of data at scale to feed your

BI and analytic applications for better decision-making

Master data management (MDM): Enriching 360-degree views of customers, employees,

suppliers and other types of master data with big data insights

“As our many customers can attest, metadata management is foundational to effective data

management and governance,” said Amit Walia, executive vice president and chief product

officer, Informatica.

"With our comprehensive set of metadata management solutions, Informatica is committed to

fulfilling customers’ immediate metadata management needs while helping them realize their

future enterprise architecture and data management goals. We believe that the positioning of

Informatica as a Leader in the first-ever Gartner Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management

Solutions reflects our complete support for all metadata management use cases and continued

innovation in defining and delivering next-generation metadata management solutions.”

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology

users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's

research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

1 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions, Guido De Simoni, Roxane Edjlali, 15 August 2016.

Magic Quadrant for Metadata

Management Solutions Published: 15 August 2016 ID: G00297145

Analyst(s):

Guido De Simoni, Roxane Edjlali

Summary The growing need for organizations to treat information as an asset is making metadata management strategic, driving significant growth for metadata management solutions. We evaluate nine vendors to help data and analytics leaders find the solution that best suits the needs of their organization.

Strategic Planning Assumptions Through 2018, 80% of data lakes will not include effective metadata management capabilities, making them inefficient.

By 2020, 50% of information governance initiatives will be enacted with policies based on metadata alone.

Market Definition/Description Metadata describes various facets of an information asset in order to improve its usability throughout its life cycle. Metadata management is about the organization's management of its data and information assets to address use cases such as data governance, analytics and enterprise metadata management (EMM). It is important to note that this understanding of metadata goes far beyond just technical facets; it is used as a reference for business-oriented and technical projects and builds the foundations for information governance and analytics.

The market for metadata management solutions is made up of vendors that include the following metadata management capabilities (one or many) in their stand-alone metadata management products:

Metadata repositories — Used to document and manage metadata, and to perform analysis using the metadata. Organizations can also use repositories to

publish information about reusable assets, enabling users to browse metadata during life cycle activities such as design, testing and release management.

Business glossary — A repository used to communicate and govern the enterprise's business terms along with the associated definitions and the relationships between those terms.

Data lineage — Specifies the data's origins and where it moves over time. It also describes what happens to data as it goes through diverse processes. Data lineage can help to analyze how information is used and to track key bits of information that serve a particular purpose.

Impact analysis — Conveys extensive details regarding the dependencies of information or the impact of a change within a data source.

Rules management — Automates the enforcement of business rules that are tied to the data elements and associated metadata. This capability supports dedicated interfaces for the creation of, and the order of execution and links with, information stewardship for effective governance.

Semantic frameworks — Include support for taxonomies, entity relationship (ER) models, ontology and modeling languages such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

Metadata ingestion and translation — Using techniques or bridges for various sources, such as:

o Extraction, transformation and loading; application integration; data integration; search

o Business intelligence (BI) and reporting tools

o Modeling tools

o Database management system (DBMS) catalogs

o ERP and other applications

o XML formats

o Hardware and network log files

o Spreadsheets/Word documents

o PDF documents

o Business metadata

o Custom metadata

Vendors in this market demonstrate the ability to identify, document and maintain relationships among ingested and translated metadata.

Magic Quadrant Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions

Source: Gartner (August 2016)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Adaptive

Adaptive is based in Aliso Viejo, California, U.S. Its metadata management solution is Adaptive Metadata Manager.

STRENGTHS

Broad metadata management use cases: Adaptive addresses a wide set of metadata management use cases — such as those for big data and analytics, or regulation and compliance — through a combination of product and consulting and managed services.

Go-to-market strategy: Adaptive has a good balance in terms of go-to-market strategy between direct sales, OEMs and partners.

Functional capabilities: Adaptive's reference customers praise Adaptive Metadata Manager for the richness of its functional capabilities.

CAUTIONS

Integration of products: Reference customers rated Adaptive poorly for overall ease of use and seamless integration of products. This is a challenge, because users of metadata management tools are evolving toward business functions. Adaptive will address these aspects in the next major product release.

Upgrade and installation: Ease of upgrade and installation are rated poorly by Adaptive's reference customers.

Traditional metadata ingestion: Adaptive's solutions are still based on traditional approaches for metadata ingestion and management; however, this will be addressed in the future by leveraging machine learning for automation, for example. The promising roadmap in this area must be tested before any long-term investment in Adaptive's solutions.

Cambridge Semantics

Cambridge Semantics is based in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. Its metadata management solutions are Anzo Smart Data Platform, Anzo Smart Data Integration and Anzo Smart Data Manager.

STRENGTHS

Semantic technologies expertize: Cambridge Semantics' solutions are based on semantics standards (such as the RDF and OWL languages) combined with an enterprise-class, service-oriented and event-driven architecture. These solutions are made possible by leveraging industry-defined semantic models or company-defined models to link and manage diverse data. The semantic models are graph models; they allow for the data to be linked by business concepts and for the metadata to travel with the data.

Value for money: The survey of reference customers shows that Cambridge Semantics offers a high return on investment; its customers believe they are getting value for money from their investment in its solutions.

Impact analysis: Cambridge Semantics' reference customers also considered that its solutions completely fulfill their organizational needs for impact analysis,

with extensive details regarding the dependencies of information in complex environments.

CAUTIONS

Limitations of Semantic Web standards: The semantics standards approach of Cambridge Semantics' provides great alignment to initiatives that are based on open linked data or World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Semantic Web standards — most notably RDF/OWL. However, this approach requires additional layers of mapping, and therefore additional complexity, to support the fact that metadata is context-sensitive.

Deployment cycles: Our survey of reference customers shows that Cambridge Semantics has the longest deployment cycles, compared with the other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, and that its implementations usually require professional services. This, combined with the perception of limited documentation and the need for custom training, should alert potential buyers to the potential cost of deployment and initial maintenance associated with a Cambridge Semantics solution.

Limited geographic presence: Cambridge Semantics has extremely limited presence outside the U.S.

Collibra

Collibra is co-headquartered in New York, New York, U.S. and in Brussels, Belgium. It offers Collibra Data Governance Center for metadata management.

STRENGTHS

Data governance: Collibra has entered the metadata management market, leading with data governance and information stewardship. As result, Collibra has approached the topic from a business perspective rather than an IT perspective, which is an advantage as organizations attempt to articulate the business value of data.

Industry focus: Collibra has a strong focus on industry-specific solutions — such as financial services and healthcare — which simplifies its messaging to business stakeholders and thereby adoption of its solutions.

Upcoming data catalog: In 2H16, Collibra will release Collibra Catalog, addressing the growing need for organizations to manage their critical information assets.

CAUTIONS

Not centered around technical metadata management capabilities: Collibra has built a market reputation on business metadata. As a result, it is not identified as addressing specific technical needs; for example, reference customers have given it poor ratings for its metadata ingestion and translation capabilities.

Price: Reference customers gave Collibra poor ratings for pricing and overall total cost of ownership; but an average rating for its approach to pricing and licensing. This is a clear indication that price appears to be a concern.

Technology innovation: While Collibra has done really well in addressing data governance requirements and providing a large set of connectors, its solution does not yet leverage machine learning or automatic detection of relationships based on data values. This "work in progress" will be crucial to addressing the growing variety and distribution of data assets.

Data Advantage Group

Data Advantage Group is based in San Francisco, California, U.S. Its metadata management solution is MetaCenter.

STRENGTHS

Customer support: Data Advantage Group maintains a library of hundreds of virtual machine images that allow the replication of MetaCenter customer environments and the tools they support. This is enabled by the MetaCenter's architecture and allows the company to quickly reproduce customer issues, as needed, to address them. It enables Data Advantage Group to drive better return on investment for its customers and to reduce implementation risk.

Solution performance: Reference customers' feedback demonstrates consistent satisfaction with MetaCenter's performance and scalability. The MetaCenter logical architecture offers an effective approach to enterprisewide impact analysis and lineage for several set of users accessing data sources via a loosely coupled metadata repository.

Easy-to-use user interface: Simple GUI-driven customization enables rapid application development with no programming required. Customizable search and graphical data lineage reporting allow information to be easily discovered and analyzed by users. Built in workflow capabilities allow users to collaborate using a formal governance process.

CAUTIONS

Scaling the business: Data Advantage Group has no significant plans for growth or to invest in additional resources. In the long term, this might affect its ability to scale and to respond to new business requirements.

Geographic presence: Data Advantage Group has limited presence outside the U.S., especially in Europe. Plans to expand its geographic presence by leveraging partners in strategic and vertical markets might improve its commercial exposure outside the U.S.

Executing on innovative trends: Data Advantage Group is planning to execute on updates of its MetaCenter offering; however, its approach to innovation is conservative (compared with other market players) as it continues to play safe in a highly transformative market.

Global IDs

Global IDs is based in Princeton, New Jersey, U.S. Its metadata management products are Global IDs Enterprise Information Management (EIM) Suite and Global IDs Ecosystem Management Suite.

STRENGTHS

Vision: Global IDs' approach to metadata management is innovative. It is based on machine-centric automated learning enabling automatic curation of metadata assets. This is a promising approach to dealing with the ever-growing variety and complexity of enterprise data assets.

Metadata repository: Global IDs' metadata repository is graph-oriented and can be composed of any number of subgraphs representing things such as data elements, applications or business concepts. This approach is foundational for delivering scalable, flexible and rich metadata management capabilities.

Functional capabilities: Global IDs' reference customers rate highly its functional capabilities in the areas of impact analysis, metadata repository, business glossary, lineage, metadata ingestion and translation, and semantic frameworks.

CAUTIONS

Business outcomes: While Global IDs has an innovative approach to metadata management, it needs to tie this more clearly to the business benefits that metadata management can deliver. Reference customers rated as average the value for money they got out of the technology. Helping customers to understand and articulate the business benefits will be crucial to Global IDs' success.

Rules management: Overall, Global IDs was praised by its customer references for the richness of its capabilities, with the exception of rules management. Managing governance and risk across complex data landscapes will require strong rules management capabilities.

Market visibility: Global IDs is a small, innovative vendor playing in a market that is experiencing renewed interest. Its ability to make itself known and to develop partnerships with major players in the market will be crucial to its success.

IBM

IBM is based in Armonk, New York, U.S. Its product for metadata management is IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog.

STRENGTHS

Depth and breadth of usage: IBM's tool continues to be adopted as an enterprisewide standard, one applied to a wide variety of data domains and use cases.

Enhanced information governance functionality: Continued innovation in information governance and stewardship (such as new capabilities for managing data from Hadoop distributions), based on IBM's robust metadata management foundations, enables business-level understanding of data assets.

Focus on information infrastructure versatility: IBM continues to focus on enabling information infrastructure modernization in its efforts to align data integration with diverse demands for information capabilities (including metadata management and governance, support for line-of-business users, big data, and integration support for cloud adoptions).

CAUTIONS

Cost model: The cost of IBM's software and the perceived total cost of ownership were identified as key reasons for ruling out IBM in competitive situations.

Support improvement: Reference customers identified a need for IBM to improve the support it offered on existing and emerging technical requirements in metadata management.

Professional services support: Customers would like to see better alignment between IBM's metadata management solution and the ability to provide implementation skills and professional services support for this solution. In 4Q15, IBM launched a consulting initiative to respond to this customer feedback.

Informatica

Informatica is based in Redwood City, California, U.S. Its metadata management solutions are Metadata Manager, Business Glossary and Enterprise Information Catalog — Standard Edition.

STRENGTHS

Broad presence and dedicated focus on, and innovation in, data management: Informatica's mind share in this market is extensive, with the highest frequency of appearances in competitive situations. Informatica's concentration on enabling information capabilities aligns with its application- and technology-agnostic offerings, which have a broad range of established and emerging information infrastructures.

Alignment with evolving trends and business-facing demand: Informatica's innovative approach in supporting an enterprise data catalog, self-service data preparation, stewardship and governance, and data analytics — with the graph-based Live Data Map of metadata assets — represents a focus on maximizing business value.

Strong growth: Informatica continues to demonstrate strong growth in market share in all industries and geographies, which reflects its deep understanding of the market and the alignment of its sales and marketing strategy with its execution.

CAUTIONS

Integrated metadata solutions: Reference customers point to a perceived difficulty with Informatica's set of metadata management solutions functioning as a seamlessly integrated solution. This is particularly relevant for large enterprises with complex information infrastructures.

Business evolution: Informatica's roadmap and status as a thought leader has been communicated to its customers; however, Permira's acquisition of Informatica still generates some uncertainty among prospective and existing customers about the possibility of an impending change of strategy.

Pricing model: Prospective customers point to difficulty in understanding Informatica's licensing and pricing methods. Existing customers often express concerns about high costs relative to the alternatives in this market.

Oracle

Oracle is based in Redwood Shores, California, U.S. Its metadata management product is Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management.

STRENGTHS

Synergies with portfolio's broad range of technologies. Recognition of Oracle's diverse portfolio for addressing data integration and other data and application-oriented requirements (spanning data quality tools, master data management solutions, enterprise series bus, analytic appliances and enterprise applications) continues to fuel its appeal in deployment scenarios.

Metadata management as a foundation for critical core capabilities. Oracle's vision leverages metadata management as a foundation for integrating critical core capabilities such as business continuity, data movement, data transformation, data governance, and streaming data solutions. This approach can, potentially, support new architectural models with less dependency on specific technologies (whether open source or not).

Bridges for metadata ingestion: Oracle has extended its big data support to enable ingestion of streaming data by Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) workflows that can be deployed in Apache Spark and Apache Pig environments. To capitalize further on big data and streaming integration scenarios, Oracle is expanding its product development competencies to focus on machine learning in modeling and design processes.

CAUTIONS

Metadata management strategic focus: Based on Gartner's sources and data, Oracle is not as visible on metadata management shortlists as other vendors, because enterprises are unsure whether it can be considered a strategic partner. A focus on executing on its metadata management strategy might shift this

perception of Oracle. Engaging users across several business and IT user profiles with the integrated user interface will help to support this focus.

Inadequate functionality: The survey of customer references for this Magic Quadrant revealed that Oracle's capabilities were rated relatively low (specifically related to business glossary and metadata ingestion capabilities) compared with those of the competition. In addition, Oracle was often not selected as strategic partner in the metadata management solutions market because of inadequate functionality. Gartner expects Oracle's aggressive roadmap to address these limitations during the coming year.

Ability to demonstrate the value of its solutions: Reference customers identified poor response to RFP as a weak point for Oracle in competitive situations. Also, customers of Oracle's solutions identify challenges with its processes for product support, especially in urgent cases.

SAP

SAP is based in Walldorf, Germany. It offers SAP PowerDesigner and SAP Information Steward for metadata management.

STRENGTHS

Governance: SAP offers a broad product portfolio, embracing many aspects of information governance such as data integration, master data management, data quality, information life cycle management and metadata management.

Full life cycle of metadata: SAP promises to deliver on the full metadata management life cycle by interoperating SAP PowerDesigner and Information Steward. This interoperability is designed to allow collaboration between business and IT roles.

Breadth of functionality: SAP's reference customers rated it highly for the breadth of its functional capabilities. For example, SAP PowerDesigner is a strong contender for data-centric architectural projects and programs.

CAUTIONS

Complexity: Getting the most out of SAP's metadata management solutions requires using both products in conjunction with each other, which adds complexity to the deployment. Reference clients rated the seamless integration of these two products as average, indicating that while not perfect it does provide an acceptable solution.

Customer satisfaction: Overall, reference customers rated SAP poorly for value for money, technical support and the overall sales experience.

Vision: Metadata management will be key to enabling the emerging roles of the CDO and managing data as an asset. SAP is taking a conservative and gradual approach to evolving its product at a time when digital business and the Internet of Things (IoT) will be driving even greater complexity in managing data. SAP

has, however, launched a series of webinars to inform CDOs about its planned roadmaps for information management products, including metadata management solutions.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added

This is a new Magic Quadrant, so no vendors were added.

Dropped

ASG , based in Naples, Florida, U.S., participated in the Magic Quadrant process by submitting a response to our request for information and supplied Gartner with customer references. Gartner assessed that ASG qualified for inclusion in the 2016 Magic Quadrant based on four products in its portfolio aggregated together: Rochade, becubic, Manager and Enterprise Data Intelligence. Subsequently, during the review stage, ASG informed Gartner that it had ceased selling Rochade, becubic and Manager in August 2015 (though these products are still maintained and may be upgraded, transferred or outsourced), and that its only metadata management product — Enterprise Data Intelligence — was generally available in June 2016. Gartner has therefore decided to remove ASG from the 2016 Magic Quadrant for metadata management solutions.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria To be included in this Magic Quadrant, vendors had to meet the following criteria:

Vendors must offer stand-alone packaged software tools or cloud-based software (rather than embedded in, or dependent on, other products and services) that are positioned, marketed and sold specifically for general-purpose metadata management. The solution must support two or more of the following use cases:

o Data governance — In this use case, metadata management solutions provide a glimpse into the workflow of data; the ability to perform an impact analysis; a common business glossary, and support accountability for its terms and definitions; and an audit trail for compliance.

o BI and analytics — In this use case, metadata management solutions involve presenting data in a way that provides insight into the business and supports decision making. The data usually derives from several different and often operational sources. Data is extracted from operational

systems; it is then transformed and merged before being delivered to integrated data structures for analytical purposes.

o Master data management — Master data defines the core entities of an enterprise, such as what a customer, product or asset is. Master data management is the discipline that ensures the consistency of an enterprise's master data. In this use case, metadata management solutions leverage extended attributes for master data.

o Service-oriented architecture (SOA) — Which allows users to combine fairly large elements of functionality to form ad hoc applications built almost entirely from existing software services. SOA depends on data and services that are described by metadata. In this use case, metadata management solutions support the required relationship of metadata.

o EMM — This is the discipline for governing the important information assets of an organization, in support of enterprise information management (EIM). EMM connects several information initiatives and their related metadata. In this use case, metadata management solutions enable EMM via metadata ingestion and translation from several data sources.

Vendors must deliver metadata management capabilities (as identified below) that include, at a minimum, metadata repositories, business glossary, data lineage, impact analysis, rules management, and metadata ingestion and translation from various sources. Vendors that offer only some of these capabilities (for example, those that support only business glossaries) are excluded because they do not provide the minimum metadata management capabilities required for a complete solution. Specifically, vendors must offer all of the following:

o Metadata repositories — Used by information managers to document and manage metadata and to perform analysis using the metadata. Organizations can also use repositories to publish information about reusable assets, enabling users to browse metadata during life cycle activities (such as design, testing and release management).

o Business glossary — A repository used to communicate and govern the enterprise's business terms along with the associated definitions and the relationships between those terms.

o Data lineage — Specifies the data's origins and where it moves over time. It also describes what happens to data as it goes through diverse processes. Data lineage can help to analyze how information is used and can track key bits of information that serve a particular purpose.

o Impact analysis — Conveys extensive details regarding the dependencies of information or the impact of a change within a data source.

o Rules management — Automates the enforcement of business rules that are tied to the data elements and associated metadata. This capability supports dedicated interfaces for creation, order of execution and links with information stewardship for effective governance.

o Metadata ingestion and translation — Using techniques or bridges for various sources, such as:

Extraction, transformation and loading (ETL); extraction, load and transform (ELT); application integration; data integration; insight engines

BI and reporting tools

Modeling tools

DBMS catalogs

ERP and other applications

XML formats

Hardware and network log files

Spreadsheets/Word documents

PDF documents

Business metadata

Custom metadata

Vendors must support packaged capabilities (sales and support) in more than one country.

Vendors must support end-user facing functionality (reporting/dashboards, rules development, workflow, issue tracking and resolution).

Vendors must support overall usability (configuration, administration, development and general ease of use).

Vendors must support large-scale deployment on-premises and/or cloud-based architectures that can support concurrent users and applications.

Vendors must maintain an installed base of at least 15 production customers for the metadata management solutions meeting the above criteria. The production customer base must include customers in more than one region (North America, Latin America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific).

Vendors' products must have been in production (that is, generally available) as of 1 May 2016. Products in beta or test have not been considered.

Vendors meeting the above criteria, but limited to deployments in a single or specific application environment, industry or data domain, are excluded from this Magic Quadrant.

There are many vendors in the market for metadata management solutions, but most do not meet the above criteria and are therefore not included in this Magic Quadrant. Many vendors provide products that deal with one very specific metadata management solution for a particular scenario; for example, a solution for the ingestion, population or governance of data in data lakes. Others provide a range of functions, but operate only in a single country or support only narrow, departmental implementations. Others may meet all the functional, deployment and geographic requirements, but be at a very early stage in their "life span" and therefore have few, if any, production customers.

Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

Product/Service. Core goods and services that compete in and/or serve the defined market. How well the vendor supports the range of metadata management capabilities required by the market, the manner (architecture) in which these capabilities are delivered, and the overall usability of the solutions.

Overall Viability. Financial viability includes an assessment of the organization's overall financial health as well as the financial and practical success of the business unit. The vendor's financial strength (as assessed by revenue growth, profitability and cash flow), and the strength and stability of its people and the organizational structure. The medium weighting for this criterion reflects buyers' increased openness to considering newer, less-established and smaller providers with differentiated offerings.

Sales Execution/Pricing. The organization's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. The effectiveness of the vendor's pricing model in the light of current customer demand trends and spending patterns, and the effectiveness of its direct and indirect sales channels. Given buyers' strong focus on cost models and return on investment, and the criticality of consistent sales execution for a vendor's growth and customer retention, this criterion receives a high weighting.

Market Responsiveness and Track Record. Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve, and market dynamics change. As an important consideration for buyers in this market, but not an overriding one, this criterion receives a medium weighting.

Marketing Execution. The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message in order to influence the market, promote the brand, increase awareness of products and establish a positive identification in the minds of customers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional, thought leadership, social media, referrals and sales activities. In this criterion we look at the overall effectiveness of the vendor's marketing efforts, the degree to which it has generated mind share, and the magnitude of the market share achieved as a result. Given the increasingly competitive nature of this market and the

continued entry of new vendors (both large and small), we gave a high weighting to this criterion.

Customer Experience. Products and services and/or programs that enable customers to achieve anticipated results with the products evaluated. This may include ancillary tools, customer support programs, availability of user groups, service-level agreements, and so on.

In this criterion we consider the level of satisfaction expressed by customers with the vendor's product support and professional services and their overall relationship with the vendor, as well as their perceptions of the value of the vendor's metadata management solutions relative to costs and expectations. We provide a high weighting for this criterion to reflect buyers' scrutiny of these considerations as they seek to derive optimal value from their investments.

Operations. The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis. This criterion is not rated in this Magic Quadrant, because our interaction with the market indicates it to be a minor consideration during the selection of metadata management solutions.

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding. Ability to understand customer needs and translate them into products and services. Vendors that show a clear vision of their market will listen, understand customer demands, and can shape or enhance market changes with their added vision. In this criterion, we consider the degree to which vendors are aligned to the significant trend of convergence with other data-management and analytics-related

markets. Given the dynamic nature of this market, this criterion receives a high weighting.

Marketing Strategy. Clear, differentiated messaging that is consistently communicated internally, and is externalized through social media, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements. In this criterion, we consider the degree to which the vendor's marketing approach aligns with and/or exploits emerging trends (such as the ability to address a variety of data types and to capture and enrich metadata at the time it is being loaded; plus support for complex multivendor environments to provide end-to-end data lineage). This criterion receives a medium weighting.

Sales Strategy. A sound strategy for selling that uses the appropriate networks, including direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication. Plus, partners that extend the scope and depth of market reach, expertise, technologies, services and the vendor's customer base. This criterion receives a medium weighting.

Offering (Product) Strategy. An approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes market differentiation, functionality, methodology and features as they map to current and future requirements. We also consider the breadth of the vendor's strategy with regard to a range of delivery models for products and services, from traditional on-premises deployment to SaaS and cloud-based models. Given the rapid evolution of technology in this market, we give this criterion a high weighting.

Business Model. The design, logic and execution of the organization's business proposition to achieve continued success. In this criterion, we evaluate the overall approach that the vendor takes to executing its strategy for the metadata management solutions market, including the diversity of delivery models, packaging and pricing options, and partnership types. The dynamic and transforming nature of this market does not yet enable a significant comparison of successful business models, so this criterion receives a low weighting.

Vertical/Industry Strategy. The strategy to direct resources (sales, product and development), skills and products to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including verticals. Given the broad, cross-industry nature of the metadata management discipline, vertical-market strategies are somewhat less important than in some other disciplines, so this criterion receives a medium weighting.

Innovation. Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes. Driving toward information valuation, treating information as an asset. Given buyers' desire to take substantial leaps forward in their information management competency, and the strong interest in extending metadata management capabilities in support of broader information governance and analytics goals, this criterion receives a high weighting.

Geographic Strategy. The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market.

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders

Leaders in metadata management solutions are front-runners with an offering that supports the full range of metadata management capabilities. They exhibit a clear understanding and vision of where the market is headed, and are strong in matching customers' requirements in a variety of use cases. They support both business and technical metadata scenarios, leveraging strategic partnerships to optimize the delivery of their solutions. These vendors establish market trends (to a large degree) by providing new functional capabilities in their products, and by identifying new types of business problem to which they can bring significant value. Leaders have an established and/or fast-growing market presence, and a multinational presence.

Challengers

Challengers are well-positioned in the light of key trends; however, they may not provide the comprehensive breadth of functionality, or may be limited to specific technical environments or application domains. In addition, their vision may be hampered by a lack of coordinated strategy across the various products in their metadata management solutions portfolio. Challengers have an established customer base, credibility and viability, though their implementations may be focused on noninnovative projects.

Visionaries

Visionaries demonstrate a strong understanding of emerging technology and business trends, or have a position that is well-aligned with current demand; however, they are

not yet perceived as competitive players beyond their traditional customer base. They may be new entrants lacking the installed base and global presence of larger vendors, although they could also be large, established players in related markets that have only recently placed an emphasis on a focused offering in metadata management.

Niche Players

Niche Players have gaps in both their Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. They often exhibit a narrow focus in supporting use cases. Niche Players may be established vendors for some capabilities of the metadata management solutions market and going through a cycle of change to compete in a transforming market.

Context

Metadata facilitates the understanding of an organization's information assets and how they are managed. It serves as a means to realize additional value from an organization's data assets that, in turn, can enable business benefits. These benefits include improved compliance and corporate governance, better risk management, better shareability and reuse, and the ability to better assess the impact of change in the enterprise while creating both opportunities and threats.

Metadata describes various facets of an information asset in order to improve its usability throughout its life cycle. Metadata management is about the organization's management of its data and information assets to address use cases such as data governance, analytics and EMM. Various reasons motivate the introduction of a metadata management solution in an enterprise, including the following:

Facilitating collaboration around data. At the enterprise level, metadata requires the contribution of numerous people from different divisions, countries, and so on. Metadata management tools can provide a multiuser environment — through techniques such as cataloging — that is able to deal with collaboration challenges such as user access control or simultaneous modifications. In addition, metadata management solutions can facilitate collaboration among data consumers and providers by enabling a business-driven development of data management and its metadata (see"How to Align Information and Analytics Governance With Enterprise Metadata Management" ).

Dealing with complexity. The complexity of data depends on the complexity of applications, the variety of information and the growing number of information management use cases it describes. This typically depends on the size of the enterprise and the maturity of enterprise information management. Metadata attempts to break down and explain the complexity.

Automating processes. Because data is subject to change, there are numerous recurring activities that software solutions may enable or streamline by (partial) automation (for example, creation, publication, approval or revision). Metadata management enables these activities and processes (see "Best Practices in Enterprise-Class Metadata Management Capabilities" ).

Information managers seeking metadata management capabilities often demand solutions that address a use case or a project focus, or just need to work in alignment with their organization's other technology investments. Many service providers and vendors perform training and consulting in the discipline of metadata management.

This Magic Quadrant has a lot of white space between its Visionaries/Leaders and the other vendors, indicating that the market continues to demand more innovation and better execution to address the needs of automation (machine learning and semantic enrichment by search capabilities), and combined cloud and on-premises deployments. This market therefore offers opportunity for significant movement and will attract new vendors (not currently included in the Magic Quadrant). These emerging vendors will challenge the positions of the established vendors.

This market is in a state of flux; disruption is likely to continue throughout 2016 and into 2017, which will erode the installed bases of the traditional vendors and enable new leadership.

Market Overview Some metadata management solutions have been in the market for more than 10 years and enjoy hundreds of clients. However the technology continues to expand in its capabilities and support for multiple use cases. A growing ecosystem of system integrators and independent software vendor partners support the most popular metadata management solutions.

Gartner predicts that the metadata management solutions market will double in size in 2017 (from an estimated value of $170 million in 2016) — driven by the information of everything, proliferation of data from the IoT, big data and data lake forces, and requirements for organizations to know what data they have — as information is recognized as an asset with an attached financial value (see "The Growth of the Metadata Management Tool Market Is a Reality" ).

According to the customer reference survey for this Magic Quadrant (97 respondents; ranking 1 to 5; aggregated results), the following data types are the priorities in relation to metadata management improvement initiatives:

Transactional data (67%)

Customer/prospect/patient data (65%)

Financial (63%)

Product/materials data (48%)

Big data environments (38%)

Content (35%)

Location data (32%)

Employee/associate data (25%)

Supplier/vendor data (24%)

In addition, the market is already expanding to match the requirements for organizations to address information governance. Metadata management is foundational to better understand existing silos and rules relating to strategic types of information assets.

Today (according to our customer reference survey results; ranking 1 to 3; in aggregation), these use cases represent the priorities in metadata management improvement initiatives:

Data governance (90%)

BI and analytics (42%)

Master data management (32%)

Enterprise metadata management (EMM) (26%)

Market Trends

Fueling smart machines and, ultimately, an algorithmic business, existing and emerging semantic approaches, data classification models and information analysis techniques will enable the information of everything — mapping relationships between the different data elements (see "Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016: At a Glance" ). An essential part of that shift is the requirement to understand and leverage information as an asset across the organization.

In harnessing data for business outcomes, data leaders must understand the flood of data in multiple formats. Information has been available in disparate repositories for decades, but in today's digital business environment organizations face new demands to access and use data across these repositories — by mapping relationships between the different data elements (see "Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016: At a Glance" ).

Vendors will need to prepare, adjust to and exploit the following upcoming changes:

The variety and extent of metadata supported

The enhancement of the scope of metadata through automation (machine-learning), and through automated enrichment by semantic search capabilities, standard processes and crowdsourcing

Semantics formalism for improved interoperability

New ways to visualize metadata across a federated environment (self-service data preparation for analytics is driving this requirement)

New governance models, driven by the IoT

The transfer of metadata ownership from the CIO to the CDO

New technology innovations will generate interest in bridging information silos in order to improve the value of information-based business outcomes, for example: the ability to

address a variety of data types and to capture and enrich metadata at the time it is being loaded; the ability to combine machine-learning and crowdsourcing metadata from experts; and support for complex multivendor environments to provide end-to-end data lineage. However, there are still a few inhibitors to even faster adoption, including:

The lack of maturity of strategic business conversations about metadata

The required and expensive effort of integration for metadata management solutions in multivendor environments

The lack of identification of accurate metadata management solutions whose capabilities match the current and future requirements for specific use cases

Most organizations will find that their current metadata management practices are different across applications, data and technologies, and that these practices are siloed by the needs of different disciplines — each with their own governance authority, practices and capabilities. Data and analytics leaders that have already invested in data management tools/solutions should first evaluate the metadata management capabilities of their existing data management tools, including their federation/integration capabilities, before buying a new metadata management solution. However, if they are dealing with emerging use cases — including collaborative analytics and community-oriented data governance — they should learn about, and investigate, new metadata management solutions.

Acronym Key and Glossary Terms

Evidence The analysis in this document is based on information from a number of sources, including:

Extensive data on functional capabilities, customer base demographics, financial status, pricing and other quantitative attributes gained via an RFI process that engaged vendors in this market.

Interactive briefings in which vendors provided Gartner with updates on their strategy, market positioning, recent key developments and product roadmaps.

A web-based survey of reference customers provided by each vendor. This captured data on usage patterns, levels of satisfaction with major product functionality categories, various nontechnology-related vendor attributes (such as pricing, product support and overall service delivery), and more. In total, 97 organizations across all major regions provided input on their experiences with vendors and their solutions.

Feedback about tools and vendors captured during conversations with users of Gartner's client inquiry service.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute

Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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