An IDC survey puts the MDM market at USD 10.4 billion by 2009, with a compound growth rate of 13.8%. To save you some Excel exercise, that puts the existing MDM market at USD 5 billion today. This seems quite high, and clearly involves counting the existing sub-markets of CDI (customer data integration) and PIM (product informaton management) which have been around a lot longer than general purpose MDM tools (e.g. Kalido MDM, Oracle Data Hub, Hyperion Razza and SAP MDM or whatever it is called this week). Certainly the latter tools are what has stirred up a lot of interest in the MDM market, since they promise to address the general problem of how to manage master data, rather than dealing with the speicifc point problems of customer and product. This is important, since BP uses Kalido MDM to manage 350 different types of master data, so if we have to have a different software solution for every data type then IT departments are going to be very disappointed indeed! In fact today there are relatively few deployed instances of general purpose MDM tools, which are quite young (KALIDO MDM went on general release in Q3 2004) so it is of great interest to those vendors as to how quickly the “general purpose MDM” market will pick up from its early beginnings to grow to a serious proportion of this overall market. IDC are the most quantitative and thorough of the industry analysts when it comes to market size data, though as ever caution should be used in projecting the future in a straight-line form. Still, even at the current market size of USD 5 billion, it can be seen that this market, which did not even really have a name a year or so ago, is generating a lot of interest.

There have recently been a couple of useful indicators of the health of the technology industry. A somewhat lagging indicator is the new Software 500 list, which shows 2004 revenues, but for reasons best known to itself comes out in September. This shows overall revenues up 16% in 2004 compared to 2003. The software 500 is a slightly odd list in that includes assorted technology companie and systems integrators like Accenture rather than just pure play software companies, but it is otherwise a useful list. More recently, the FT reported that M&A activity in the European technology industry was at a record high, even more than in the previous record Q1 2000 quarter - there have now been ten straight quarters of M&A growth. This would suggest that, while the IPO market remains lacklustre unless you are called Google or have “China” in your name (just 64 technology POIs in the first nine months of 2005 v 367 in the same period in 2000) , the executives in the industry itself see opportunities in investing in technology companies, or at least see some bargains on offer.

These are welcome signs after the nuclear winter for technology of late 2001 and 2002, with 2003 only a little better. Customer IT spending is still frugal compared to the late 1990s, but at least some projects are now getting financed. Technology executives will hope to see conditions continue to improve after some lean years.

Bob Zurek rightly questions a statement from Eric Schmidt at Google that “there are 5 million TB of data in the world”. A study by the University of California at Berkeley estimated that there were 1,500 million TB of data produced in the world just in 1999.

Another interesting question is how much structured information there is in large companies. If you restrict the issue dramatically, to structured data on servers (not PCs) in large corporations, it is still a large number. With the largest data warehouses in the world weighing in these days at around 100 TB, and 1 TB data warehouses being quite commonplace, even if each Global 5,000 company had just 10 TB of total data, then we have a number 50,000 TB. This excludes the vast number of companies in the world that are below the Global 5,000. Certainly very large companies in industries like retail, Telco and retail banking will certainly have hundreds of terabytes of structured data each. Those with long memories will recall the puny disk drive sizes that we used to deal with even on mainframes in the 1980s, which does make you wonder, given that all those big companies worked just fine then. As they say about processors, Intel giveth, and Microsoft taketh away….. - perhaps there should be a similar truism for disk storage?