To date, product and customer data have been the centers of attention in most master data management (MDM) projects. In releasing Oracle Site Hub last week, Oracle says it's ready to take on an important new MDM frontier, consolidating and cleansing location information for retailers, government agencies, utilities, financial services firms and other companies seeking to rationalize site-specific data.

"This is an extension of our existing suite of MDM hubs that is focused on everything related to site management," explains Pascal Laik, Oracle's Vice President of Master Data Management. "The Hub helps them improve operational efficiency and it also supports better decision making as businesses choose and manage new sites."

It's all too common for retailers, for example, to manage hundreds if not thousands of sites, subsites and prospective sites. To do so, internal groups including marketing, operations, real estate, finance and procurement must collaborate, yet all too often they share information about sites via spreadsheets and disparate, unintegrated systems that spawn a chaotic jumble of conflicting and inaccurate information.

Oracle Site Hub is said to streamline the entire life cycle of site/location information management, from consolidation and cleansing of information from multiple data sources to governance and collaboration. "The hub provides a single view and one single point of truth for site and location information across the enterprise to make sure groups can work well together," Laik says.

The new hub is described as open and easily integrated with leading applications and data sources via Web services. The product is also preintegrated with Oracle's Property Manager, Enterprise Asset Management, and Inventory Management applications. The hub costs $200 per site/record or, in an enterprise licensing approach, $725 per million dollars of corporate revenue. Thus, a deployment at a firm with $1 billion in annual revenue costs $725,000.