Worldwide master data management (MDM) software revenue will reach USD 1.9 billion in 2012, a 21 percent increase from 2011, according to Gartner, Inc. The market is forecast to reach USD 3.2 billion by 2015.

“This is the biggest annual growth we’ve seen for this market since 2008,” said Colleen Graham, Research Director at Gartner. “Pressures to optimize costs and efficiencies in a heterogeneous IT environment are driving organizations to turn to MDM as a more efficient way to manage and maintain data across multiple sources. In addition, the increasing governance, risk and compliance regulations are forcing organizations to focus on MDM to support these initiatives.”

From a regional perspective, North America and Europe will drive the demand for MDM, and both regions will grow at a steady pace to reach the billion-dollar mark, in 2013 for North America and in 2015 for Europe. In 2013, MDM software revenue will see faster growth in Asia/Pacific, where revenue will increase by 30 percent from 2012 to reach USD 209 million.

“MDM has become a critical discipline required for dealing with the challenges of social data, ‘big data’ and data in the cloud,” Graham said.

Within the overall MDM market, more than half the revenue is driven by products from small and best-of-breed vendors, as the market continues to favor specialized solutions over "generic" offerings. However, the overall MDM market is dominated by three major players — IBM, Oracle and SAP.

“In the next four years we expect larger vendors will continue to acquire for this specialization while smaller vendors will acquire each other to build market share and increase the functionality within their portfolios,” said Chad Eschinger, Research Director at Gartner.

However, the variety of technologies that can be applied to an MDM initiative leaves the door open for the entrance of data integration and data quality providers, in particular. As more midsize organizations adopt MDM in the course of the next four years, they are demanding lower prices and more flexibility from vendors. As a result, many new MDM vendors and offerings capturing this market will be focused on areas such as open source, as well as cloud computing/software as a service.

The largest domains of the MDM software market are MDM of customer data and MDM of product data, each of which is predicted to more than double in size over the next four years. MDM of customer data helps an organization cross-sell and cross-market, as well as retain customers and provide a consistent high-quality customer experience. The market for MDM of customer data is expected to reach USD 644 million in 2012 and to exceed USD 1 billion in 2015. The market for MDM of product data, which helps an organization store product-related master data, metadata, or both, is projected to reach USD 688 million in 2012 and to surpass USD 1.1 billion in 2015.

“The increased demand for more effective decision-making and a focus on improving the timeliness and accuracy of business decisions makes MDM paramount for organizations,” said Graham. “MDM supports these goals by ensuring the high quality of key data needed at the point of decision, removing uncertainty and increasing confidence.”