Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that the structured data integration problem at scale is still an open problem? I’m looking for problems that are unsolved out there, not problems that you’ve solved already.

Bob Renner: I think scale is an unsolved problem at this point. A very difficult problem that you have to solve elegantly is cross-domain master data management (MDM). I think you’ve got a few products and solutions and implementation within a given domain and a less complex domain had been adequately handled, but I think cross-domain master data management is a problem that continues to be very use-case specific, and generally, there have not been a lot of solutions.

Sramana Mitra: I think I know what you’re talking about. Let’s do a use case example that is a cross-domain master data management example.

Bob Renner: Forget about the cloud part of it. Let’s start out within an enterprise. If you’re trying to reconcile in to a single data set with concept of a customer and the concept of a product, what you have right now is an environment that has surfaced because of the different taxonomy and ontologies where you have products that are optimized for a customer. In some cases, optimized for employee or product.

In the more complex world of healthcare, you have registries. You don’t even have what I would call master data management. They’re registries that are optimized by therapeutic area. When you want to look at in the same tool or through the same view, it’s a very difficult problem. Often, our clients and other people have to deploy multiple solutions and then try to join those together through a third-part product.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that is worth discussing that you would like to discuss?

Bob Renner: It’s fairly well-written on at this point but I think it’s something that Liaison has been focused on for quite some time – the convergence of technologies that have been separated. I’ve talked about one which is the fine grain multi-domain MDM. , which really needs to converge in order to provide a reasonable view of not just cross-discipline data, but also the convergence of data management including big data techniques and others with the integration substrate.

What we think is a powerful trend and I think it’s picked up on not only by a lot of vendors, but a lot of customers, is really starting to unify the integration platform with the data management platform. I think that’s a trend if you look forward from an entrepreneurial standpoint. You’ll start to see products come to market that are not separated to B2B integration, MDM, big data. These things are all going to be unified platform going forward.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies
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