No SAP DW, No Oracle BI, but Kalido. Why?

I am asked this question a number of times. I give the same answer that Bill Hewitt, Kalido's CEO and President, gave to Jim Ericson in a recent interview. It goes like this;

"All the ERP vendors are saying it's about SOA. SAP says we can provide everything: middleware, information management, transaction systems. Oracle says the same thing. What customer in their right mind wants to go back to buying every piece of their stack from one vendor? If you want to deliver your applications with a database flavor, then Oracle is a great place to go. If you want to deliver your middleware with a manufacturing flavor, SAP is a great place to go. But SAP has rolled out their second try at MDM [master data management], and it's failing because while they understand applications, they don't understand data. Oracle understands data but they don't understand applications. What we promote is maintaining separation between the five layers of your IT environment that move at different speeds: your infrastructure, your security, your information management, your applications and your user interface. Eventually, SOA is going to be the technology that brings all that together, but I don't think you should need to have your information management come out of your transaction systems or vice versa. What customers want is interoperability between the layers of the IT stack so they can make changes that suit their environment as they grow or shrink or change in other ways."

Managing Compliance with Master Data Management

DMReview published an excellent article on How Financial Services Firms are Improving Adherence to Regulations using Master Data Management. It says, U.S. corporations spent an average of $4.6 million implementing Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) section 404 controls in their first year of implementation, and Forrester Research estimates the five year cost of Basel II implementation for the largest banks to be $150 million. The size and scale of investment on compliance is forcing organizations to invest in technology solutions. It goes further by saying, considering that SOX, Basel II and the USA Patriot Act all share the need for reliable control of master or reference data, leading Financial Services firms are looking to master data management (MDM) as the foundation for managing regulatory compliance. By creating a centralized master reference hub, organizations can deliver the most reliable, complete views of key business data within their existing business processes and more importantly leverage these data assets within operational business processes to remain in compliance, adhere to various privacy requirements and simplify the reporting process.

Among all the new data technology initiatives, MDM is one that is getting a lot of attention because of its ability to make compliance and reporting a whole lot easier.

Kalido Error: -5092 : Handle does not belong to given list

This error appears when you try to import a transaction file definition. The only reason an import of transaction file definition throws this error is that there are existing transaction batches associated with the transaction file definition. This is a bug with 8.3 release of Kalido DIW. It will be fixed in the subsequent release of DIW. In the meantime you would have to delete associated transaction batches in order to successfully migrate a transaction file definition.