We announced the General Availability (GA) release of IBM Product Master v12 on 15th May 2020. IBM Product Master is the new name for IBM Master Data Management Collaborative Edition (MDM CE) which is a product that all of us are very familiar with for a long time now. I am sure the immediate question everyone is going to have is why are we changing the name of the product which is a well-established brand with customers, partners and analysts community. This short blog is an attempt to help clarify the rationale for the name change.
So why did we changed the name after all?
MDM CE is a product which is used by our customers to manage various entities such as products, suppliers, assets, locations and even customers in some cases. Although the customers manage various entities which is made possible because of the flexible data model as well as adaptive UI, MDM CE at the core is really a built for purpose Product Information Management (PIM) solution. This is because it provides all the core capabilities which are a must for a robust PIM solution. Even though the current name reflects what the product provides (collaborative authoring of master data via workflows), the feedback that we got from number of prospective customers, analysts and field was that the name doesn't resonate well with PIM solution and hence was potentially confusing to people. We also heard the feedback that prospective customers weren't sure if IBM even had a PIM offering. Lastly, because we did not have the "Product" keyword appear in our product name, we weren't able to leverage search engines for organic marketing of the product which is an important asset as far as digital marketing is concerned. Given all this, we made a decision to change the product name to "IBM Product Master" to address all the concerns listed above.
What does this mean for our existing customers, partners and everyone?
Given this is product name change, there is no change to the underlying architecture or functionality of the product. In fact, with the upcoming v12 release, there are some more cool capabilities which are being released to make the jobs of various user personas easier and efficient. The product will continue to be part of the IBM MDM family and will continue to have the same L2/L3 support engagement.
We are very excited with all the recent developments in the product including the recent machine learning capabilities and are confident that those will help our customers to continue derive greater benefits.
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Anup Gandhi Chief Product Architect, OM - IBM Product Master
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