Toby Ingleton |
This article first appeared in the Winter issue of The Record.
Anybody with an interest in technology will be aware of the massive effect data is having on modern business. The insights gained from the vast amount of information that can be made available today is reshaping how companies operate.
As a master data management (MDM) software company, Profisee is helping companies realise the potential of their data and making it easier for organisations of any size and budget, to bring about immediate business benefit by turning data into insight, and making it accessible for anyone in the organisation. Profisee CEO, Ian Ahern states, “It’s been virtually impossible to implement MDM for under seven figures. Gartner points to a high 6:1 ratio for implementation-to-software cost. Our mission is to give any enterprise a more flexible, lower total cost of ownership approach compared to the large MDM vendors.
Profisee has been a long-time Microsoft partner, and the company’s architecture is built exclusively to leverage Microsoft’s technology strategy. This pays dividends to our customers in two key ways: First, it lowers the overall cost of an implementation because both the Profisee platform and the underlying Microsoft technology are best of breed and lower cost; and second, Profisee has consistently demonstrated bringing new product to market with enterprise-grade robustness, scalability and performance aligned with Microsoft.
“Regarding integration, Profisee can act as a hub and repository for master data, managing processes across the enterprise 100% aligned with Microsoft. In addition, we can connect to any application or data source” Ahern says. “We run our product on any Microsoft Azure data centre, anywhere in the world, leveraging the power of Microsoft. It’s about the power and reach of the Azure Marketplace being the distribution engine. We look at long-term trends and are always trying to stay one step ahead.”
Ahern shares Profisee’s four key trends that will shape the MDM space going forward.
The first theme is cloud.
Ahern explains, “In the midmarket, we see organisations marketed to very aggressively by vendors with a cloud-only strategy. Some vendors in the MDM space come to market with a SaaS only strategy. There are also those that have traditional perpetual license technology on premise.”
Profisee allows users to run the full spectrum of cloud deployment options with licensing options that fit the customer’s model.
“We believe we are further along in the MDM market when it comes to building the wide range of deployment, implementation and application management services necessary to support any deployment option – from 100% on premise to 100% in the cloud using a single code base.” Ahern says.
Ahern considers Profisee’s mission to deliver best-cost MDM, while not compromising on platform functionality. In fact, since a major portion of the cost of MDM is the implementation of the software, not the software itself, this, he says, ties into the second key theme: codeless deployment.
“We want to offer the best of both – price and capabilities,” he says. “Profisee offers best of breed MDM at the best price point. Profisee’s vision is to be the mid-market MDM leader. The key resistance for most vendors trying to extend their MDM offerings into the mid-market is cost of implementation.
In addition, the cost of application maintenance is factored into total cost of ownership. In fact, the mid-market, and many of our clients are proof that organisations are looking to move off of legacy MDM technology, and that the cost of application maintenance is a primary driver.
Profisee’s next generation codeless platform provides the necessary levels of flexibility at a fraction of the implementation and maintenance cost and time. He says. “Customers need a solution that can be embedded easily, with minimal disruption, and begin to benefit the company as quickly as possible.” Profisee also provides a comprehensive SDK and Workflow engine integrated with Visual Studio.
The third theme: companies want platforms to help drive their decision making.
“A growing number of customers want the platform to provide advice and insight on how to best build an application, based on the specific application requirements and the underlying data,” Ahern states. Profisee is able to extend its platform value through technology that is embedded, called Integrator.
The final, and fourth theme reverts back to Profisee’s mission, and centres on being able to offer a single platform that offers price disruption.
Specifically, this is about being able to offer support of multi-domain MDM applications without limits on users, records, data sources or domains, as opposed to numerous technologies wired together, which require license and implementation for each domain and technology module.
“In the modern global enterprise, the conversation and transformative goal is getting to a single view of the customer.” Ahern says. “Organisations are now focused on building their MDM foundation with greater data integrity across the enterprise, in order to provide trusted data analytics and insights. This is MDM’s fundamental value to every organisation.”