Can you please share with us a brief overview of your company?
Semarchy is the creator of the Intelligent Data Hub™ which empowers business users to become data champions. Its xDM platform enables organizations of any size to quickly bring together the critical information scattered across applications into a single data hub, with fast time to value. Data can be discovered, mastered, governed, and centrally managed in a non-intrusive way. Semarchy xDM is natively available on most popular cloud marketplaces, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, with the same features as the on-premises platform.
Tell us more about xDM. What are its key features and capabilities?
Organizations need a comprehensive Data Management solution that delivers an end-to-end solution. xDM allows organizations to begin building the solution by profiling their data to identify inconsistencies and relationships in the data. Next, its data modeling capabilities allow companies to build a model that meets business requirements and to architect the model to deliver value quickly following an agile approach. The data model includes data quality, cleansing, de-duplication, matching, merging, and survivorship logic to build the trusted golden records. After consolidating and publishing golden records, xDM allows enterprises to enforce governance requirements and track changes over time with data lineage and audit trail features. Finally, this data is available for operational and analytical systems to consume.
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How does it compare to other MDM solutions available in the market?
xDM is unique in the marketplace because it is an all-in-one platform for master data, reference data, data quality, data catalogs, and data governance. xDM empowers organizations to build a single platform for managing and governing all of its critical data from customer, product, and vendor to employee, location, and finance data. The same platform can dive into verticals, such as managing financial assets, pharma products, and oil pipelines in the Intelligent Data Hub™.
The flexibility in this approach allows organizations to design a solution tailored to their needs in weeks, implementing rules, policies, and workflows specific to their domain and business cases. Semarchy is the only product in the market that can deliver such fast time to value so enterprises begin to see the benefits of having a Data Hub much faster than other MDM solutions in the market.
What exactly is an Intelligent Data Hub? How does it extend Master Data Management’s scope?
The Data Hub is the go-to place for the core data within an enterprise. It centralizes the enterprise’s data that is critical across applications, and it enables seamless data sharing between diverse endpoints, while being the main source of trusted data for the data governance initiative. Data hubs provide master data to enterprise applications and processes. They are also used to connect business applications to analytics structures such as data warehouses and data lakes.
MDM is mainly about managing the domains’ core data assets (reference, customer, product, etc..) with data quality, match/merge and stewardship workflows. The data hub extends this idea in multiple directions:
- It extends the scope of data available via the data hub beyond core master data, for example by eventually including transactional data and interactions to provide 360° views.
- It takes an end-to-end approach for the data management initiative: from data governance, data onboarding with data discovery, profiling and cataloguing, down to the assessment of the value delivered with dashboards and KPIs.
- It transparently opens the initiative to the whole enterprise. All business users become full members of the initiative via the data governance, data management and measurement channels. In short, the Intelligent Data Hub transforms every stakeholder in the organization into a data champion.
What are some of the most pressing challenges in Data Management today? How is Semarchy addressing these?
Organizations are facing unprecedented volumes of data in the 21st century. These giant data sets come from dozens of siloed sources, which lead to inconsistent and incomplete data. Simultaneously, the democratization of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) promise organizations that they have tools to mine big data to transform data into an asset to grow their business. The problem with leaping towards these new predictive analytics tools is that their insights are only as trustworthy as the data they are founded upon.
Organizations that invest in standardizing their data to have a common definition across the enterprise benefit the most from the possibilities that AI and ML bring. But before standardization is possible, organizations must create a central repository in a non-intrusive way. I know it sounds like an oxymoron and that’s partly why it’s so challenging to build a Data Hub for enterprises so they can mine their data for insights to make better business decisions. Combining this challenge with all the new regulations, including GDPR & CCPA that organizations face, it’s not surprising that many organizations simply bury their heads in the sand.
Fortunately, thanks to Semarchy xDM, it’s much easier to succeed at creating a single data pipeline to reduce the “time to insights” and deliver value to the business quickly rather than stuck as multi-year-long IT projects.
Semarchy provides customers with the innovative technology to build a centralized Data Hub, which serves as a repository for mission-critical data. This Data Hub serves the data lakes and warehouses with cleansed, consolidated, and trustworthy data that allows data scientists to garner insights and value from otherwise unruly data dumps.
This transparent data also allows organizations to meet their compliance requirements as they have clear visibility on their customers data, and supports the organizations’ procedures for meeting regulatory requirements.
What industries do you serve and who are your current customers?
Semarchy xDM is an all-in-one-platform, which means we can address any industry with a data problem that touches customer, product, location, reference, and dozens of other domains. We have customers in the pharmaceutical industry, oil and gas companies, retail, manufacturing, consumer electronics, hospitality, aerospace, and the list goes on.
We are able to address all industries because all industries have data problems. The xDM platform is agile and flexible enough to handle them all. We rely on our customers and partners to bring the industry-relevant experience and expertise to build a robust data hub to deliver the insights the business needs.
We have easily recognizable customers, including many on the Fortune 1000 list. We also serve the small-to-medium sized business (SMB) market, which has typically been ignored by the legacy mega vendors because SMBs don’t have mega budgets.
Here is a list of our customers, many of which are household names.
Can you provide us with sample use cases for xDM platform?
A consumer electronics company manages a myriad of customer data across their CRM, call centers, e-Commerce site, and third-party resellers. Before building a Data Hub, they struggled to consolidate their customer data across all the channels.
This resulted in poor customer visibility. For example, new customers who purchased headphones through a reseller would have an incomplete record of interactions when they contacted the call center for warranty assistance.
This company recognized that they could significantly improve the customer experience by building a 360º view of their customers, including consolidating duplicated data and enriching with third-party sources. A central Data Hub would allow them to securely handle personally identifiable information (PII) data to comply with GDPR, CCPA, and other data traceability and privacy regulations.
This company needed a data governance and management solution that could be brought online quickly and scale to handle the millions of customers.
This electronics company worked with Semarchy to create an end-to-end Data Hub to address their data governance challenge.
This effort began with profiling data to identify data sources and the nature of the data. Data Discovery uncovers data quality problems and weaknesses in the data, such as missing customer information. Next, these issues were addressed by designing a data model that could transform the data to fix data quality problems as well as define business rules to enforce governance requirements.
Once the data was cleansed and consolidated, the Data Hub could integrate via SQL and REST APIs with existing IT systems and real-time customer-facing applications. Custom-built dashboards allowed the customer to track KPIs to ensure quality was improving over time.
Semarchy’s agile approach allowed this company to implement the Data Hub in a fraction of the time that typical data management initiatives require.
Today, the consumer electronics company successfully combined data from their stores, resellers, and online operations with service and call center transactions thanks to Semarchy xDM. They are better able to anticipate customer needs, identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and expand marketing initiatives while meeting regulatory and privacy compliance.
Looking into the future, what are some market trends or technologies you see on the rise in the Data Management space and how is Semarchy meeting these?
One of the biggest market opportunities is for data sharing. Gartner published an article in October 2020 arguing that “Data and analytics leaders who share data externally generate three times more measurable economic benefit than those who do not.” The article explains that organizations that share data externally — even with their competitors — benefit from ” increased value through efficiency and cost savings for each organization.” The old-school mentality of “data ownership” where you “don’t share data unless” mindset is being replaced by the emergent data-sharing culture. Gartner notes that there are two critical components to facilitating this sharing approaching: 1. Fostering trust and 2. A data-sharing environment. Semarchy xDM delivers a foundational component to addressing both trust and providing a sharing environment. xDM empowers organizations to build a centralized repository of trusted data worthy of sharing. The data hub has security and privileges to control the amount of data that is shared and who has access to it with robust tracking and audit capabilities. Even Gartner mentions in the article that “organizations that adopt data hub strategies will achieve outcomes dependent on shared and governed data with at least 60% lower cost.” Semarchy is a pioneer in fostering this sharing mindset by empowering organizations to share and collaborate natively with their customers, partners, and even competitors using xDM.
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