This is one of my favorite tools, having worked on it for quite some time now. Let me provide an unbiased opinion on Kalido based on the "key capabilities of MDM" post that I had written.
The first point on Data Governance can be omitted here, as it is more of a process oriented practice.
Does Kalido control the flow of good quality data into the MDM repository? Yes. Kalido provides association rules (1:N, M:N,optional,mandatory), data-type verification, deletion anomalies, data length verification and custom validation formula. Is this enough for an MDM tool to host clean master data independently? Probably no. But Kalido still wins in this sector. Because it covers most of the important validation checkpoints.
Kalido is truly a flexible data modeling tool. It can model time-variant hierarchies, ragged hierarchies, depth-less hierarchies,super-type/sub-type relationships and having done all this, its quite easy to change from one model to the other. This is because it has quite a generic modeling mechanism and most companies which are into heavy-duty acquisitions and mergers prefer it. Kalido completely wins here. I have rarely faced a scenario in Kalido where I wasn't able to model one. Kalido also provides you features for moving the models during the migration process.
The MDM component of Kalido isn't a master in integrating with different heterogeneous sources. As of now, it can accept only text files. It expects the ETL tool to convert the data into the CSV/XML format.
You can define 'sophisticated' work flows to move a piece of data between states. One can provide action items(like email notifications), events triggering the work-flow and the different states of transition. Editing of data, raising an issue/change request is possible with this tool. So Kalido wins again.
Through Access Control Lists, Kalido implements security. ACLs dictate which sets of Users can access the data (at an instance of entity level) and what data they can access.
Probably the one area, which I am not thoroughly convinced is the Search & UI. It has a decent hierarchy browser and a neat search feature. Though it has .Net compatibility, certain basic UI features (like changing the font of the text if the data belongs to one particular market) is cumbersome.
Kalido truly lacks in the Data enrichment area. They currently don't have pre-built vanilla models, which might be useful for certain Master data like Product, Customer.
I haven't truly tested Kalido on a distributed network. Hence cant comment on it.
Overall, Kalido is an effective MDM solution
3 comments:
Good Post, do you say MDM has the capability to parse an XML document and load subjects / Categories?
Yes, MDM tools do have the ability to parse XML documents and load categories.
Senthil can you give some brief information about depth-less hierarchies?
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