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For the fourth consecutive year, Gartner, Inc. has named Oracle as a Leader in its “Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data Solutions.” (1)

“MDM is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT staff work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise's official, shared master data assets. Master data is the consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describes the core entities of the enterprise, such as customers, prospects, citizens, suppliers, sites, hierarchies and chart of accounts,” according to Gartner.

By enabling organizations to consolidate product information from heterogeneous systems, Oracle Product Hub creates a single view of product information that can be leveraged and shared across functional departments in the enterprise, as well as externally with trading partners.

Leaders headed by Microsoft (NASDAQ MSFT), the world's biggest software company; Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), the No. 1 database developer, and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), the No. 2 computer maker, showed off new software and analysis tools to enable retailers to make more from the consumer dollar.

The company also said that using in-house software analysis permits retailers to forecast trends and have merchandise made quickly to capitalize on them. Its “birth of a trend” analytics has determined what it calls “steampunk,” or a science-fiction and fantasy mix based around gothic machinery and 19th-century geniuses like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells will be a big trend in 2013.

1) Do bad customer experiences cause people to switch brands? In a 2011 research project conducted by CX application vendor RightNow, 89% of consumers said that yes, a bad experience has spurred them to switch brands. But in the brand-new study of business-executive perceptions that’s the subject of this column, only 49% of the surveyed executives said yes.  QUESTION: What steps do you need to take to close this dangerous perception gap? 2) While 97% of executives say CX is critical to the success of their company, and 91% say they’re committed to making their company a CX leader, only 20% would rate their own CX initiatives as “advanced,” with a dedicated CX leader in place, initial projects pushed to the optimization phase, and the overall project extended to new channels and groups . QUESTION: What are the obstacles preventing you from aligning your actions with your words? If you say it’s a “budget” issue, aren’t you really talking about strategic priorities rather than line items? 3) Most companies have a clear and direct understanding of the looming CX challenge and the powerful interaction of social media. The study found that the top two drivers for CX initiatives are (a) rising expectations from customers (59%),  and (b) the impact of social media on customers’ ability to broadcast good and bad experiences (37%). Now, even if you’re able to somehow rationalize those findings, here’s one that not even the most-accommodating executive can dismiss:

4) Being a CX laggard can cost those companies many tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue: executives estimated that the lack of positive, consistent, and brand-relevant customer experience can cause them to lose out on a staggering 20% in annual revenue.

Worse yet, all that money’s likely to wind up in the pockets of your competitors!

Pentaho, for instance, is one of this year’s rookies. It had been knocking on the door for a year or two and received an honorable mention last year. It needed to increase its overall sales figures to be cited by Gartner, a requirement it satisfied this year.

a lot of articles calling data scientists and statisticians the jobs of the future

there are more immediate needs that, when addressed, will have a much greater business impact.

Right now we have huge opportunities to make the data more accessible, more “joinable” and more consumable. Leaders don’t want more data – they want more information they can use to run their businesses.

Business Intelligence And Big Data, Q4 2012 survey of 634 BI users and planners, we found that social and mobile data is actually a pretty low priority: While big data technologies like Hadoop can definitely deal with over-hyped new data like mobile and social, the broad demand is simply not there yet. Instead we find leaders recognize that the big deal about big data is the potential for getting more value more quickly from more data, at a lower cost and with greater agility; and it is a whole range of technologies and new techniques that make more possible.