TIBCO’s MDM product

The master data management (MDM) of TIBCO was through the acquisition of French MDM company Orchestra Networks in 2018. Since late 2022, TIBCO itself is now part of the broader Cloud Software Group, that includes Citrix, Jaspersoft and the former ibi (Information Builders). The core MDM product remains EBX, which has been implemented at well over three hundred corporations around the world. In addition to being a critical component of TIBCO’s well established data integration capabilities, EBX has been instrumental in some larger scale implementations than was typical a few years ago. One major customer now uses EBX globally across nine different data domains (not just customer and product) in an implementation covering over 100 million master data records.

EBX is a muti-domain solution and is quite agnostic to implementation, so customers may implement it either on premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid configuration. The technology remains model-driven, with even the user interface being created from the underlying data model. There have been changes to the underlying infrastructure in the recent version 6 of EBX, including improved  search capabilities, graphical mappings and transformations, a new way to handle big volumes, a new matching engine, greater visualisation options  and the removal of some minor restrictions in hierarchy management, which was traditionally already a strong feature of EBX: EBX has no limitation in terms of dimensional levels, and one customer has an eighty-level deep hierarchy, to give an idea of the complexity that EBX can handle. EBX already uses machine learning to a degree in its capabilities to identify links between data, but is evaluating how to take advantage of the most recent developments in generative AI.

In the future EBX will extend its catalog and business glossary capabilities, while it will still be able to work with existing customer implementations of third-party products in this area. Further in-built data quality capabilities are another area that we are likely to see e.g. data cleansing in addition to existing capabilities around data validation, duplicate detection and merge/matching.

Overall, EBX was one of the pioneers of multi domain master data management, and it seems as if plenty of additional development effort is going into the product now that it has a home within TIBCO and now the broader Cloud Software Group. Time will tell whether the sales and marketing focus of the larger organisation will enable EBX to continue its growth path. Certainly the data integration capabilities of TIBCO are highly complementary to EBX, and allow it to compete effectively with vendors such as Informatica, which has long had a strong data integration story to complement its own master data management capabilities.