Digital Future & Strategy

The 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management Solutions was published on April 6, 2026. By September, part of the market it described had already changed. Salesforce had completed its acquisition of Informatica in November 2025. Then, only a month after Gartner published the new MDM Magic Quadrant, SAP completed its acquisition of Reltio on May 7, 2026. That timing makes the 2026 report particularly interesting. The Magic Quadrant still provides a useful snapshot of 20 MDM vendors evaluated on Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision . But an enterprise selecting an MDM platform today has to look beyond the chart and ask another question: What has changed around the vendor since Gartner completed its evaluation — and does that change improve or complicate the fit for our enterprise? That is how I would use the 2026 Magic Quadrant. Not as a ranking that chooses a platform for us, but as a starting point for a more difficult purchasing decision. Fi...

Late in an SAP S/4HANA migration, a data problem can suddenly become a program problem. The conversion itself may be running. Interfaces may already have passed testing. Business users may be preparing for cutover. Then a migration rehearsal exposes something that looked minor in the legacy environment. A supplier exists under several identifiers. A customer is linked to the wrong organizational structure. Material attributes mean different things in different plants. A legacy code has no agreed target value. A record loads successfully but cannot support the first business transaction after go-live. At that point, another cleansing cycle is often started. Sometimes that is necessary. But I think it is important to ask a more fundamental question: Is this really a migration defect — or is the migration exposing a master-data decision that the organization never made? That distinction matters. A migration tool can move data. It can validate formats, execute mappings...