Siperian

Siperian, Inc. operated as a key player in the master data management (MDM) infrastructure market before its acquisition by Informatica Corporation. Founded in April 2001 by brothers Ken and Khoi Hoang, the company established its headquarters in Foster City, California. The initial concept for Siperian originated with Ken Hoang in late 2000, who then brought on his brother Khoi as the second employee. Their journey in the data management space began even earlier, with some team members, like Lesley Hanly, starting at a startup named Delos in 2001, which Siperian subsequently acquired in 2003.

The firm specialized in providing a holistic, single view of foundational business entities, often referred to as master data, which includes records for customers, products, employees, and suppliers. Siperian's core product, the Siperian Multidomain MDM Hub, was a flexible software platform designed to allow enterprises to consolidate and manage this critical data from various distributed sources. This platform was notable for its multidomain capability, meaning it was not restricted to a single data type like 'customer' or 'product' but could manage multiple data domains simultaneously on the same platform. This approach enabled clients to start with one business problem and expand to others over time, with nearly half of its customers leveraging the platform for additional data domains beyond their initial implementation. The business model centered on licensing this MDM software to large, data-intensive Global 500 companies across various industries, including prominent names in financial services and life sciences such as Bank of America, State Street Bank, Pfizer, and Shire.

A key feature of Siperian's offering was its built-in data governance application, the Business Data Director. This web-based tool empowered business users, not just IT staff, to create, manage, and monitor master data directly, while adhering to governance policies and workflows for review and approval. This proactive approach to data quality, correcting information at the point of entry, was a significant differentiator. On January 28, 2010, Informatica announced its acquisition of Siperian for approximately $130 million in cash. The move was a natural extension for Informatica, as Siperian already used Informatica's identity resolution and address cleansing technologies as core components of its MDM Hub through OEM relationships. The acquisition integrated Siperian's multidomain MDM capabilities into Informatica's broader data integration and data quality platform.

Keywords: master data management, MDM, data governance, multidomain MDM, data integration, data quality, customer data integration, product information management, Siperian MDM Hub, Informatica acquisition, single source of truth, data consolidation, enterprise data management, data stewardship, reference data, business entity data, Khoi Hoang, Ken Hoang, Siperian Business Data Director, data hub