Best Enterprise Data Management Vendor: GoldenSource

John Eley, CEO at GoldenSource, puts the win down to the company’s decision two years ago to gather feedback from customers and prospects on the firm’s strengths and weaknesses. “We listened to what the market was actually saying, and what they told us to do we did,” he says.

The work started with improvements to the user interface. “We completely changed how users interact with the system, and the new version is easier to work with,” says Eley, explaining that users now depend less on involving IT teams to make changes. In addition, conversations with customers revealed opportunities for improving data cleansing and normalizing tools.

According to Eley, sales have skyrocketed following the new system release, and close to half of the customer base has either already upgraded or is in the process of doing so. “We had a record year last year with sales in every region where we have a sales presence,” he says.

GoldenSource’s success also comes from its move into application management and hosted offerings—another launch that followed the 2015 feedback process. “It was very clear people wanted to specialize and move away from managing the application and focus on the data cleansing instead,” says Eley. GoldenSource has now seen continued traction in hosted services, with the market moving more in this direction. “We expect half of our customers to undertake some sort of application management or hosting over the next few years,” he says.

Traditionally known as being solely an EDM vendor, GoldenSource now utilizes its scalable and flexible data model to underpin other solutions, helping solve data management challenges such as reporting, which needs to be carried out in specific formats to meet different regulatory standards. Right now, the vendor is building out a regulatory reporting infrastructure, starting with a reporting framework for the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II, which will go live for the first customers in the coming months.

With GoldenSource’s new strategy it is clear that having an EDM platform is not something that only will benefit IT—it is about generating the most value from data and overcoming business pain points for all data consumers.