Compare the capabilities of legacy MDM vs. Reltio Data Cloud™
Is your legacy MDM system holding you back from gaining value from your enterprise data and responding fast to changing business needs?
Innovative, leading companies trust our Reltio Data Cloud. With AI-driven SaaS data unification and management capabilities that go beyond MDM, we deliver trusted, interoperable data in milliseconds and at scale. And our cloudnative platform has been battle-tested for over 10 years.
Go live in 90 days with our Reltio Data Cloud and industry- and domain-specific velocity packs. Empower your teams to adapt to changing business and market needs with trusted data available and mobilized across your enterprise.
Legacy MDM
Scalability
Supports real-time operations
Big data architecture
Deployment & upgrades
Secure, AI-driven matching
User interface
Consent management
Workflow & collaboration
Transactions
Search & segmentation
Data integration
Contextual best record
Reltio Data Cloud
Scalability
Supports real-time operations
Big data architecture
Deployment & upgrades
Secure, AI-driven matching
User interface
Consent management
Workflow & collaboration
Transactions
Search & segmentation
Data integration
Contextual best record
| Legacy MDM | Reltio Data Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Scalability | Doesn’t scale to billions of customer records or 1000s of profile attributes. Disadvantage: Difficult to manage big data volumes and scale for seasonal or growth requirements. | Manage billions of global B2C or B2B customer profiles, vendors, suppliers, products, and locations. Our data model scales easily to manage thousands of profile attributes and onboard hundreds of sources. Scale up and down without downtime or dependence on IT. Benefit: Managing and unifying billions of entities leading to faster business value and lower TCO. Learn more: Reltio performance and scalability for your enterprise needs |
| Supports real-time operations | Latency in data and insight due to batch processing. Disadvantage: Poor customer experiences due to outdated data, slow business processes, potential downtime. | Real-time, 24/7 API access accelerates real-time operations. Benefit: Ability to service customers with timely data across all channels, track their preferences, and offer new services. Learn more: Maximizing efficiency and real-time operations with Reltio |
| Big data architecture | RDBMS-based. Doesn’t allow for multiple data models to meet the unique needs of different functions. Adding new attributes requires a data model restart, which is a slow, laborious process. Disadvantage: Rigid data models need heavy lifting and often implementations that go on for months! | A flexible data model based on big data architecture makes it easy to add, remove or change attributes. Metadata model and schemaless NoSQL store enables smart storage based on data type. Benefit: Ability to make real-time data and rule changes based on changing business needs. Quick and accurate business decisions with contextual entity views. Learn more: Modernizing MDM: Unify and mobilize trusted data in real time |
| Deployment & upgrades | Takes a long time to set up and go-live with an on-premises system. Upgrades are painful and costly. Disadvantage: High TCO with limited or slow business value. | A cloud-native, SaaS environment is available from day one—with disruption-free upgrades. SaaS also eliminates the redundancy of managing multiple environments, and security is built in. Benefit: Zero-downtime upgrades accelerate time to value and lower TCO by 30-50%. Zero-effort HA/DR with a minimum of 99.95% uptime SLA built into the offering (99.99% with Reltio Business Critical Edition). Learn more: How to compare the TCO of cloud-native, on-premise, and hosted data platforms |
| Secure, AI-driven matching | Rigid, rules-based, and fuzzy match. Disadvantage: Long and cumbersome process for creating, testing, and revising match rules. Lag in operations and business decisions. | Reltio Flexible Entity Resolution Networks (FERN) uses LLMs pretrained for entity resolution with zero-shot learning. Working seamlessly alongside rule-based matching methods, Reltio enables granular match control plus automated merging and unmerging. Benefit: Clean, accurate data for actionable insights— and increased productivity. Learn more: Reltio Flexible Entity Resolution Networks |
| User interface | IT-focused user experience Disadvantage: Business users depend on IT to diagnose data issues, which causes delays in operations and decision-making. | Consumer-grade UX enables you to manage and collaborate on data. GenAI-powered Reltio Intelligent Assistant (RIA) enables teams to explore and segment data without IT assistance. Benefit: Quick adoption and high productivity for all users including business, data stewards, and admins. Learn more: Introducing RIA—Reltio Intelligent Assistant |
| Consent management | Doesn’t have enough information to support GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations. Disadvantage: Exposed to fines, lawsuits, brand damage, and reduced customer loyalty. | Simplify compliance with privacy laws as you manage consent across campaigns, brands, channels and locations, and track communication preferences. Benefit: Respect privacy, consent and communication preferences to build loyalty and simplify compliance. Learn more: How customer data is protected in Reltio - applying a zero trust approach to security |
| Workflow & collaboration | Workflow support only. Disadvantage: Separate license cost and complex workflow tools. Clunky business user experience for managing tasks. | Collaborate across teams with built-in workflows. Stay on top of priority profiles with discussion threads. Use custom workflow designer for more advanced workflow needs. Benefit: Enable real-time collaboration and curation between IT and business. Learn more: Data governance for data stewards, collaboration tools |
| Transactions | Can’t correlate customer profiles with interactions and transactions. Disadvantage: Can’t use preference rich customer profiles for segmentation. | Store transactions and interactions for quick access to preference-rich customer 360 profiles. Create granular, dynamically updated audience segments—and activate them with prebuilt connectors to popular sales, service, and marketing applications. Benefit: Deeper understanding of customer needs, preferences, and behaviors for segmentation and recommendations. Learn more: Overview of interactions and transactions in Reltio |
| Search & segmentation | Index/SQL-based search. Disadvantage: Lag in search leads to poor customer experience. Can’t segment based on all available and calculated attributes. | Scalable Elastic search leads to faster results while searching on thousands of profiles and calculated attributes. Learn more: Data quality & search—for data stewards |
| Data integration | Code-first approach relying on bespoke integrations to critical systems in a batch mode, with limited prebuilt integrations. Disadvantage: Longer time to value and higher risk of project failure due to time and specialized resources needed to custom-code integrations. | Built-in, event-driven integration with a no-code/lowcode environment. API-first architecture layered with an intuitive drag-and-drop, graphical interface to rapidly create any integration—with 1,000+ prebuilt connectors and integrations to operational business applications, enrichment sources, cloud data warehouses, and data catalogs to streamline data orchestration. Learn more: Data integration with Reltio Data Cloud |
| Contextual best record | Hard merge of data. Disadvantage: Can’t provide multiple contextual views of customer profiles based on functional needs. | Dynamic survivorship delivers a tailored “best source of truth” by function in real time based on rules specified by the requestor. Benefit from a logical data merge. Benefit: Gain higher-quality contextual data that powers faster, smarter decision-making and real-time operations. Learn more: Dynamic survivorship in Reltio |
