3 on December 10, 2025, on Cloud Pak for Data and IBM Cloud. This page answers nine questions for both, with sources checked on September 17, 2026, and says when IBM MDM is the better choice.
Every IBM MDM cell carries its source number; the sources are listed at the foot of the page.
| Question | IBM MDM | Lima master data |
|---|---|---|
| Where the master data lives | Records, entities, relationships, hierarchies and groups are held in a graph store on Cloud Pak for Data or IBM Cloud after bulk load; exports feed downstream analytics [1]. | Golden records are governed views over the sources, read in place through the federated engine, and materialised only where latency needs it, in your lake, under the same keys. The transactions sit in the same bed, so a merged customer and its orders change together. |
| Reaching SAP, Oracle and the lakes | SaaS, on-premises and hybrid deployment; connectors through the wider IBM data-integration portfolio [2]. | SAP S/4HANA and ECC through released read interfaces and change capture; Oracle Fusion through REST and BI Cloud Connector extracts, E-Business Suite through JDBC and open interfaces; Snowflake, Databricks and Fabric read in place; Salesforce, ServiceNow and Workday through their APIs. Write-back through BAPIs, IDocs, REST and web services, acknowledged and logged. |
| Golden record: matching and survivorship | Probabilistic matching with ML-assisted tuning, batch matching and linking, token frequency calculation, and composite-view (survivorship) rules in the model service; Gartner notes 'metadata- and AI-driven entity resolution' [1][3]. | Strong keys first (VAT ID, DUNS, GTIN, manufacturer part number), then standardised attribute and address matching, with a language model for the hard pairs; two thresholds per rule (review, merge); survivorship per field by source rank, recency, verification and steward override; unmerge restores the sources; every value keeps its source, rule and time. |
| Hierarchies and reference data | API groups for hierarchies and groups and for relationships; 360-degree composite views [1]. | Levels and several hierarchies per entity, kept as versions with validity dates and validated against the facts they aggregate; reference data and crosswalks kept as small domains with the same history, rules and security. |
| Rules, security and audit | 'Built-in stewardship tools with audit trails'; data entitlements and access control as an API group; history and governance metadata APIs [2][1]. | Column, row and business rules in one language, evaluated on save and on demand, including rules over aggregates and across tables; twelve security layers for read, write and delete; an append-only audit trail with point-in-time reads and logged reads of sensitive columns. |
| APIs and data services | REST with records, entities, probabilistic search, matching, quality, bulk load, export, hierarchies, workflow and entitlements; IAM bearer tokens [1]. | REST, SOAP, SQL (JDBC and ODBC), events and an agent endpoint over one policy engine; the golden-record lookup answers with the record, the cross-reference and live related facts; page sizes and rate limits published per endpoint. |
| Analytics: pivots, measures, transactions | Matching tuning and token-frequency jobs; notebooks live in Watson Studio next door, outside the product; pivots and measures are absent [1]. | Pivots on any hierarchy level with time on the columns and measures in the cells; calculated measures; data entry with disaggregation by weights, equal shares or a time profile; drill-down from a cell to the transactions and to the source row; charts beside grids; natural-language and SQL querying. |
| Pricing unit and trial | Pricing unpublished; 'Try it free' on the product page with terms unspecified; InfoSphere MDM 11.5 reached end of support on April 30, 2023 [2][4]. | Platform capacity tiers (32C to 128C); domains, records, attributes and users included; the price is written before the work starts; a guided first domain on your data in one day; the showcase estate for demonstrations; a self-service sandbox tier is a decision pending (see the review notes). |
| Analyst placements 2025–26 | Gartner Magic Quadrant for MDM Solutions, April 6, 2026: Challenger; ISG Buyers Guide MDM 2025: Overall Leader [3][5]. | Analyst evaluation is the purpose of this page set; placements to date: none. The platform pages are organised on Gartner's eight mandatory features and four implementation styles so a briefing lands in the right market. |
Choose IBM when the estate runs on Cloud Pak for Data and watsonx, when probabilistic matching tuned by IBM's tooling is the priority, and when an on-premises InfoSphere estate needs a vendor-supported successor. Its entity-resolution depth is a real advantage for large banks and insurers [3].
Lima suits the enterprise whose master data should be governed on the rows in place across SAP, Oracle, the CRM and the lakes, with the transactions in the same bed: the golden record and its orders in one query, rules over totals, pivots on golden dimensions with data entry and disaggregation, drill-downs to the source row, and a headless lookup that answers with live related facts. Twelve security layers and an append-only audit trail apply to every door, and the price is written before the work starts.
The domain catalogue shows thirty domains with, for each, the objects read in place in SAP S/4HANA, Oracle Fusion, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Snowflake and Databricks and the interface used for the write-back.
Facts change; re-check the sources at each review and re-date the page.
Bring two systems that hold the same customers, suppliers or materials. In one working day we connect them, run the match on live rows, review the queue with your steward and publish the first golden view with its API.
