At the Gartner BI Summit, I met with representatives from Kalido, a vendor which sits squarely in the analytical (versus operational) master data management space. Kalido's goal is to recognize data, map it, and then provide it to business users, said John Evans, the company's director of product marketing.

A few weeks ago, we covered Kalido's release of their third generation MDM solution, which seeks to bring the market a comprehensive, subject-independent, scalable master data management solution.

Brian Hartlen, Kalido's VP of Marketing, told me that Kalido's MDM product, as well as the company itself, was developed entirely as a result of a IT project to create a data warehousing tool for Shell (Royal Dutch/Shell Group).

I read in DM Review magazine that Shell was using Business Objects' business intelligence reporting tools, but they could not find a data warehouse application to provide global views of performance from the multiple systems for BI reporting.

So they decided to build their own data warehouse solution, and Kalido was formed as a result of the product that was created during this project, said Hartlen.