Microsoft have been somewhat quiet in the enterprise data governance arena since their acquisition of MDM vendor Stratature in 2007. Since then they took that product off the market which clearly indicated that Stratature was a piece of a bigger puzzle they are building . Of course they already have their SQL Server Integration Services data integration tool (part of the SQL Server offering). Yesterday they added yet another piece to their solution by announcing their intent to acquire Zoomix a data quality vendor. So it seems that Redmond is clearly building and end-to-end enterprise data management offering which now includes data quality, data integration and master data management. We still need to see their solution for automated discovery and mapping (could come from Zoomix), metadata management (including business vocabularies and lineage), taxonomy generation and the ability to publish information services and use them from within SharePoint, Windows Workflow Foundation, BizTalk and Microsoft Dynamics.

Although Microsoft are late into this market I wouldn't be at all surprised if later this year or early next they unveil a major competitive offering to the independent MDM vendors as well as the Data Governance Vendors such as SAP Business Objects EIM, IBM Information Server, Informatica and DataFlux.