No doubt you've heard today's news about Microsoft's attempted takeover of Yahoo. Being a data integration guy as I am my interest isn't sparked by talk of share dealings, boardroom swaggering or financial terms; I want to know how Microsoft plan to integrate the two companies' customer lists and employee org charts.
This will be no mean feat. I was at a training course in this week and there was a guy there from Microsoft IT who stated that they have "billions of customers". Not sure whether he was exaggerating or not but clearly they have quite a few.
Now consider the consumer space. The majority, if not all, of Yahoo's customers are the people that regularly use their online services and according to something I read today there are over 300m of those. Microsoft have even more with their 400m active Live ID users. I'm assuming that there won't be any attempt in the foreseeable future to disband such recognisable brands as Yahoo, MSN and Windows Live so all the effort should be on seamless integration between them all. The combined online behemoth should be attempting all of the following:
- Allow access to all Live ID properties using a Yahoo ID
- Allow access to all Yahoo properties using a Live ID
- De-duplicate all those people that have a Live ID and a Yahoo ID
This is a classic Master Data Management (MDM) conundrum. Companies merge and then the foot soldiers have to work out how each other's back-end systems are going to work together and produce the longed-for "single view of a customer". I'm sure that no-one has had to do it for these sorts of numbers though. Solving the deduplication issue will be hardest but will also produce most benefit by enabling scenarios like allowing users to seamlessly embed Flickr photos into emails sent from Hotmail.
Those who read my other blog will know that I have a keen interest in all things Windows Live related so today's news is of particular interest to me for other reasons as well. Take a click through there if you're interested where I might well be talking about some of my hopes and fears for how a purchase of Yahoo could affect Windows Live and what other scenarios could be possible. I firmly believe that the emphasis will be on making Yahoo and Microsoft's services work better together rather than just replacing the Yahoo logo with an MSN one.
-Jamie