It is not customary to start a foreword with an admission that the writer of the foreword has only recently come to personally know the author of the book. I started hearing about Adatis, the company for which Jeremy works, a few years ago. The context was always around Business Intelligence implementations in the United Kingdom, always made with a positive context whether it was from someone working at Microsoft, a customer, or an industry analyst. So it was after being introduced to Jeremy by my friend and valued business partner in the UK, Ian Maclachlan, who has headed up European operations for the last two companies I founded around Master Data Management, I started a deeper investigation of both the author and the company he is part of. Starting, as we all do, with their website, I immediately found a kinship with the firm and the author. Their pragmatic approach echoed on almost every web page and blog entry made me realize that I had met another team like ours. Adatis focus on real-world problems and the direct solution of the problem instead of surrounding their projects with reams of expensive strategic and business consulting. Since then my conversations with Jeremy have re-enforced my earlier research. He knows MDS very well indeed.
As the founder of Stratature, the company which delivered +EDM, Enterprise Dimension Manger, to the market nearly ten years ago, it is naturally very gratifying to see four years after Microsoft acquired my prior company, Master Data Services is now doing so well in the market. With the release of MDS in SQL Server 2008 R2 last year, it has taken this long for the market to embrace the new release of SQL Server, due mainly, as far as I can ascertain, to IT approval and software maintenance and update cycles. As this book goes to press, we are seeing unprecedented levels of MDS adoption, so as they say, "timing is everything". As I started Profisee focused on extending MDS as an ISV and partner of Microsoft, I was struck by how long it took to bring MDS to market.