Adaptive Canvas
Adaptive CanvasThe Enterprise Data Design & Governance Platform
Executive briefing

One version of the truth.
On your database.

MDM Studio unifies customer, product, party and any other domain data scattered across your systems into governed golden records — the whole method in one product, running on the database platform you already own.

Product  MDM Studio v1.2.0 Date  August 2026 Method  Design · Map · Govern · Trust
01 — The problem it solves

The same customer, six times, in six systems

Every large business runs on records that disagree. The core system, the CRM, the billing platform and the branch spreadsheet each hold a version of the same customer, product or supplier — and none of them is wrong enough to fix, or right enough to trust.

What it costs you daily

Duplicate customers inflate campaign spend and distort every count. Reconciliation happens in spreadsheets. Analytics is argued with rather than acted on.

What it costs you at audit

A correction made in one system does not reach the others. When a regulator or auditor asks who changed what and when, the answer has to be assembled by hand.

What it costs you strategically

Every personalisation or single-view initiative starts by rebuilding the same customer view from scratch — and inherits the same disagreement.

MDM Studio fixes the record once, in a governed hub, and keeps it fixed — then serves the corrected value to everything downstream and, where you allow it, writes it back to the systems that hold it.

02 — How it works

Four disciplines, one studio

MDM Studio walks your master data through the full lifecycle — from a blank canvas to golden records the whole business can rely on. There are no modules to license one by one.

01

DESIGN

Model the estate visually: domains, entities, a governed data dictionary, relationships and ERDs.

02

MAP

Connect SQL Server, Oracle, CSV, Excel, FTP and REST sources. Map fields stage by stage and let scheduled pipelines do the heavy lifting.

03

GOVERN

Change requests with review and approval, policies, role-based access, sensitive-data clearance and full audit trails — built in, not bolted on.

04

TRUST

Match, merge and survivorship produce golden records with complete cross-reference lineage, quality scoring and controlled write-back.

03 — The product

What your team actually works in

MDM Studio hub works identically on all four supported database engines.

One operational picture of the whole estate
One operational picture of the whole estateGolden records with average confidence, data quality, open exceptions, ingestion jobs and model footprint — on one screen, with the pipeline strip showing every stage from Extract through Match, Survive and Publish. This is an early-stage hub, and note what the empty tiles say: “no quality compute yet”, not a reassuring zero. Throughout the product, a number you have not earned is reported as unknown rather than as good news — which is the difference between a dashboard you can run a business on and one you learn to ignore.
A governed data dictionary, not a spreadsheet
A governed data dictionary, not a spreadsheetEvery attribute in the estate with its entity, domain, type, data profile and business term — the language the business uses, kept beside the language the database uses. Attributes carry sensitivity classification and mapping coverage, so you can see at a glance what is defined, what is sensitive and what is still unmapped.
Matching you can explain to an auditor
Matching you can explain to an auditorRulesets combine exact, fuzzy and phonetic comparators — Jaro-Winkler, Metaphone, numeric tolerance — with per-rule weights and auto-merge and clerical-review thresholds you set. Blocking analysis shows the reduction before you run anything. Every merge keeps its evidence, so a steward and an auditor can both see why two records were judged the same.
Data quality as a work queue, not a report
Data quality as a work queue, not a reportFailed rules become assignable exceptions with severity, ownership, ageing and SLA state — open, unassigned, in progress, overdue, critical, and my queue. Each row names the rule, the attribute and the actual failing value. Resolutions are typed and automatically re-validated, so the loop closes rather than generating another report.
Access control the business can read
Access control the business can readA role-to-area-to-action matrix covering every functional area, with four-eyes elevation for new administrators. Sensitive values are masked at serve time and restricted records are hidden outright — so their very existence never leaks. One rule filters every surface, meaning counts, quality scores, queues and exports all agree.
04 — What changes, by office

The same hub answers four different questions

OfficeThe question you are askedWhat MDM Studio gives you
Chief Executive
& the Board
“Do we actually know how many customers we have?” One governed count with a stated basis and confidence, visible on a dashboard rather than assembled for a meeting. King V Principle 9 makes data integrity a board responsibility from 1 January 2026 — this is the evidence for it.
Chief Risk
& Compliance
“Prove this correction reached every system.” A tamper-evident audit trail of who changed what and when, approval records on every published change, and governed write-back that pushes the corrected value to source under eligibility rules and post-apply verification.
Chief Financial
Officer
“What is duplication costing us?” Duplicate detection with scored, explained matches; supplier and product mastering that collapses regional vocabularies through crosswalks; and quality scorecards that turn “the data is bad” into a number with a trend.
Chief Information
& Data Officer
“Can we do this without a two-year programme?” One product covering design, mapping, quality, mastering and governance, on the database platform you already run, deployed inside your own perimeter — starting on a single VM.
05 — Where it lands first

Start with one domain. Add the rest for free.

Domains, entities and attributes are unlimited at every tier. Modelling a second or a tenth domain costs nothing, so the programme grows by appetite rather than by budget round.

CUSTOMER 360

Banking & insurance

One golden party across core banking, CRM, cards and policy administration, with classification and masking on personal fields, and an approval record behind every published change. Supports FICA client-due-diligence completeness and the accuracy duty POPIA places on personal information.

PRODUCT & SUPPLIER

Retail, FMCG & distribution

Product and supplier mastering across regions and banners, with reference-data crosswalks that reconcile competing code sets rather than forcing one on everybody. Golden values served to downstream systems through a read-only API with revocable tokens.

ASSET & MATERIAL

Mining & asset-intensive

Material, equipment and vendor masters with hierarchy tiers, per-tier quality scoring and governed reference vocabularies — so spend analysis and maintenance planning read the same catalogue.

And the capabilities that come with all of them

Multi-engine hub

One canonical model, natively on SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle. The engine is a per-session choice, not a migration project.

Reference data (RDM)

Governed code sets with immutable, checksummed releases and crosswalks between source vocabularies.

Governed write-back

Push mastered values back to source under eligibility rules, batching, approval gates and post-apply verification.

Multi-tenancy

Many isolated business units or subsidiaries on one deployment, enforced at the data layer — no shared record pool.

Hierarchy tiers

Multi-level hierarchies with per-tier dimensions, labels and their own data-quality scoring.

Analytics & lineage

A report studio in the hub — seven visual types, calculated fields, pivots with drill, dashboards whose filters unify across sources, saved views and scheduled subscriptions — plus end-to-end lineage views. Reports read through the same clearance and row-level rules as the record screen, so analytics is not a way around them.

06 — Getting live

A lean service, not an implementation programme

STEP 1

Stand up the hub

Point it at SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL or Oracle. Migrations bootstrap the schema on first run. Automatic HTTPS via Caddy and Let's Encrypt.

STEP 2

Model and connect

Many connection types across relational, cloud, file and integration sources, in one registry with credentials AES-256 encrypted at rest. Schema discovery and live previews from your real sources.

STEP 3

Master and govern

A guided pipeline takes a domain from first extract to golden record. Advisors propose match, survivorship, quality and crosswalk configurations for a steward to accept or reject.

What we will and will not claim We publish no installation-time or implementation-duration figure, because the honest answer depends on your source estate rather than on our software. What we will commit to in a working session is standing up a hub and walking a sample of your own sources from first extract to golden record, live. That is a better estimate than any number we could present here.

Your people are trained, at no cost

The Adaptive Canvas Academy is free at every tier. Four certification tracks with graded exams and verifiable credentials valid 24 months: Certified Associate (Foundations), Certified Data Steward, Certified Modeler & Integrator and Certified Administrator. Pass mark 70%. A guided lab builds a complete Customer 360 in a real environment in about 150 minutes. Certificates carry an integrity-checked ID anyone can verify — which also means you can require it of an implementation partner.

07 — Support

Support that starts with evidence

Every deployment exports a one-click support bundle with secrets automatically redacted, and exposes live health diagnostics and a Prometheus metrics endpoint — no server login required. A conversation starts with data, not guesswork.

SeverityStandardPremium 24×7Resolution objective
S1 — Critical
Production down; no workaround
4 business hours1 hour, 24×7Continuous effort until restored
S2 — High
Major function impaired
1 business day4 hoursFix or workaround within days
S3 — Normal
Minor issue; workaround exists
2 business days1 business dayScheduled into a maintenance release
S4 — Low
Cosmetic, docs or feature request
Next business day ack.Next business day ack.Considered for the roadmap

First-response targets. These are objectives, not contractual guarantees; exact commitments are defined in your support agreement.

08 — Security & sovereignty

The hub lives where your data already lives

MDM Studio installs on-premises, in your private cloud, or as an isolated tenant on a managed hub. Wherever it runs, the hub sits next to the databases it masters and each tenant is isolated at the data layer, with no third-party or SaaS egress — nothing is shipped to a vendor cloud to be processed. POPIA does not require data to stay in South Africa; section 72 sets conditions for transferring it. Knowing exactly where your master data sits, and being able to prove it, is what makes that a question you can answer.

Classify → Control → Mask → Prove

Four sensitivity levels cascade from domain to record; clearance governs access; values are masked at serve time; the audit trail proves it.

Enterprise sign-on

Local password, Active Directory/LDAP or OIDC single sign-on, chosen per user, with time-based MFA. SCIM and SAML at Enterprise.

Encrypted secrets

Connection and directory secrets AES-256 encrypted at rest, decrypted only in memory, never returned to the browser.

What we do not claim MDM Studio holds no ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification and no third-party penetration-test attestation, and we publish no uptime SLA. We describe the platform as built for POPIA and GDPR obligations — not “compliant” or “certified”, because compliance is a property of your deployment and your processes, not of our software. We will answer your security assessment questionnaire in full, and give your assessor an audit trail they can reconstruct events from.
09 — Commercials

One product, four editions

Capability picks the edition; mastered-record volume prices it. You are never charged per domain, per module or per attribute, and never per record — a band is pre-paid capacity, not a meter running against you. Licences are signed keys, and if a key lapses MDM Studio falls back to Community rather than locking you out.

Community

R0
Evaluation & small teams
Up to 25,000mastered records
  • 3 domains · 10 users
  • PostgreSQL & MySQL hubs
  • Full modelling, mapping & pipeline
  • Match, survivorship & golden records
  • Data quality & reference data
  • Academy & certification
Most deployments

Professional

R450k–R1.05m
per year, indicative · by record band
100,000 – 1 millionmastered records
  • ∞ domains · 50 users
  • Adds the SQL Server hub engine
  • Single sign-on (OIDC) + MFA
  • Governed write-back to source
  • Reference-data push, advisors & reporting
  • Business-hours support & guided onboarding

Enterprise

R1.55m–R2.85m
per year, indicative · by record band
Up to 5 millionmastered records
  • ∞ domains · unlimited users
  • Adds the Oracle hub engine
  • SCIM provisioning & SAML
  • Real-time match API & catalog integration
  • HA / DR & priority support

Enterprise+

R3.6m–R6.5m+
per year, indicative · by record band
5 million and abovemastered records
  • ∞ domains · unlimited users
  • Bands to 10m, 25m and beyond
  • HA / DR architecture assurance
  • Multi-tenant & OEM terms
  • 24×7 support & dedicated customer success

What each band permits

Choose the edition for what it does — hub engines, sign-on, write-back, real-time serving, HA/DR — and the band for how much you master. The two are independent, which is why the same volume appears under more than one edition.

Mastered recordsCommunityProfessional EnterpriseEnterprise+
Up to 25,000Included · R0
Up to 100,000 R450,000
Up to 250,000 R625,000
Up to 500,000 R795,000
Up to 1,000,000 R1,050,000R1,550,000
Up to 2,500,000 R2,100,000
Up to 5,000,000 R2,850,000
Up to 10,000,000 R3,600,000
Up to 25,000,000 R4,800,000
Above 25,000,000 From R6,500,000

Indicative annual licence in ZAR, self-managed, confirmed by sizing. Effective cost falls from about R4.50 per record at the entry band to R0.57 at five million and R0.19 at twenty-five million — the ladder rewards growth rather than taxing it. Where a volume appears under two editions, the difference between them is what the higher edition does, not how much you master.

How a record is counted A mastered record is a golden record in the hub — counted once, however many source rows survived into it. Three systems holding 400,000 rows each master roughly 400,000 records, not 1.2 million. Entities, attributes and relationships are never counted, and domains are unlimited on every paid edition — Community is capped at three. You also get 10% headroom above your band, so ordinary growth never becomes an awkward conversation. Sustained use above that headroom moves you to the next band at your next renewal, pro-rated — never a mid-term invoice, and never a charge per record. And the platform will not refuse to master a record because a band is full: metering informs, it does not block.
Licensing is a screen in the product, not a spreadsheet
Licensing is a screen in the product, not a spreadsheetYour edition, its entitlements and your live usage against your limits, visible to your administrator at any time. Metering informs; it never silently blocks your team mid-flight. There is no audit surprise because there is nothing you cannot already see.

What the total actually consists of

Cost lineHow it behaves
LicenceAnnual, banded by mastered record volume. Unlimited domains on every paid edition, entities and attributes — modelling another domain costs nothing.
Hub databaseR0 if you use PostgreSQL or MySQL. Prefer SQL Server or Oracle? You are using licences you almost certainly already own.
InfrastructureOne VM to start; the hub sits next to the databases it masters. No egress charges for shipping master data to a vendor cloud, because it is not shipped.
ImplementationScoped by domain and source count, delivered by us or by a certified partner.
TrainingR0. The Academy and its four certifications are free at every tier.
SupportStandard business-hours support and guided onboarding included with Professional and Enterprise. Premium 24×7 optional.

Indicative annual licence in ZAR, confirmed by sizing. 3-year prepaid attracts a term discount. Vendor-hosted deployment is priced separately from self-managed. This is not an offer.

10 — Straight talk

What we are, and what we are not yet

Genuinely strong

Data sovereignty and self-hosting; four hub engines; the whole method in one product, reporting included, so answering a question about mastered data does not mean exporting it somewhere less governed; licensing you can read; speed to a first governed domain.

Where incumbents are stronger

Established suites bring deeper capability breadth, packaged industry data models, large partner ecosystems and analyst coverage.

A younger ecosystem

Our partner bench, reference base and certified community are growing. We would rather say so than oversell it.

On numbers other vendors will show you We have deliberately kept outcome percentages out of this document. Our published deployment scenarios are illustrative composites, not audited results from a named installation, and presenting them as outcomes would be dishonest. What we offer instead is a working session against your data. If a vendor shows you a headline improvement figure, the useful question is which named customer it was measured at.

Performance: the matching engine and pipeline are benchmarked in an in-product Performance Lab on generated data — a representative envelope you can reproduce, not a service level. The largest volume tested is 5 million records. Figures are available on request and we will not extrapolate beyond what we have measured.

11 — Next step

Bring us a domain

We will connect a sample of your own sources and walk your data from first extract to golden record, live — on a hub standing on one VM, inside your perimeter. You will see the match evidence, the survivorship decisions and the audit trail on your own records, and leave with a defensible estimate for the full estate.

info@adaptivecanvas.co.za  ·  adaptivecanvas.co.za  ·  Partner enquiries: partners@adaptivecanvas.co.za

MDM Studio v1.2.0 · © 2026 Adaptive Canvas · adaptivecanvas.co.za · South Africa