DSXchange

I'm trying to understand how IBM Initiate fits into the overall Infosphere MDM product portfolio. I see that IBM Initiate Master Data Service is included in IBM InfoSphere MDM Enterprise Edition, IBM InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition, and IBM InfoSphere MDM Standard Edition.
So does that mean Initiate is a separate product on its own or is it a feature in the above editions ?

What I gathered from an IBM session last year is that IBM had purchased the Initiate component, which used to be a separate product made by some other company, and they integrated it as a feature into MDM in order to change the old MDM deterministic matching engine to a new and improved probabilistic matching engine (PME).

The PME comes pre-configured based on a national sample set of 10 million records and it is also configurable. It operates in a very similar way to the probabilistic matching that QualityStage with weights, composite scores, thresholds, etc., which begs the question of why didn't IBM integrate QualityStage matching into MDM in the first place.

They have let you use QS matching for a long time: long before they bought Initiate.

Haven't used it a whole lot, but I found the stan part of the process a bit hard to use: you could often select invalid combinations that you wouldn't be able to run, and very little insight into what each method did.
On the other hand I thought the matching part was pretty nice, especially the order independence (firstname lastname or lastname firstname) or being able to match between multiple fields at once (shipping address, billing address, postal address, etc) with none of the sorts of chicanery you'd have to engage in to do the same in QS.