EDM or Enterprise Data Model allows applications within an Enterprise to speak to each other in the same language.

From my perspective EDM is the next step after MDG (Master Data Governance) where MDG aligns between different systems masterdata (like business partners and materials) and EDM makes a step further to align transactional data (like sales orders and deliveries).

EDM is becoming a popular topic as enterprises do not want to lock themselves to a single vendor, but still want applications from different vendors to speak with each other.

Is it some product or category of products? There can be some supportive products for data translation (like SAP One Domain Model) and modelling, but this is more an abstract or logic construct. Real world implementation could look like a documentation discribing which documents you have within your organization and which rules should be followed to change them or add new ones.

Does it mean we can’t use vendor-provided data model? Not really. The concept of EDM usuall comes with translation of vendor-specific data to EDM.

With EDM even if you have a multiple warehouse management systems from different vendors, upon uploading the data to BW system you can translate it to a single EDM. Thus, ensuring BW reports will work independently of which system is the source of data, which will unlock business to use global data for decision-making.