Informatica World 2008

So, can you believe it’s been 9 years since we’ve been running our Innovation Awards at our Informatica World annual user conference? Every year it gets bigger, and every year more customers enter some pretty interesting projects. And did you know these are the only awards dedicated to excellence in the Data Integration industry?

The entries are evolving with the times – we used to get mainly data warehousing projects being put forward, but it’s a whole new world now! Data migration, data consolidation, M&A, governance, compliance – all important to a company’s bottom line and all areas in which Informatica helps companies realize business value every day.

Of course it was a hard decision to decide who to choose as overall winners – but the order of the day was innovation…

The awards were announced this year with much fanfare – we showed a short video as each of the winners walked on stage (by the way, they came from near and far – I think the furthest was Germany this year). Our CEO, Sohaib Abbasi and CMO, Chris Boorman congratulated each one amongst some well-deserved applause.

Click To Enlarge

Here’s a list of the winners:

Business Enablement Awards Winners

• Driving shareholder value in M&A – Virgin Media
• Delivering enhanced customer service – KPN
• Driving operational efficiency – Oi and ING Americas
• Enabling better decision making – Deutsche Post and Ahold Netherlands
• Ensuring governance and compliance – Bank of America

Technology Enablement Award Winners

• Data quality – ACH Food Companies
• On-demand data integration – Ellie Mae
• B2B partner integration – Paramount
• Strategic approach to enterprise data integration – Duke Energy

In addition to individual category winners, the overall "best-of-the-best" Innovation Award was bestowed upon KPN for its use of Informatica for real-time access and cleansing of its customer data.

Click To Enlarge

Award winner Virgin Media said, "There's only one way to compete effectively in the communications/entertainment industry - customer service, outrageously fine customer service, supported by real-time access to customer data every second of every day. And that data has to be up to date. In spite of the merger of three companies over a brief period, that's what we promise our customers. This nomination acknowledges how much what we've accomplished means for Virgin Media and how much it means for our customers."

Comments like that make it all worth it.

* A special thanks to our guest judges this year, Michael Friedenberg, CEO and president, CXO Media and Mark Smith, CEO and founder of Ventana Research.