Informatica World 2008

I just wanted to close out this year's conference news to let you all know that all of the content is now available on our post-conference site. This includes all keynote presentations, and video's of them, plus breakouts given by Informatica, our partners and our customers.

Remember - the challenges we face today are in delivering trusted information to the business and gaining the maximum value from our data assets. For those of you who joined us in Vegas, please help yourself to the materials at our post-conference site. 

See you next year!

Tony Baer was at our analyst day on Wednesday at Informatica World and has some interesting thoughts about how the market for data integration is rapidly broadening. One of the key technologies that is enabling our customers to do much more than data warehousing, Data streaming through products like our Real Time Edition.

Mark Smith, CEO and EVP of Research at Ventana Research (and one the attendees at Informatica World this week), posted the following blog entry last night - "Informatica Bets Big on Information Economy."

Here's a snippet from Mark's entry:

"Informatica recently has brought forward new products and organizational leaders to continue their growth across the globe. I believe that Informatica is beginning to truly understand the larger benefit of data integration which is a required component of a CIO strategy and larger information economy."

The information economy and the role of broader data integration - this is the key theme that we and our customers and partners are talking about this week at Informatica World.

In fact, Ron Swift from Teradata is talking about it right now during the closing session of our conference.

Stay tuned for a more detailed post of Ron's session and the rest of today's proceedings…

During yesterday's keynote session and on this blog, both Sohaib and I talked about cloud computing, the fragmentation of data, and how you need to access it, move it, clean it and trust it in order to succeed in today's global information economy. Enter Informatica.

We're not the only ones talking clouds these days - check out the post on Salesforce.com's force.com blog, titled "The Right Stuff is Better than More Stuff."

Here's a good snippet from Peter Coffee's entry:

Clear supremacy for the cloud is now emerging, though, in the form of superior integration among cloud-based tools (e.g., salesforce.com and Google Apps) and — probably even more important — both cloud-based and on-premise data sources (viz. today's announcement from Informatica).

Maximizing operational uptime or minimizing operational downtime, whichever way you look at it, presents a daunting challenge and an exacting need for a business and its supporting IT infrastructure. Business drivers such as improving customer service with say Straight Through Processing or increasing operational efficiency by say supporting 24/7 operations are placing great pressure on IT organizations looking to support the business' goals for increased agility.

In yet another customer feature, this session put the technologist directly in contact with a real customer to understand how Informatica's real-time data integration capabilities supported a business model that could not tolerate any operational downtime. The session opened with a compelling video showcasing the customer's business background, the integration challenges and the benefits of the Informatica solution, in particular Change Data Capture.

The session had some very well laid-out use cases and before and after scenarios showcasing how Informatica's right-time data integration technologies provided the customer with a structured, repeatable, predictable design, development and operational process. As expected, the audience really relished the opportunity to hear other customers speak to common integration challenges and their solutions. This fact seemed to be reflected yet again in the involved Q&A session that followed the presentation.

Having been up and talking to customers late into the night on Tuesday, I wasn't looking forward to Waking up early for the breakout sessions. However, I was really glad I did otherwise I would have missed the highly informative session on orchestration and human workflow. Like myself, the audience came actively seeking out this session as they had been hearing about this exciting new technology from Informatica, at the various keynotes, kiosks and breakout sessions.

The Informatica product managers did a great job at introducing the concept, discussing the advanced data integration capabilities and also demonstrating the unique value proposition from a technology perspective. They made a very compelling case for for the use of process-driven data integration as an natural extension for Informatica's data integration capabilities. For me, however, the takeway from the session was to hear a real customer speak about how this new technology from Informatica was providing them with a flexible technology to advance their architecture and rapidly deliver information-centric products to the various stake-holders in their business model.

As a keen observer of how this year's event is progressing, I must say that I have been very impressed with the way many of the breakout sessions at this Informatica World have included a real customer story. Most of the sessions that I have attended have either included a real customer as a co-presenter or a real customer use case. As they say, the proof is really in the pudding and when I hear real customers talk about the various Informatica products and technologies, it is extremely gratifying.

Media coverage is rolling in from publications around the globe, detailing the launch of Informatica 8.6 and the Master Data Management partner news to come out of this week's show.

Informatica 8.6

InfoWorld - "Informatica revs data integration platform"

The article also appeared in PC World, Network World, CIO Magazine and IDG.

Intelligent Enterprise - "Informatica tackles real-time, on-demand and cross-enterprise integration"

ITPro - "Informatica moves to support cloud computing"

IT Week - "Informatica announces updates to its open platform"

Partner News

B-Eye Network - "Siperian joins Informatica's Worldwide Partner Program, INFORM"

TMCnet - "Siperian joins Informatica's Worldwide Partner Program"

TDWI once published a study that poor data quality was costing companies an estimated $600B annually in the US alone. And yet, industry analysts estimate the data quality tools market to be between $300-400M annually. The demand for better data quality is clearly there, but the size of the data quality tools market does not appear to reflect that same demand. Could it be that traditional Data Quality tools are not delivering enough value for customers? Perhaps instead of focusing merely on data cleansing and data profiling, tools vendors need to be reminded that the goal, ultimately, is getting customers to the point where they can trust their data.

I had a nice conversation with a customer after giving the Data Quality keynote. This person was using PowerCenter for data integration, but a Data Quality product from another company. Until he had the attention and involvement of the business, he stated that he had no reason to trust the data. I was really struck by this statement. Here was a customer who was clearly an expert in the use of matching technology. He had successfully completed an IT project that was processing very large volumes of data - and yet, without the availability of business owners for the data, he was unable to get enough validation on the data so that he could trust it.

We hear these types of comments very often. A great deal has to happen before customers feel they can trust their data. Eventually, data quality vendors will understand how to address the value gap that exists in this market - but the first to figure this out will have a golden opportunity to overtake the incumbents. Until then, data quality will continue to be an underserved market.

Hotels in Vegas have this tendency to sprawl for miles and miles and getting back to the conference rooms after a quick visit to one's room may often feel like finishing a marathon in five minutes. I wish I had also not stopped to grab a really late lunch en route to the session as I was really lucky to get a place to sit in what was a fully packed room on Tuesday afternoon.

The session was true to its name and showcased the real-world deployment and use of data services with PowerCenter 8.6. The audience was treated to a real customer's insight into their experience with creating and using PowerCenter data services. The customer took us through their business requirements phase and then also shared their real-world experience with implementing data services using PowerCenter.

In what was a highly interactive hour, a number of questions came up around the development of data services using PowerCenter and performance. The product management team at Informatica provided quick responses to some of the product roadmap questions and also provided guidance on the new data services capabilities.

On Tuesday afternoon, I attended the customer panel on right-time data integration moderated by David Lyle featuring five customers and their respective use cases.

What was really refreshing about this panel was that the there was a great mix of customers who see the world slightly differently from each other from the perspective of what exactly real-time data integration means to each of them. Some fancied using change data capture while others shared their thoughts on how data services were enabling their business. The session was well attended and a number of questions were directed to the panelists around how they were employing Informatica in their enterprise integration infrastructures.

The common theme across the use cases and success stories, however, was the use of Informatica as a versatile data integration platform that can serve up data to their IT systems at the speed of their business.

This video had some people buzzing today at Informatica World…

Read about Informatica 8.6's great impact on Informatica customers and partners.