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!

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).

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

We're here at the opening keynote, planning to capture as much as possible.

9:06am: Here we go… packed house, music pumping as people are getting seated. Standing room only at the back. Lights down, and a nice video plays about how fast the world is moving, and how data can help you manage the pace of change.

9:09am: Chris Boorman, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, is giving the introduction. 10th annual Informatica World - this year is the largest ever. Chris is describing how people got here, planned their trips, and how they communicate, shop and travel - how all of them have Informatica in common. Many airlines, car companies, travel companies, phone companies, banks, etc. - all Informatica customers.

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9:16am: Chris introduces Informatica's Chairman and CEO, Sohaib Abbasi. Sohaib mentions how much this user conference has grown since the first one ten years ago… he says (I'm pretty sure tongue in cheek) that the entertainment at the first one was a local high school marching band.

9:20am: Sohaib talking about the launch of Informatica 8.6 and how it will help customers grow beyond the traditional capabilities they've known from Informatica over the years… more on this later in the keynote.

Talking about customers and why Informatica is so focused…mentions a third-party survey which concludes that Informatica has retained the #1 customer loyalty rating among data integration vendors.

Sohaib is now outlining the key trends driving the Information Economy: Globalization, Growth, and Governance, and how these drivers are creating more and more need for organizations to be able to integrate and trust their data.

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9:25am: On the topic of the current uncertain times, Sohaib shows a quote from the CEO of a large financial services company… "A number of times people have seen a light at the end of the tunnel… and it has ended up being a train coming down the tracks." Ouch.

9:24am: Sohaib is discussing consolidation in the industry and how it is driving a platform shift. Application vendors in particular are gobbling up smaller competitors, leaving a huge need for a neutral party that can help customers make it through this platform shift.

He shows a great quote from an SAP executive: "Business Objects is coming to SAP with more than 70 percent of its revenue based on non-SAP environments. SAP did not spend more than $6 billion to lose 70 percent of the revenue."

Another quote from Oracle's web site about the nasty intellectual property dust-up between Oracle and SAP. Not pretty to say the least.

The point behind those two quotes: customers need these big vendors to work together, but clearly they don't like each other.

9:37am: relentless pace of innovation - continue to work with customers to refine products, create new products, and roll them out at a pace beyond what any other vendor does.

9:40am: Launch of Informatica 8.6 - first comprehensive, unified, and open platform for data integration. Based on flagship product PowerCenter, but now expanding out to new roles, data exchange between business partners, and delivering data in real time.

9:32am: Sohaib is talking about how Informatica has been a pioneer in cloud computing. Laid out a strategy for software as a service two years ago, and is now launching 3rd service - Data Loader Service for Salesforce.com. Invites Ron from the On Demand group onstage for a demo of "cloud-to-cloud" integration.

This is getting interesting… integration from one cloud to the next. Showing list of fictitious sales leads (funny list of famous, rich executives) in Salesforce.com. Sohaib wants to analyze this data in a spreadsheet, so Ron does point and click integration from Salesforce to Google Spreadsheets. They are doing this live… let's see what happens. Yep, the Google spreadsheet automatically pulls up the Salesforce data.

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Now Sohaib wants to make changes in the spreadsheet… increasing probabilities of deals closing, increasing deal sizes… etc. Ron makes the change in Google Spreadsheets, and it automatically shows up back in the Salesforce system. Pretty cool… the crowd is eating this up.

Ron pulls the "one more thing" trick ala Steve Jobs… and pulls out an iPod Touch. Shows how you can do the same scenario on the iPod touch or any device with a browser and an internet connection. Probably the first time an iPod has been used for a data integration demo!

9:50am: Sohaib moves into new product announcements - talking about the launch of B2B Data Exchange. Brings out a customer from Paramount who is describing how they manage flow of information for iTunes royalty payments. They are using Informatica to automate the process now and have cut their development time in half.

9:55am: Final product announcement: Data Quality 8.6. Describing how, now that Data Quality is natively integrated with Informatica's data integration platform, customers will be able to manage data quality at "the point of entry" within their systems. Discussing the identity resolution capabilities that came through with Informatica's recent acquisition of Identity Systems. Sohaib brings up Ivan Chong, SVP and GM of Informatica's Data Quality business unit.

Ivan makes a claim that he is going to show how "Informatica can make the complex –> simple, and the impossible –> possible. Ivan is showing a customer database in the Data Quality Assistant - tons of duplicate entries, partial entries, etc. Ivan shows how a few clicks can remove the duplicates, but then shows how the problem can be compounded when you bring in multiple languages. He shows a customer bases in multiple languages: English, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian. Yikes. Ivan then makes a few more clicks and does cross-language matching. And just like that, the list is narrowed down, shows which languages they came in, etc. Very cool… you can see the obvious use cases for things like goverment security/intelligence, but also things like fraud detection, CRM, etc.

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10:02am: Sohaib is wrapping up now - excited to bring Informatica 8.6 to the customer base, thankful to Informatica's customers for their contributions.

Sohaib is now bringing up Girish Pancha, EVP and GM of Informatica's Data Integration business unit. We'll capture Girish's comments in a separate post… stay tuned.

Our annual user conference, Informatica World 2008 kicks off tomorrow at the Las Vegas Hilton. This is our tenth year with the conference and a lot has changed…

Back in 1999, our first user conference was held in San Diego and it was small enough that all attendees fit onto one Hornblower Yacht for our cruise around the harbor! Our partner expo was held in a parking garage - we had to wait several hours to clear the air of car exhaust.

Over the years our customer base has grown tremendously, and Informatica World has grown along with it. This year we expect more than 1,200 customers, partners, and integration experts to join us in Las Vegas.

Over the course of the next three days, we’ll host more than 56 breakout sessions, 11 Birds of Feather discussion groups, 6 education sessions, and more than 250 demos, 1:1 meetings and focus groups in the Hands on Lab. And of course, we have an amazing partner expo - we've graduated from the garage to a big, beautiful ballroom.

So, what is the prevailing topic at Informatica World? The “dry heat” of Vegas, of course!

Beyond that, we’ll be talking a lot about data integration (surprise!) and the expanding role it is playing in your businesses and the technology landscape today.

With so much activity at the conference this year, we decided to extend it virtually for those who couldn’t join us.

Within this blog, we’ll track the news and highlights of the key discussions taking place during the show. Subscribe to the RSS feed so you get real-time updates on the Innovation Awards, real-time recaps of the keynotes, and a few fun photos and videos.

We hope you will enjoy this blog, and encourage you to join the discussion.