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"

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.

I was looking at Google Trends yesterday and noticed how the term "cloud computing" is rapidly emerging in our technology vernacular!

I don't know about you, but I've only just come to terms with On-Demand and SaaS (well, I know them pretty well having worked for Salesforce.com for 18 months or so).

On-Demand is exciting and growing in acceptance. Most companies now-a-days are looking at such services. It surprised me to hear from our CIO that we have 13 on-demand services in use at Informatica.

What's clear to me is that the concept of On-Demand has started becoming mainstream. However, large (and medium-sized) enterprises will not be able to run their entire businesses on them for many years to come - if indeed ever. They have their place, yes, but so does traditional computing. The weird thing about On-Demand is that you're placing your trust in someone else to look after your data. You don't know where your data is, but you know it's there, and it's safe (make sure you check to be on the safe side!).

However, you need to make sure you can use it, it's correct and it's adding value to your business. You need to analyze it, and report on it. You need to move it from one system to another - in other words you need data integration. Pretty obvious really, but it seems to me that On-Demand computing cannot succeed in the enterprise without data integration - for all the reasons I've just stated.

So that brings me back to Cloud Computing. What "exactly" is it? Is it everything "outside" the firewall? Is it On-Demand, and Google spreadsheets and Amazon? Is it everything out there - that you can reach but don't physically know where it is?

There doesn't seem to be one simple definition that everyone has agreed upon yet, but, to me the important thing is that Cloud Computing is that it's about further fragmentation of data. It's about the IT infrastructure virtualizing into the clouds. But it's also about keeping our feet on the ground and making sure we can still be in control of "our" data and making sure that we are able to differentiate, innovate and gain a competitive advantage.

To do that you need to be able to access it, move it, clean it and trust it - and that's fundamentally where Informatica comes in. Integrating, moving, synchronizing and cleaning. That's what we do well - whether your data is inside your firewall or spread across the heavens in clouds.

Data integration is important - now more so than ever before.

PS: you might like to take a look at our On-Demand services that provide connectivity from one cloud to the next.

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.

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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.

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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.