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!

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.

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…

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.

Today, we launched an entirely new version of the Informatica company website - www.informatica.com

In this day and age, a blog posting about a new web site may not seem that interesting, or is it?

Well, I think it does get interesting when you consider why we did it, what it means and how it reflects the evolution of Informatica.

You see, we've changed a lot in the last few years. Our heritage of only being a Data Warehousing company has long gone. We've expanded our technology offerings, acquired companies and broadened our message.

The existing website was very much a 1990's style place - crammed full of technology. It was a place where you went if you wanted to know about our products - and you had to speak our language. But it hadn't kept up with what we were about, and didn't think about "you"…

Us versus You!

Our new website is designed to think about who you are and what you might be interested in. If you're a business user, it speaks your language. If you're a technologist then it speaks your language. You can navigate by business solution, or technology solution, or product. It gives you the clear choice. It also talks about our solutions in plain english - not some technical gobbaldy-gook. We've simplified the site and made things easier to find. We've brought our customers to the fore and pushed ourselves back.

Content Delivery

Our old site simply presented our content - with little thought to who you were or what you wanted. You had to be impressed with how much we could write! Our new web site tries to simplify everything. Ultimately the content is still there - but it's arranged more elegantly and only drills into the detail if you want to drill into the detail! I believe you need to be able to understand what we do within a few seconds - nobody wades through reams of online content anymore!

A New Informatica

ETL and Data Warehousing is now one small, but important, part of our story. We're about helping companies to get value out of their data - whether it's in the traditional enterprise, in the clouds or spread across global supply chains.

Our new web site tries to reflect this. It shows us as a modern provider of technology relevant to this global information economy we live in. Our heritage is still technology, but we're far more than that. We're about enabling the business, delivering trusted information for regulatory compliance, enabling Cloud Computing, managing data flows across supply chains and much, much more.

Today the world is changing and the new Informatica is all about helping companies deal with that change, and gaining the greatest value possible from the most important asset - their data.

Our new web site tries to capture this and is the launching pad for demonstrating our relevancy in today's modern internet-based world.

We hope you like it.

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.

10:05am: At the top of the hour, Sohaib handed the baton to Girish Pancha, EVP and GM of Informatica’s Data Integration business unit, for a more detailed discussion of the newly announced Informatica 8.6 platform.

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Girish’s session took Sohaib’s opening remarks a level down and went through three key components of the new platform:

PowerCenter Real Time Edition

Girish: Real Time Edition is all about real time, near-universal data integration within an enterprise. With new features such as streaming changed data capture, Girish spoke of PowerCenter 8.6’s support of the continuum of data integration latency or timeliness requirements… from batch to real-time. Examples from Electronic Arts, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and West Bend Mutual Insurance were used to highlight Informatica’s ability to maximize data value and optimize IT efficiency.

B2B Data Exchange

Girish highlighted the single infrastructure of 8.6 that allows “Data Warriors” to deal with traditional and non-traditional data exchange, as B2B Data Exchange is completely integrated with the 8.6 platform. Concerned about the quality of your partners' data? You can leverage the Informatica Data Quality offering to ensure the data is clean and trusted. No additional hardware infrastructure or system administration needed. One customer, Clalit, saved 10 person years of work for its HL7 solution with help from Informatica.

Informatica On Demand

Girish then moved on to talk about on-demand data integration to retain control over outsourced, off-premise data. The new Data Loader service provides business users a simple-to-use service to integrate their off-premise data managed by salesforce.com with their on-premise data.

10:35am: Ivan Chong returns to the stage to talk about the fourth key facet of 8.6 – data quality solutions.

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As Ivan notes, data quality is more than just data cleansing and profiling – it’s getting customers to the point where they can trust their data. Traditional data quality normally starts with customer data. But we all need to think about the quality of data across the whole enterprise. Informatica’s data quality solutions take data from different domains and establish rules that reference multiple types of data. There is a consistent look and feel and common repository for data.

The interesting thing that they're saying is that with Informatica 8.6, the data quality engine IS PowerCenter.

Ivan mentions that a large food and beverage manufacturer recognized huge savings in trade promotions spend because of Informatica’s data quality offering. Another customer, a large bank, avoided $20M in AML fines using Informatica PowerCenter.

With the recent acquisition of Identity Systems, Informatica has been able to expand is data quality offering. Cross-language and cross script matching now enables businesses to deal with their global customer base. The IRS, GE Capital, Wells Fargo, FedEx, DHL, Canada Border Services and the US Postal Inspector are all customers leveraging technology from Informatica to ensure trust with their data.

Quite the morning thus far – and the best is still to come! The Informatica Innovation Awards ceremony is up next…..

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.