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!

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.

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.