Informatica World 2008

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…

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.