Monthly Archives: October 2008
An afternoon at the Oscars or a Florida user’s group
Over the last couple of months we have been running user conferences across the world. Our user community is incredibly important to us and we are delighted with the assistance our chapter leaders provide in guiding these meetings and helping us to maintain a strong community.
So it was with great delight that I read an article in the “examiner.com” about our recent user group meeting over in Florida. Entitled “OMG, an afternoon at the Oscars or a Florida user’s group “ it espoused the value of the group. In fact, it had me laughing merrily:
“If I were rating the most fun and entertaining users’ group meeting I’ve attended this year, Florida IUG would have walked away with the following awards: Best Location, Best Actor, Best supporting actor and actress; Most Prolific Presenters; Best Buffet”.
OK, so the article was humorous – well, certainly to me. However, there is a very serious side to this. Our user group meetings are an opportunity for our users to come together, to meet others and to discuss the latest trends and developments in data integration. We hold user group meetings all over the world. If you would like to know more about them visit our community site. Connect with your peers through our newly launched Informatica Technology Network, or our online user community.
We are continually looking at ways of improving how our users connect with each other. If you think we can do more, then please let me know.
Informatica, Salesforce.com and Amazon debate cloud integration
On October 29th my colleague Sanjay Krishnamurthi is joining Peter Coffee from salesforce.com and Jeff Barr from Amazon.com at the Architecture and Innovation summit in Minneapolis.
They are discussing the state of the industry around one of the hot new architectures climbing the technology hype cycle – namely Application Platform as a Service (APaaS). Offerings in this space include Informatica On-demand, salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services to name just a few.
The really big question of course is … “Is Cloud Computing a valid strategy for large mission-critical applications or is it just for quick ramp-up of new capabilities and low-volume department solutions?”
The reality is that core business solutions are being implemented today in the cloud by companies of all sizes with impressive results. An enterprise could, in principal, implement their entire suite of applications with the only purchased software being a browser!
If you are in the vicinity, please drop by and listen to Sanjay, Peter and Jeff explore the promise of APaaS and the present day reality. I’l write-up a brief summary of their presentation and post it afterwards. Here’s what you can expect:
- a broad overview of cloud computing; what it is and what it means for business leaders, architects, and system integrators.
- the challenges, such as data fragmentation and information security, and solutions that are available to address them.
- an overview of their respective offerings including real-life case studies.
I’ve also been told that they will show a live cloud integration demo showing how salesforce.com can be integrated with Amazon Web Services using Informatica On-Demand.
Sounds exciting – you can find out more about the summit here.
Bad Data Impacting the Economy
Alan Greenspan stated last week that poor data quality is part of the reason for today’s financial crisis. As many businesses have already learned, databases are only as accurate as the information fed into them. (more…)
SOA’s Last Mile Part III: How to Address SOA’s Data-Centric Pitfalls Effectively
This blog post is part two of an ongoing series highlighting the importance of data in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). I look forward to hearing your thoughts and input on the subject.
I’m back. It’s been a little longer than normal, longer than I would have liked. Perhaps that’s because ‘addressing SOA’s data-centric pitfalls’ isn’t easy. (Really it’s because I’ve been working on other things. But let’s get back to the topic at hand.)
One of the benefits of the SOA approach is the ability to think top-down about problems. The usual approach is to work tightly with the business to define your processes from a business perspective, leading to clearly defined services that the business understands and you can implement together.
This is wonderful and has a clarifying symmetry that Software Engineering has been trying to achieve since the days of CASE. But now, here we are in 2008 with the SOA standards defined and the tools available to potentially achieve this vision. Ah, finally, the integration hairball will be contained and life will improve immeasurably for all!
But as I talked about last time, one of the reasons that things aren’t that simple is the data-centric pitfalls. And addressing this problem is not easy if you want to take a long-term, enterprise-oriented approach.
In talking with folks who have walked down this path, struggled with data problems, and are trying to think holistically about a workable longer-term solution, three themes come up again and again: (more…)
Could Better Business Intelligence Have Averted the Credit Crisis?
If banks and financial institutions had invested in more data integration and business intelligence tools to spot issues arising within their portfolios, could they have avoided the recent credit mess?
Perhaps, to a degree. But it is human beings that are ultimately making the risk judgments, and oftentimes, bad decisions may have looked good at the time they were made.
Still, technology has improved to the point where troubles could have been more effectively flagged. (more…)
Do you trust your data?
I find this rather an interesting and profound question! Trusted data. What does this mean, and how does it affect us all? We’ve built all these systems over the years and we implicitly trust that the data provided is correct.
For years I have used online banking and I trust my bank (well, things have been OK up to now and I always check my statements and cross-reference incomings and outgoings). Why do I check it – basically because I’m still a little nervous, it makes sense and I hear horror stories about hacking, stolen identities and all sorts of security issues. The latest high profile example of this of course was the Sarah Palin hack (take a look at View From The Bunker for an interesting blog on security).
We make decisions all the time based on trust. We buy presents for our loved ones, or cars and houses because we think we have enough funds – we trust our data. I was chatting to a journalist recently over at the Oralce Openworld conference and he brought up the word trust … apparently he was using a very popular on-demand service (you know … the gorilla in the market!) to sell to customers and wasn’t able to reconcile with his finance people. They were telling him that his top 10 customers were completely different to the top ten in his SaaS system. Hmm … a great example of “which data do you trust”? The CRM system , or the finance system? After investigation he found out that the problem was because the two systems were not connected and his company was relying on human process to update both systems.
That’s the whole point of integration – to help ensure that your systems are connected and that the right information is available to you to help you improve your decision making process, and operate more effectively. Today data is the lifeblood of every company, it’s the true currency that we all deal in when we trade on the stock exchanges, or run drug trials across hospitals, or manage supply chains across continents. You have to be able to trust your data – and yet the world is full of examples of mistakes made or mishaps occuring because of poor quality data.
Take a look at “Do You Trust Your Data?“. It’s a new site we’ve pushed out highlighting real-world examples of stories relating to trusting your data. You can add your own (anonymously if you’d like). We’ve love to hear from you. Go on… I know you want to 
Integration Opportunity Calculator
An Integration Competency Center (ICC) can save a ton of money. You’ve all seen references from industry analysts singing the praises of Business Intelligence Centers of Excellence (COEs) or ICCs, but most of them are either qualitative statements or, if they have been quantified, they refer to aggregate industry numbers. For example, here are a couple of headlines from a quick Google search: “Enterprise Business Integration Market to Reach $3.9 Billion” and “Worldwide Network Consulting and Integration Services Spending to Increase 7.8% to Reach $29.3 Million”. (more…)
Where’s the Beef? Why SOA Needs MDM
Years, ago, I came across this question in an article in Boardroom Reports: “What do you call a hamburger that’s 99% meat and 1% garbage?”
The answer was a “garbageburger.” In other words, even if a small fraction of the burger is tainted, the whole meal is tainted. The original analogy was being used to illustrate the challenges of time management, but it’s an apt analogy for data environments as well. That is, if a portion of the information is bad or unreliable, trust in all the data eventually breaks down. In essence, many implementations of service-oriented architecture (SOA) taking place across companies may be garbageburgers because they are serving up unreliable information – an element that has been out of the control of SOA designers.
Sorry if I ruined anyone’s lunch, but the point had to be made. (more…)
Datawarehouse Databases, Appliances, a plethora of options…..
On the eve of Teradata’s Partners Conference, following Oracle OpenWorld, after Netezza’s User Conference, following HP Neoview’s debut, following Asterdata’s unveiling, after DatAllegro’s purchase by Microsoft and Greenplum’s extreme scale announcement… I think you get the idea. The Datawarehouse Database and Appliance market is starting to feel like the first generation of the relational database evolution in the 90′s, many new options and players driving innovation and performance at a breakneck pace.
Prospective buyers will find many new options to consider for implementing new or broadening existing BI initiatives, all with one thing in common. They require effective, scalable data integration to be successful. That is why we have strong partnerships, a growing ecosystem and referenceable customers with most/all of these new/extended offerings.
As the leading Data Integration provider in the middle of all these offerings/options, we pay particular attention to the best methods to load large volumes of data, read data for downstream use and increasingly deliver real-time feeds for Operational BI and MDM initiatives. If you’re attending Teradata Partners next week, see a joint customer deployment session with Cisco and hear about this linkage.
I look forward to seeing you there and at other events in the future!
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Informatica and Data Synapse – scaling and sharing PowerCenter in the broader IT ecosystem
One of our ISV Partners, Data Synapse, provides a solution for managing infrastructure more efficiently through virtualization and dynamic provisioning. In today’s cost-cutting/cost savings economy, their approach makes a lot of sense to get the most of our existing resources. We’ve jointly developed a solution that allows for co-existence of Informatica PowerCenter and other applications to ensure best use of hardware assets and dynamic “capacity scaling”.
This may seem complicated, but in reality, it’s a great marriage between two solutions that are a natural fit together. Many organizations leverage data integration as a night time function and BI during the day. By sharing the same pool of hardware infrastructure, organizations can ensure optimal usage of their resources.
For more information on this concept and how the joint solution works, see an upcoming webinar next week
DataSynapse and Informatica Host Webinar On Reducing Infrastructure Costs for Data Integration – Wednesday, October 15 at 11 a.m. EDT
It’s a movement that has momentum and can provide organizations a huge cost savings.
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