Monthly Archives: January 2009
Salesforce.com Customers Vote Informatica On Demand Data Loader Number One!
It was with great pleasure that I was told yesterday our latest cloud service (the Informatica On-Demand Data loader) was crowned “Best Integration tool” for salesforce.com. This is particularly appealing since it is voted for by salesforce.com users.
Our goal is to help users integrate data – wherever it is. As cloud computing takes off, users are faced with an increasing dilemma – how to control this further fragmentation of data. Over the last few years we have pioneered the ability to not only connect to the clouds, but also to deliver a service in the clouds. This is why this accolade is so gratifying to us all at Informatica.
One of the really cool things that salesforce.com does is allow users to post comments about the salesforce.com applications community – and our Data Loader Service is just one of those.
Take a look at some of the actual comments from the user community about our solution:
- “I found that this tool was easy to understand, simple to set up and I feel that this is of great value to our organization”.
- “We researched a few data integration tools that we thought would work within our corporate environment. Nothing beat the value that Informatica brings to the table”.
- “After having trialed SalesForce’s own data loader I have got to say that Informatica’s on demand data loader was a refreshing turn of direction”.
- “This tool couldn’t be simpler to use. If you are looking for an easy way to copy all of your salesforce data once or on a regularly scheduled interval into a Local Database, this is the tool for you”.
- “After looking and testing several products Informatica On Demand Data Loader Service for Salesforce was by far the easiest product to implement into are salesforce enviroment”.
You can find all these reviews and more on the Salesforce.com Appexchange here. Why don’t you test out the On Demand Data Loader Service for yourself for free and see just how easy it is. Go on, try it – you know you want to 
Lean Integration Part 3: Sustaining Knowledge
Here is the next installment of the “10 weeks to Lean Integration” series. If you are joining the discussion now, you may want to start by reading the first posting.
A core principle of Lean and the Toyota Production System is continuous improvement through experimentation and learning. The general notion is that there isn’t a “perfect” way to do something. Rather, there are always opportunities for improvement that can be uncovered using scientific disciplines. (more…)
Tony Young
Mr. Young serves as senior vice president and chief information officer of Informatica with responsibility for the strategic direction of Informatica’s global information systems and technology infrastructure.
During his tenure at Informatica, Mr. Young and the Information Technology department have won prestigious industry awards, including the 2006 CIO Decision Midmarket Leadership Award, the 2006 Ventana Research IT Performance Management Leadership Award and the 2007 100 Best Places to Work in IT by ComputerWorld.
Prior to joining Informatica in 2002, Mr. Young served at Mindcrossing and Converge, where he was responsible for overseeing product development and product management. Mr. Young began his career at HP where he served for 11 years in a number of information technology and marketing roles. A major milestone at HP included building the first partner portal, as well as building an enterprise portal and e-commerce infrasructure.
Mr. Young earned a bachelor’s degree in information systems and a master’s degree in business administration from Santa Clara University.
Click here to view all of Tony’s posts
Data Management Emerges as a “Power Center”
Have you noticed how many of the important new initiatives over the past year revolve around data and information? We’ve been seeing a greater impetus to measures such as master data management, service oriented architecture, data integration, business process management, the rise of open source data warehouses and BI, the rise of data warehouse appliances, and the blooming of the cloud computing revolution. On top of all this has been heightened concern - and action - over data security.
Not only is PowerCenter Informatica’s flagship product line, it’s also an appropriate description for what’s become of the data management function in recent times. (more…)
Driving Data Integration through the Social Network
I read an interesting report in dmreview last week. Entitled “Survey Shows Chief Marketing Officers Haven’t ‘Friended’ Social Networking Sites” it analyses a report that suggests my peers are not too interested in social networking. I’m surprised by this, given the role social networking has in today’s society. That then had me thinking about our marketing strategy here at Informatica and the role of Facebook, and other online communities, in our activity.
Before talking about social networking, I thought I’d start by stating the obvious – the role of marketing here is to raise the awareness of Informatica within our target audience and to partner with the sales organization in executing programs to find opportunities for our technology and services. (more…)
Is Having One Enterprise Business Glossary Practical In Real World Data Governance Practices?
Business glossaries are comprehensive lists of common business vocabulary that enable a common language between business and IT.They provide the foundation for data governance initiatives that brings together cross-functional teams to make interdependent rules or to resolve issues or to provide services to data stakeholders.
By giving business context to technical artifacts (technical metadata), the business glossary makes it possible to catalog, govern and use valuable corporate data in a trusted, consistent and efficient manner.
While it would be hard to find someone to disagree on the value of a business glossary, I’ve heard mixed opinions on the tactical implementation of it–particularly in the context of large enterprises. Specifically, whether or not having just one enterprise business glossary to govern valuable corporate data is practical and timely enough to implement and quickly benefit from. (more…)
Lean Integration Part 2: Eliminate Waste
This article is the next installment of the 10 weeks to Lean Integration series. If you are joining the discussion now, you may want to start by reading the first posting.
The original seven wastes (muda in Japanese) that were targeted in manufacturing and production lines are:
- Transportation (unnecessary movement of materials)
- Inventory (excess inventory including work-in-progress)
- Motion (extra steps by people to perform the work)
- Waiting (periods of inactivity)
- Overproduction (production ahead of demand)
- Over Processing (rework and reprocessing)
- Defects (effort involved in inspecting for and fixing defects)
Demonstrating the Power of a Data Integration Platform
We’ve all heard the saying “A picture paints a thousand words”. All very profound, so how much is a good demonstration worth? Over the last couple of months we’ve been busy in our labs building some new demo’s that showcase the power of a truly comprehensive, unified, open and economical data integration platform.
The Informatica platform offers access to any data, from anywhere, at any time to any role and for any use. This all sounds very comprehensive and open - take a look at the platform demonstration in our online demonstration center. Here you will also see the unified platform approach of Informatica – data quality and data integration combined with consistent user interfaces and a unified run-time engine.
The platform enables a consistent approach to any data integration project type – whether it be datawarehousing, data quality, data migration, data consolidation or master data management to name but a few. For example, take the subject of Datawarehousing. Informatica enables the creation of an enterprise datawarehouse to facilitate better decision making and compliance with the ever increasing number of regulations that companies of all sizes face today. You can find an excellent demonstration of how the Informatica data integration platform enables the creation and maintenance of an enterprise datawarehouse in our demonstration center. Data migration is another use case of the platform – take a look at our data migration demonstration here! Data quality is another example, and Identity resolution another. All available to view within our demonstration center.
Cloud data integration is another capability provided by the Informatica platform, and here is yet another demonstration that showcases our capabilities within the clouds – not just integrating from an enterprise to the cloud, but data integration within the clouds using our own on-demand service.
Over the coming months we will be adding further demonstrations to our center. Please take a few moments to have a look – each demonstration is just a few minutes long and designed to put across what we believe are the critical capabilities required for each use case. I’d be interested in your views and whether there are specific demonstrations that you would like to see. Let me know!
10 Weeks to Lean Integration
Lean Integration is a management system that emphasizes focusing on the customer, driving continuous improvements, and the elimination of waste in end-to-end data integration and application integration activities.
Lean practices are well-established in other disciplines such as manufacturing, supply-chain management, and software development to name just a few, but the application of Lean to the integration discipline is new.
Based on my research, no-one has tackled this topic directly in the form of a paper or book. But the world is a big place, so if some of you readers have come across prior works, please let me know. In the meantime, you heard it here first! (more…)
M&A – An Integration Challenge?
It seems like almost a lifetime has passed, but six months ago at Informatica World 2008, one of the keynote presentations contained a demonstration of the Informatica Platform. The demo focused on how Informatica products can help companies before, during and after a merger or acquisition (M&A) to address integration challenges. The relevance of it still stands today.
Early in the demo, Adam Wilson stated that there were 4.5 trillion dollars of M&A activity last year, representing over 45,000 transactions. Based on those numbers, I think it is safe to say that the majority of the market has probably been impacted by M&A in some shape or form.
Adam went on to say that 3-6 months post-M&A, most companies cannot get a consolidated view of financial or operational data and even after 2-3 years, 32% of companies still cannot achieve this. While certain types of M&A activity has slowed in 2008, there is still a flurry of activity going on especially for companies that buy and collect debt, thus many companies are still facing significant integration challenges.
One of those challenges is rationalizing data assets. It is likely that after M&A, companies will have duplicate customers, vendors, and potentially products across their IT systems. For example, the same entity may be represented in different ways across systems such as Bank of America, BofA, Bank of Am., etc. Rationalizing these data assets can be challenging, but with the right set of tools it can be managed. Data quality technology can help address this issue, by not only helping to identify these near duplicates through fuzzy matching technology, but it can also allow standardization of the data values so there are a common set of terms.
The demo is available on the Informatica web site and is entitled The Informatica Platform: Release 8.6.
Have a look and let me know your views. Are you currently or have you recently experienced any M&A activity? Was data quality an issue for you?
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