Call me a convert. I have a renewed faith in the power of the community. I finally started using Twitter today in order to keep up with the real-time commentary flowing out of our industry analyst conference (#infaanalyst). It’s been enlightening (and often amusing) getting plugged into the thoughts of the analyst community/blogosphere around data integration and information management.

And today, we announced the Informatica Marketplace. This is going to turbocharge the already robust community for data integration. Tens of thousands of Informatica developers are already using LinkedIn, Facebook, Informatica’s TechNet and other venues to connect with each other, sharing knowledge and solutions for data integration, data quality, MDM and more. The Marketplace is going to make that 10x easier and more productive.

Buyers will have a single place to go to find pre-built solutions that will let them deliver their projects faster and cheaper. Sellers will have a way to reach the broad data integration community to market their wares and show off their expertise.

And it’s going to be fun. To get things going, we are organizing a pre-launch contest to let developers strut their stuff. The top gurus will get top billing on the marketplace, and their 5 minutes of fame onstage at InformaticaWorld 2010.

I honestly can’t wait to see what starts coming in. There’s going to be great stuff that we never would have thought of on our own—and that’s the whole point of the marketplace.