Today Informatica completed the acquisition of 29West.  I am sure that many of you will have read the press release (here). However, I wanted to give you my personal view on why this is important and how it will help you, our customers, gain more value from your data.

Our rationale starts by looking at how the world has changed in the last 10 years.  The internet and improved communications have made the world so much smaller and everything seems to be happening at an accelerated pace.  I remember a day many years ago when computers were seen as a way of doing our jobs more quickly and we would have more down-time to enjoy our lives.  Oh how naive we were!

What has happened is that computers have heralded a data revolution causing us to ask more questions, gather more data and try to outwit our competitors by acting more quickly.  Today companies are using data for competitive advantage in ways that the previous generation could only dream of – and the decision makers today need the data immediately and at their fingertips.  That is the key word for today – immediacy.  We all want to act on data before our competitors.

At Informatica our single-minded vision is to help you, our customers, with gaining the maximum value from data.  We have evolved our offerings over the years to provide a comprehensive data integration platform that can access and understand data inside your firewall, into the clouds and between enterprises.  In addition we have delivered technology to allow you to proactively take action based upon business rules and to virtualize operational data into your traditional data warehouses

We have also progressed by providing both batch and real-time capabilities in dealing with data. This allowed customers to move data at latencies anywhere from a weekly batch load to within a second. This was, and is still, perfectly good enough for many use cases.  However, as the world continues to speed up we are seeing requirements that need to go faster, to go not within seconds, but in milliseconds or even microseconds – and this trend will only continue. Take, for example, the financial services industry, where deals are executed across the world stock exchanges.  For them, gaining a millisecond advantage when they are trading can be worth $100 million a year. Wow! Think about that – human muscle reaction time is about 200 milliseconds, and you will have moved about 2 inches in one millisecond if you are going at 100 miles per hour!

This is what 29West provides – a technology that fills in that last part of the latency curve.  Now we will be able to offer any latency from batch through near real-time to zero latency.  This is very exciting since it enables capabilities that the financial services industry requires TODAY, which other industries are beginning to adopt, and which many of us will need in the coming years.

Indeed, the financial services industry has been the early adopter of this technology for the front office because every millisecond is a competitive advantage in trading.  The firms require trusted, relevant and instant data delivery in order to drive revenue from the mass of market and customer data while dealing with trade positions, global risk and compliance.

With this technology, we will be able to offer a range of other innovative use cases by combining zero-latency data integration with other Informatica technologies.  For example, many of our customers already use Informatica with messaging products for near real-time data integration, operational MDM, B2B and CEP.  We will now be able to offer this with zero-latency (which means that no time is lost in exchanging information from one interface to another and a system responds instantly to an input of information).  This type of technology truly leads to business advantage, across industries.

So why did we choose 29West? The answer is quite simple – they provide the most scalable, technologically advanced software solution.  This has been proven in the most stringent world of the financial service front-office trading desks and is deployed by leading financial institutions.   They offer something called “Ultra-Low Latency Messaging”.  We are taking this and combining it with our platform to deliver zero-latency data integration.   Together we are now able to offer the industry’s first “any” latency data integration platform to address the entire range of data delivery needs: batch, change-data-capture (CDC), streaming CDC, messaging-based near real-time and zero-latency data delivery.

For many of you this is a requirement you have now – particularly in the financial services industry, but also telecommunications and government.  For many others of you this is something that may not be a requirement today, but I guarantee that it will become far more critical for you in the future as you look at ways of out-thinking your competitors.  Timely, relevant and trustworthy data is paramount in today’s global information economy.

Make no mistake – Informatica is committed to helping you with your most critical requirements and zero-latency is here, now!