One of the key themes of the Informatica 9.1 release is Authoritative and Trustworthy data. To set the stage, consider the imperatives that organizations are driving such as becoming more customer-centric to drive top line revenue, or optimize just-in-time procurement to drive costs out of the business, or comply with new Dodd Frank regulations. Not only do all these imperatives require organizations to be able to deliver business value faster and faster, but they span the organization across Lines of Business and geographies. In particular they require reliable global business processes and analytics to succeed, and that means that they need trusted data. For example, Procure-to-Pay processes and decisions rely on data across product data, vendor data, and financial data, and that data has to be trusted, meaning that it’s essential to have consistent, correct, and complete vendor price and performance data in order to determine preferred vendors and negotiate better contracts.

However, business processes and business decisions are at odds with the data they need. At the heart of the problem is the combination of poor data quality that renders the data untrustworthy, and a fragmented view of master data (such as customer, vendor, product) so there is no authoritative version of truth. Together they behave like a “snow ball” that grows larger as data is created and manipulated across hundreds or even thousands of business  applications and business intelligence tools. The end result is a fundamental lack of trustworthy and authoritative data in global business processes and analytics. Informatica 9.1 provides a single platform for trusted data, so customers can manage Data Quality and Master Data holistically. In particular 9.1 delivers value in 3 key ways:

1. First, with 9.1 customers are able to reuse Data Quality Policies and rules across their data integration and MDM projects. This prevents conflicting data quality rules and data governance policies across systems, and this allows customers to maximize their ROI and business confidence through consistency of data.
2. Second, with 9.1 customers are able to drive Proactive Data Quality Assurance. With 9.1 customers now have comparative profiling and data validation so they can understand data mapping errors before there is a problem that will cause project churn and delays as well as automate data validation, cutting testing time from weeks to days. Moreover, with 9.1 customers can drive continuous data quality improvements with proactive monitoring to detect and address data quality issues before they adversely impact the business.
3. Thirdly, with 9.1 customers have a single market-leading product for MDM for any architectural styles. In 9.1 customers can chose any architectural style or combination of style to implement their MDM solution. For instance customers can start with a registry approach and then upgrade to a hub approach, or implement a combination of the two, and do so in a single product. This allows customers to reduce complexity, reduce cost, as well as ensure flexibility to meet changing needs over time with a rapid time-to-market and a lower risk.

In summary, with Informatica 9.1 customers enjoy a single platform to deliver both trustworthy data with Informatica Data Quality, and authoritative data with Informatica MDM, thereby empowering customers to deliver trusted data more holistically and rapidly across global business processes and analytics in order to become more customer centric, improve operational performance, and comply with regulations.