Category Archives: Business Impact / Benefits
A key growth milestone for the Informatica Marketplace
Recently, the Informatica Marketplace reached a major milestone: we exceeded 1,000 Blocks (Apps). Looking back to three years ago when we started with 70 Blocks from a handful of partners, it’s an amazing achievement to have reached this volume of solutions in such a short time. For me, it speaks to the tremendous value that the Marketplace brings not only to our customers who download more than 10,000 Blocks per month, but also to our partners who have found in the Marketplace a viable route to market and a great awareness and monetization vehicle for their solutions.
There has been a lot of discussion around the explosion of data and what it means to companies trying to leverage this extremely valuable resource. Informatica has a huge part to play in helping customers solve those problems not only through the technologies we provide directly, but through the tremendous ecosystem that we have built through our partners. The Marketplace has grown to more than 165 unique partner companies, and we’re adding more every day. Blocks such as BI & Analytics sing Social Media Data from Deloitte, and Interstage XWand – XBRL Processor from Fujitsu represent offerings from large, established software companies, while Blocks such as Skybot Enterprise Job Scheduler and Undraleu Code Review Tool from Coeurdata are solutions that have been contributed by earlier stage companies that have experienced significant success and growth. It has been a pleasure helping these companies to grow and reach new customers through the Marketplace.
One of the most exciting things about reaching the 1K Block milestone is not just the amount of companies that are on the Marketplace, but the amount of solutions that have been contributed from our developer community. Blocks such as Autotype Excel Macro, Execute Workflow, and iExportNormalizer are all solutions that Informatica developers have built because it helps them in their daily activities, and through the Marketplace they have found a way to share these valuable assets with the community. In fact, over half of our solutions are free to use, which is a ringing endorsement of the power of the community and a great way to try out any number of useful solutions at no risk. By leveraging enabling technologies such as Informatica’s Cloud Platform as a Service, developers can create and share solutions more quickly and easily than ever before.
Overall, it has been an exciting ride as the Marketplace has rocketed to 1,000 Blocks in under three years, and I look forward to what the next three years has in store!
When it comes to Data Quality Delivery, the Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff (Part 6 of 6)
In my previous blog I explored the importance of a firm understanding of commercial packaged applications on data quality success. In this final post, I will examine the benefits of having operational experience as a key enabler of effective data quality delivery. (more…)
A Big Hairy Audacious Vision
Integration technologies have been around for 20 years (as long as Informatica has been in business) and have proliferated in corporate IT. We are now at an inflection point in the business needs and maturity of integration best practices which we can call Next Generation Data Integration (DI). If we’re going to talk about the next generation, then first we need to put a stake in the ground to describe the current, or prior generation. Furthermore, for it to be a “generational” change, it needs to be a significant step-function improvement in how the work is done and in the business value generated by data assets. Or as Jim Collins said in Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, we need a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. (more…)
When It Comes to Data Quality Delivery, the Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff (Part 5 of 6)
In my last blog post I discussed why an understanding of corporate financial concepts is so important to data quality success. In this blog, I will examine knowledge of commercial enterprise applications as a key enabler of effective data quality delivery.
Packaged applications for ERP, CRM, MRP, HCM, etc. were first introduced decades ago to provide tightly integrated business management functions, standardized processes and streamlined transaction processing. While one can argue whether or not these applications have lived up to all of the hyperbole, the reality is that they have been successful and are here to stay. As these backbone systems continued to evolve and mature, lessons learned from thousands of implementations were incorporated into the model solutions as best practices. These best practices spawned industry standard processes and specialized variants were born (e.g. vertical systems solutions). With the widespread adoption of these solutions, the days of custom building an application to meet the business’s needs have largely disappeared (although exceptions do persist to support specialized needs). (more…)
How to Go From Multiple Salesforce Orgs to a Single Customer View
Tracking key information across global, regional and departmental levels is often hard enough without considering multiple Salesforce orgs in your business.
If you’re here, then you may already know what a Salesforce org is, but if not, we have a definition available straight from the horse’s mouth:
“A deployment of Salesforce with a defined set of licensed users. An organization/org is the virtual space provided to an individual customer of salesforce.com. Your organization includes all of your data and applications, and is separate from all other organizations.” (more…)
Salesforce.com Recognizes Informatica for Cloud Data Integration
This week we got the news that for the fifth year in a row, Informatica Cloud has won the 2012 Salesforce.com AppExchange Customer Choice Award. Informatica Cloud Integration for Salesforce was recognized as the winner in the very crowded IT and Administration category, which includes administration and IT, data cleansing, integration, IT management and other applications.These awards are based on the number and quality of customer reviews on the AppExchange. (more…)
Data Integration Is Now A Business Problem – That’s Good
Since the advent of middleware technology in the mid-1990’s, data integration has been primarily an IT-lead technical problem. Business leaders had their hands full focusing on their individual silos and were happy to delegate the complex task of integrating enterprise data and creating one version of the truth to IT. The problem is that there is now too much data that is highly fragmented across myriad internal systems, customer/supplier systems, cloud applications, mobile devices and automatic sensors. Traditional IT-lead approaches whereby a project is launched involving dozens (or hundreds) of staff to address every new opportunity are just too slow. (more…)
When It Comes to Data Quality Delivery, the Soft Stuff Is the Hard Stuff (Part 4 of 6)
In my previous post I emphasized the importance of demonstrated project management fundamentals as a key enabler of effective data quality delivery. In this blog, I will discuss why an understanding of corporate financial concepts is so important to data quality success.
Despite the continued evolution of data management technologies and the growing awareness of the challenges and promises of data quality, business buy-in is still a major barrier to the widespread adoption of data quality as another lever to achieve operational effectiveness. One of the key reasons for limited adoption is a clear linkage between data quality and a business’s performance, which is measured in a myriad of ways from operational metrics to managerial reports to formal KPIs. But, eventually, the enterprise’s performance is summarized in three key financial statements; the income statement, the balance sheet and the cash flow statement. Positioning data quality impacts or improvements in the context of these financial statements begins to “connect the dots” and moves data quality from the abstract to the concrete and from the theoretical to the practical. To illustrate this point, let’s take a look at the impacts and implications of a simple data quality issue like “undeliverable” billing addresses. (more…)
The Value of Knowing the Value
Ever wondered if an initiative is worth the effort? Ever wondered how to quantify its worth? This is a loaded question as you may suspect but I wanted to ask it nevertheless as my team of Global Industry Consultants work with clients around the world to do just that (aka Business Value Assessment or BVA) for solutions anchored around Informatica’s products.
How far will your investment stretch?
As these solutions typically involve multiple core business processes stretching over multiple departments and leveraging a legion of technology components like ETL, metadata management, business glossary, BPM, data virtualization, legacy ERP, CRM and billing systems, it initially sounds like a daunting level of complexity. Opening this can of worms may end up in a measurement fatigue (I think I just discovered a new medical malaise.) (more…)
Process Re-Engineering Reborn
The cover of the September 10 issue of ComputerWorld caught my attention; the headline was Rebirth of Re-Engineering. I was intrigued how the analysts and pundits would spin Business Process Reengineering since I hadn’t seen the BPR acronym much since it fell out of favor around the turn of the century. As it turns out, the NEW BPR is all about Lean and Agile and is being led by IT. Wow! (more…)
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