Category Archives: Enterprise Data Management
New Methods to Optimize Data Warehouse Performance and Lower Costs
Data warehouses tend to grow very quickly because they integrate data from multiple sources and maintain years of historical data for analytics. A number of our customers have data warehouses in the hundreds of terabytes to petabytes range. Managing such a large amount of data becomes a challenge. How do you curb runaway costs in such an environment? Completing maintenance tasks within the prescribed window and ensuring acceptable performance are also big challenges.
We have provided best practices to archive aged data from data warehouses. Archiving data will keep the production data size at almost a constant level, reducing infrastructure and maintenance costs, while keeping performance up. At the same time, you can still access the archived data directly if you really need to from any reporting tool. Yet many are loath to move data out of their production system. This year, at Informatica World, we’re going to discuss another method of managing data growth without moving data out of the production data warehouse. I’m not going to tell you what this new method is, yet. You’ll have to come and learn more about it at my breakout session at Informatica World: What’s New from Informatica to Improve Data Warehouse Performance and Lower Costs.
I look forward to seeing all of you at Aria, Las Vegas next month. Also, I am especially excited to see our ILM customers at our second Product Advisory Council again this year.
Zoom in to zoom out: The big picture in information management
We’ve been spending a lot of time here at Informatica preparing for Informatica World. That means taking a big step back to take the broader view of all the change happening in the world of information management and data integration today. New data sources and new data technologies are emerging almost daily, and the pace is only accelerating. Our mission is to help our customers and our market not only cope with all this change, but to harness it for competitive advantage.
But even as we’re putting together the latest take on the big picture, we’re also zooming in on the technology “secret sauce” which makes it possible to manage all this change. Informatica has the “secret sauce”– it’s what makes our architecture unique, and it’s what allows us to deliver the most value to our customers.
I’m not going to tell you what the “secret sauce” is now– you have to come to Informatica World to find out. Our executives including Sohaib Abbasi, Ivan Chong and James Markarian will be laying out the big picture, as well as revealing the “secret sauce.” And I’ll be diving in to more details in my Informatica Platform overview breakout session.
I hope to see you in Vegas next month. (by the way, the special hotel rate ends this Friday May 3rd, so register today!)
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…)
Top Seven Favorite Quotes From Lean Integration
The Kindle has a nice feature that is virtually impossible with paper books; it combines the highlighted sections of text (in essence an electronic yellow highlight marker) from all readers and identifies the passages with the greatest number. The View Popular Highlights function shows you passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. Here are the top seven highlighted quotes from Lean Integration[1] as of the end of 2012. (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…)
2013 Cloud Data Management Predictions
Ok, I know it’s a little late to post 2013 technology predictions, but with so many good ones published already, I figured I’d sandbag a little and not only post a few of my own but also share a few of my favorites so far. For me, it starts with Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends presentation. 2013 is going to be a year of “re-imagining” enterprise software, from social, to mobile, to cloud, to Big Data and Analytics.
I summarized my 2012 predictions in an earlier post and Informatica already posted some great predictions from the world of data. Here are my 2013 cloud data management predictions. (more…)
Is Your Center of Excellence Excellent?
A CIO told me “After five years with an integration Center of Excellence, I expect them to be excellent. They aren’t.” But so what? The IT organization has lots of things to focus on. Is integration excellence really essential? (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…)
Data Governance for Big Data: It’s Even More Critical Now
Big data and related technologies such as Hadoop present significant opportunities and challenges to businesses. Nearly everybody in IT reports that they are actively evaluating big data technologies. And, just as you would expect, they are in a variety of stages of implementation. So, who has time to think about data governance when dealing with a massive change like this?
First, you have to get your hands around the new technology, right? Actually, this is exactly the right time to think about data governance for big data; before the wild, untamed data from outside the company starts getting mixed with your potentially more trustworthy, tamed, internal data. (more…)
Informatica Advances Cloud Integration and Data Quality
Informatica Cloud Winter 2013 has arrived. This is the fourteenth release of the company’s award-winning family of cloud integration applications and integration platform as a service (iPaaS), which has now expanded to include Informatica Cloud Master Data Management (MDM). In this post I’ll provide an overview of the new cloud integration and cloud data quality capabilities. Be sure to register for a 30 day trial and/or attend the release webinar on Thursday to see Informatica Cloud in action.
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