In 2006, we unveiled a vision – a vision in which your IT would become a hybrid mixture of on-premise and cloud computing. We set off to develop two parallel tracks of integration – one in the cloud, and the other on-premise. Over the years we have continued to innovate and extend our solutions with guiding principles of simplicity, rapid deployment, unification, security and choice.

Simplicity:
Our goal was to build an award winning service that could be used by anyone to integrate Salesforce.com with any on-premise application. This year we won “best integration service” for the fourth year in a row from Salesforce.com customers.  Through our marketplace we have extended the end-points from Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle On-Demand and many other cloud or on-premise systems. The lessons we have been learnt along the way have allowed us to enhance our on-premise technology in order to provide you with easy to use web-based interfaces and self-service capabilities.

Rapid Deployment:
Everything today is about speed and data integration is no different. Our focus with cloud has been to ensure you are up and running immediately using a true SaaS solution that you can try before you buy. Our interfaces have been designed for business users with no IT knowledge – this same principle has guided our approach to self service across our entire product range and facilitated the use of data virtualization to drive agile BI.

Security:
When people talk “Cloud” they always mention integration and security as their two biggest concerns. We agree.  That’s why we designed our cloud service with security in mind.  Rather than moving data through our own multi-tenanted service, we chose to facilitate control from our service while focusing the data movement to occur within your own security protocols.  Hence we decided to drop a lightweight integration engine behind your firewall and avoid introducing ANY new security holes into your environment. Your data goes where YOU want it to go – and boy, is it going! In 2011 we moved over 200Billion rows of data for over our cloud customers.

Unification:
Our fourth design goal is to ensure unification with our traditional on-premise data integration solutions so that you, our users, can interoperate mappings from one to the other. Design a mapping on-premise and drop it into the cloud. Design a mapping in the cloud and use it on-premise to manage a simple departmental integration.  You, our customers, are now extending your own integration competency centers with our cloud service.

Choice:

Through all of this, we want to give you, our users, choice – choice relating to how and where you want to design, manage and run your integrations. Many of you are running integrations in the cloud from the cloud, AND/OR in the cloud from on-premise, AND/OR from the cloud to perform simple departmental integrations on-premise. It really doesn’t matter – the key point is that your developers are immediately cloud developers, on-premise developers and hybrid developers. You are using Informatica to manage the most complex integration challenges on-premise and are also using Informatica Cloud to run small departmental integrations.

You all tell us that your data is your most important asset. It resides on-premise, in the cloud and across the social networks. Train up through Informatica University and use your skills to maximise your return on that data from on-premise or from the cloud. It is your choice!

If you’d like to know more about our unification then why not come to Informatica World in May where you can meet and listen to customers who are doing precisely this.