Category Archives: Mergers and Acquisitions
Answering One Simple Question Shouldn’t Take Six Long Weeks
The CEO of a global technology products manufacturer had a simple question: “I need a list of our top 400 global customers by revenue—immediately.”
The boss got his answer—six weeks later.
That’s how long it took the company’s IT team to root through disparate applications, engage data owners in various business units and geographies, and manually reconcile granular data to answer a basic question that bears directly on the bottom line.
It’s a true story, and one with a happy ending. This multibillion-dollar company implemented Informatica MDM for multidomain master data management (MDM). It exploited the solution’s capabilities and followed best practices in aggressively tackling business-critical data challenges.
Learn about the key business problems solved by MDM as well as best practices in our white paper, “A GPS for Your MDM Journey”. (more…)
What Are Your Legacy Applications Costing You?
Has your application portfolio changed over the past 10 years? Have you migrated to newer systems and infrastructure to make your company more competitive? Has your organization gone through mergers or acquisitions where you ‘inherited’ additional applications? Over time, even though these applications may not be used to support current business processes, they are kept on life support simply for occasional access requirements or maybe to meet retention compliance.
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Calling All Architects – Get Engaged in THE Most Important Discussion on Data Services and Data Integration
Do you believe that a solid and well thought through data architecture for efficiently accessing, integrating and processing data is foundational to maximizing business value? Do you want to hear from your peers in the industry, about how they are solving data integration challenges such as speeding-up time to delivery of data, data quality and infrastructure complexity?
If yes, would you like to join the discussion on a data architecture that can help composite applications and portals to efficiently leverage timely, trustworthy and relevant data in an SOA? Or, an architecture that can complement existing data architecture to ensure that business intelligence reports can quickly leverage data that is not in the data warehouse?
Informatica World 2010 – Time To Plan Your Trip
Informatica World is back and it’s time to plan your trip to Washington DC in November. I’ve been told the weather will be balmy, the evenings serene and the conference will be crammed full of information and knowledge. You can find the conference web-site live at www.informatica.com/world and there are a few things I wanted to draw your attention to:
- Call for papers is open. So if you have a great idea, or a great experience that you would like to share – please submit a paper. We’ll review the paper submissions soon so it’s time to act now.
- Innovation Award nominations are also open. If you know an organization which has done something special with our software, then now is the time to acknowledge them.
- Super Saver registration is open today. Sign up now and you’ll be paying only $795 for all conference sessions, the technology fair, hands-on labs, special events and conference materials. (more…)
Rethink Data Virtualization – Get All the Data You Need And Trust NOW!
Businesses have seen great success in using virtualization to gain greater efficiencies from their hardware and network resources. Now, the concept of virtualization has been extended to the data layer.
The bottom line is about providing a logical abstraction of all underlying data, so that it appears as one data source to consuming applications.
However, given that your data is often distributed, heterogeneous, and often error-ridden, it’s not enough to simply federate it and pass this off as data virtualization. The data you deliver to your end users must be data they can trust, however, traditional data federation approaches seem to ignore this fact. They simply propagate inconsistent and inaccurate data, quickly. So where is the gap?
Using Data Subset For Divestiture
As the market continues to consolidate and companies sell off assets, not only are the physical assets separated and sold, so are the digital assets – or liabilities. John Schmidt covered it in one of his recent blogs.
When the information to be separated and sold resides in a database, you need to understand the data model and determine what master data, or reference data, and transactions belong to the new company. In the case of separating master data this may involve understanding the relationships between multiple systems to make sure that when the data is moved into the new company, it maintains context, is accurate and complete. With transactional data, you need to know the tables and rows that comprise a complete transaction so that when data is moved, no orphaned rows are left behind.
Why Did We Acquire Siperian? To Give You A Competitive Edge!
Last week we completed the acquisition of Siperian – the proven leader in multi-domain MDM. This is our fourth acquisition in the last 12 months and potentially the single most important acquisition that Informatica has ever done since moving beyond ETL with the acquisition of Similarity Systems in 2006. You can read the press release about Siperian here, and watch a video of my colleague Ivan Chong, General Manager of our Data Quality Business Unit, here.
There has also been a lot of talk about the acquisition in the last few days – such as the commentary from Forrester research analyst Rob Karel, Ventana Research analyst Mark Smith, or Lorraine Lawson over at ITBusinessEdge. However, I wanted to give my perspective on why I believe this is important to you, our customers: (more…)
Informatica 9 Sweet Spots
There’s been a lot of hoopla this week about Informatica 9, and rightfully so. A lot of people at Informatica have been working on this release for a long time, and we’re all excited about the potential it has to help our customers get to the next level. Informatica 9 can be used in many different ways to help organizations deliver more value from their data to the business. But there are several business use cases which are really a sweet spot for Informatica 9, based on the traction we have seen already with real-world customers.
- Regulatory/compliance/financial reporting. Informatica’s heritage is in data warehousing, which is a fundamental underpinning to reporting systems. But even with all the great advances that both business intelligence and data integration technologies have achieved, CFOs are still challenged in many ways. Hidden data quality issues put them at risk for non-compliance, leading to penalties, brand degradation, or even jail time. Minor changes in data sources—say a business rule that has been changed or a format has been adjusted—if not handled correctly and quickly also can mean that reports are incomplete or erroneous. And it simply takes too long for any new sources of relevant information to be incorporated into the reporting structure. Informatica 9 can really help in these areas by making data quality issues much more visible, and by drastically reducing the amount of time it takes to accommodate changes in the data underlying the reports. (more…)
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