Category Archives: Real-Time
It’s Time to Change the Game for Application Data Integration
This week at Informatica World 2013, the Data Integration Hub (DIH) was announced. It is the first out-of-the-box application for managing data access and distribution across large and complex infrastructures. It simplifies application data integration projects through the innovative use of publish and subscribe methods to decouple source and destination applicaitons. Of course we are very excited about the DIH but why should you be? Well, let me tell you a story…
Informatica Ultra Messaging: Great Performance . . . At Lower Cost?
Printed words are good, but pictures and sound are better. Watch the video below for a quick summation of how Informatica Ultra Messaging can help your business:
- Increase application performance and throughput
- Reduce fixed and operational costs
- Increase capacity
- Reduce single points of failure
- Increase scalability, reliability, and availability
For more information, have a look at: Ultra Messaging, Better Value with Better Technology.
The Freshest Data Makes the Best Business Decisions
There’s no denying that business continues to accelerate its pace, and that the luxury of using historical data for business intelligence (BI) and planning is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Today, businesses need immediate insight into rapidly changing data in order to survive and thrive. Data that’s even a few hours old—let alone a few days old—is largely useless. But most current information architectures today still only provide data that is a day, a week, or sometimes as much as a month old.
This leaves most BI, reporting, and analytics systems to operate without up-to-date data from operational systems, data that’s fundamental to making informed decisions about the business. To operate at the speed of business, it’s imperative that executives and decision makers have ready access to fresh information at all times, delivered continuously and automatically without impact on operational systems.
More and more organizations have found the answer in data replication. Data replication allows you to work with and make the best business decisions based on the freshest data drawn from all your operational systems. It delivers this current, up-to-date data in a seamless and non-intrusive manner, empowering you to operate at the speed of your business without constraints. It also automatically delivers this data wherever it’s needed – for operational intelligence, as well as operational use – without direct impact.
This unique “data-on-demand” approach removes the constraints of stale, old information and enables powerful outcomes for business initiatives. Fresh, current data drives new thinking across the enterprise, and can help organizations to:
- Increase revenue, delight customers, and outshine the competition
- Improve the quality and efficiency of business decisions
- Standardize on a single reliable and scalable solution that lowers costs and removes complexity
At Informatica, we’ve seen numerous customers implement Informatica Data Replication to deliver this fresh, up-to-date data for operational intelligence, reporting, and analytics, and report tremendous positive changes to their business. Some examples of customers using Informatica Data Replication with great success are:
- Westlake Financial Systems saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and improved its profitability and customer satisfaction through a more effective payment collection system
- Optus Australia increased both revenues and customer satisfaction by providing calling plan access, alerting, and self-service upgrades directly to its customer base
- A major national pharmacy chain accelerated and improved health care decision making across the business and increased agility and responsiveness to its customers, resulting in higher customer satisfaction while driving down the cost of technology
Is your business ready to make the leap to true operational intelligence using the freshest data to make your business decisions? Do you want to understand more about the impact that this kind of insight can make to your business?
If yes, please join us for a discussion with two business executives who have seen the impact in their own and their customers’ businesses using data replication on August 28 at 10 am Pacific. You can register using the link below.
Bad Business Decision? Blame Stale Data – Register Today
The freshest data does make the best business decisions. We look forward to your joining and participating in the discussion.
More Trading Firms Using a “Trade Smarter, Not Harder” Strategy
There are lots of ways to run a trading firm.
Some firms use a strategy centered around high frequency or algorithmic trading, which are similar in that having the best technology and writing the fastest trading applications is essential.
At the other end of the spectrum, some firms employ only human traders, using a traditional buy-and-hold strategy, expecting to hold the security for months or even years before moving it.
But in between these two ends of the spectrum, there exists a hybrid that uses electronic trading with a bit of buy-and-hold added in. Some call this blend “trade smarter, not harder”.
Instead of competing with other traders to get the absolute lowest price, this strategy prioritizes on making better decisions by doing “pre-trade analytics” on historical and financial data.
Electronic Trading Systems Moving to the Cloud
More and more business applications are moving from the desktop to the cloud, and electronic trading applications are no different.
Over the last five or ten years, application vendors have established several advantages of running major applications, even mission-critical applications like salesforce.com, over the cloud.
These advantages include:
- Easier and smoother upgrades, which provides much better adaptability and agility in the face of changing market and business conditions, plus a better user experience,
- Better scalability, with newer technology advances, and
- Better portability across a wide array of device types, including smartphones and tablets (especially in the last 2-3 years).
Recent improvements in Web technology, such as HTML5 WebSockets, are helping to speed this transition along by providing several throughput and latency advantages over earlier iterations of Web technology, and even over native Windows applications. Now, application architects can freely choose the technology that provides a better path for growth, agility, and scalability, which is often a Cloud-based solution.
As I write this, a few of our customers who provide electronic trading solutions to their clients are making the strategic move to develop a next generation application based in the Cloud. The main driver for one customer was to be able to take on more clients more quickly and therefore grow the business faster by increasing marginal revenue and profitability. They found that the list of challenges with a thick desktop client to be just too big for growing the business as quickly as they wanted to — or needed to.
Messaging middleware, especially peer-to-peer solutions such as Informatica Ultra Messaging, can be a very important piece of a Cloud-based application. The peer-to-peer “nothing in the middle” model provides applications not just ultra-high performance (whether for high throughput or low latency), but also near-linear scalability, true 24×7 reliability and availability, and business and IT agility. These qualities tie directly to the advantages listed above.
Cloud-based applications, of course, must also contend with the Internet and all that comes with that: support for various browsers and platforms (and versions of each), scalability and bandwidth issues, and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. New web technologies like HTML5 WebSockets from Kaazing are best positioned to take care of the path from server to the smartphone or tablet, and with JMS connectivity to Ultra Messaging on the back end, can provide a Cloud-based application with a lean, scalable and agile infrastructure, usually with less hardware.
For more, please see our 2011 Efficiency series (#1, #2, #3) on our Perspectives blog, or whitepapers such as Modern Messaging Middleware for Big Data in Motion or Enterprise Messaging Data for the Web.
Real-Time Risk Analytics with Ultra Messaging and Data Transformation
To follow up on our recent blog about B2B Data Transformation and Ultra Messaging Cache Option, we would now like to discuss the same topic within the Capital Markets.
One up-and-coming use case in the Capital Markets that we are excited about is front office real-time risk analytics on streaming market data, to decrease risk by informing traders in real time about potential changes to trading strategies, based on the most up-to-date data possible.
Informatica Cloud Customer Success
There’s been a lot written about the importance of customer adoption and success to the software as a service (SaaS) model – there’s even a manifesto and a Bill of Rights! Last month, Informatica Cloud received the Bronze Stevie Award for customer support. One of the drivers for this achievement was not only great front-line customer service from a world-class support organization (they even support trial accounts!), but also the establishment of a customer success team, which is run by Bryan Plaster. I sat down with Bryan to discuss his views on the importance of customer adoption to any cloud computing application, platform or infrastructure initiative, as well as some specifics on how Informatica Cloud approaches customer success. (more…)
Informatica Cloud Recognized by #Salesforce Customers for Data Integration
I’m pleased to announce that Informatica Cloud has once again been honored by salesforce.com customers with the AppExchange Best of ‘11 Award for Integration. Based entirely on user reviews for the Informatica Cloud listing on AppExchange, it’s clear that when it comes to Salesforce CRM and Force.com data integration requirements, Informatica Cloud has become the clear choice for salesforce.com customers. This is the fourth year in a row that Informatica Cloud has achieved this honor, and our free Data Loader Service continues to be the all-time most popular application on the AppExchange. (more…)
Replication and the Order of the Phoenix
Informatica Data Replication has triggered a lot of interest and also a lot of questions about why replication is seeing such a resurgence in the market today. The answer is simple: the same conditions that caused its creation for mission-critical operational systems back in the early 1990′s are now happening with data warehousing as well. (more…)
Social, Mobile, Cloud, Big Data and … Agile BI
I just came back from MicroStrategy World. There were many conversations about social, mobile, cloud and big data. There was strong interest in cloud, clear adoption of mobile, and some big data adoption. eHarmony had a great presentation about how they handle big data with Informatica, and how they’re starting to use Hadoop with Informatica HParser running on Hadoop for processing JSON.
But that wasn’t the number one conversation. The one topic that everyone was interested in – and I talked to nearly 100 customers and partners over four days – was creating new reports faster, or Agile BI. (more…)
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