Informatica Perspectives

The recent Informatica Release 8.5 launch highlighted Real-time Integration Competency Centers (ICCs) as the optimal model for successful data integration. I’d like to review the concept of the Real-time ICC and why Release 8.5 supports this advanced operational, organizational and technology model.

As data integration moves beyond the realm of data warehousing into operational integration, real-time and data services use cases have exploded in importance to the business and necessitated stronger, unified infrastructure for IT to meet the challenge. Philip Russom, Senior Manager, TDWI Research captures this trend specifically in his quote on Release 8.5.

"The movement toward real-time data access and delivery has been the most influential trend in data integration this decade. The trend has enabled user organizations to initiate a variety of valuable real-time practices, including operational BI, real-time data warehousing, on-demand computing, performance monitoring, just-in-time inventory, and so on. And the trend has led vendors to extend their data integration products, so that many functions operate in real-time, not just batch. Informatica 8.5 is a great example of this trend, because it’s re-architected to support more real-time and on-demand functions for data integration, changed data capture, and data quality."Real-time ICCs are about leveraging a single, complete platform for all your data integration and data quality requirements and moving batch processes that need data latency reduction to real-time or near real-time quickly and easily. I touched on the need to support batch and real-time on a common platform in my last post, Real-time Data – A Data Integration Challenge. How does Release 8.5 address this challenge?

For one, Release 8.5 has a unique dynamic concurrency mechanism for data services that automatically spawns request receivers (or workflow hubs in Informatica-speak) and workflow instances to handle incoming load. This mechanism is configurable at run-time due to the split between design and run-time in the Informatica platform architecture. Nothing needs to be accounted for during the design process to take advantage of this new scalability dimension. As load subsides, the system automatically takes the additional resources offline, further automating the process.

Release 8.5 also simplifies the exposing of existing business logic as data services through deployment wizards. This allows the Real-time ICC to publish services more easily and streamline the migration of batch solutions to real-time. Customer name and address validation/enhancement or product code lookup and confirmation are two excellent use cases for this capability.

Release 8.5 also brings data integration and data quality more tightly together. Informatica Data Quality 8.5 leverages the scalability and web services capabilities of the underlying Informatica platform. This puts data quality into “operational mode” through data services-based point of entry deployment. As noted by many experts on data quality, preventing problems with data when it enters the enterprise provides the most financial return. Doing it in a low-impact manner to existing applications is the key, and this new capability provides that for the Real-time ICC.

I’ve highlighted three new capabilities of Release 8.5 that help our customers deploy data integration in their Real-time ICC for business benefits. Not every organization is aligned or has the resources for this model. But I’ve found that even taken on a small scale, customers who take this concept to heart show tremendous return on their investment and deliver more for the business than ever thought possible.