Informatica Perspectives

As a follow up to my Alliances momentum post, I wanted to call attention to a recent OEM partners press release highlighting recent wins with OEM ISV partners leveraging Informatica for their own applications, be they "in the cloud" or on-premise installation based. Much of my time in Worldwide Alliances is spent working with prospective ISVs explaining the benefits of taking a 'buy' approach versus ‘building’ a hand-coded solution for data integration.

I continue to see market evidence that also explains our momentum. If you read the interesting October 20^th InformationWeek cover article entitled, "SaaS Under Stress; Integration's the next big test for software as a service", you’ll understand why SaaS software providers are trying to fill this large gap in their offerings.

This makes perfect sense when you take a step back and think about the moving parts of a SaaS application, namely data that needs to be exchanged between a SaaS provider and the end user's internal or premised applications. In my experience, early entry SaaS companies didn't highlight, or even want to discuss those issues in selling process and downplayed the role of data integration required for success.

I do believe the tide is turning. Many SaaS companies are coming to grips with the realities of integrating their applications into customer infrastructure and embracing data integration as a primary pillar of their offerings. Many of our current SaaS partners/customers are using their choice of Informatica to solve the data integration SaaS challenge as an advantage in the selling process. Who wouldn't want to know that the industry's best technology is part of the complete solution?

Whether it's using Informatica OnDemand or hosting a multi-tenant Informatica Data Integration environment, Informatica has a compelling solution for SaaS vendors. I’ll be writing more about Informatica’s advantages in this area in future entries, so stay tuned!