Informatica Perspectives

If you’re in the market for a SaaS integration tool, then you’ve probably come across one or more of the following marketing messages: "Integrate in days", "Designed for non-programmers”, "Configuration, not coding approach"… which, of course, are all messages associated with one of the main value propositions of Software-as-a-Service: Ease of use and rapid deployment.

The notion of an integration tool that has a graphical user interface, is configuration based (metadata driven), easy to maintain, and requires no programming skills is not new. Those of you who were involved with DataMart projects in the mid to late 90’s may still remember Informatica’s PowerMart 3.0 product which was the predecessor to our current PowerCenter product.

It had all those characteristics, and was quite revolutionary at the time. Its target audience was data analysts or a data warehousing administrator who had a good understanding of their organization’s data structures and business processes, but didn’t have the deep programming skills of an IT specialist.

I remember one of my early clients, a data analyst at a local University telling me after they purchased the product: "I can now do in two days, what used to take us more than two weeks to accomplish with scripting and SQL programming."

Ironically, their use case was not data warehousing related, but it was a data synchronization problem between a legacy student registration application and a more modern system based on Oracle. When I asked him what he liked most about the tool, he said “ease of use and maintainability”.

Today, SaaS applications and cloud computing are sweeping the software industry, and gaining traction across companies of all sizes. Leading web 2.0 companies like Google, Amazon.com and eBay have leveraged SaaS and the web to deliver powerful applications with extremely easy to use, maintenance free, self-service interfaces. Salesforce.com has become the first $1Billion/year commercial SaaS application company by providing an intuitive, web based CRM solution that could be deployed by line-of- business employees with minimal, and sometimes no support from their own IT organization.

In a similar way, SaaS customers are discovering that they need integration solutions that are easy to use and maintain in order to accomplish rapid deployment and fully experience the benefits of SaaS. This is especially true for small and mid-size companies that have limited IT resources.

PowerCenter is a perfect fit for enterprise customers looking to deploy SaaS applications as proven by successful implementations at nearly 100 of salesforce.com’s enterprise customers. It is easier to use and maintain, and requires fewer resources to configure and operate compared to hand coding or EAI/Messaging based integration solutions. In addition, PowerCenter’s ability to process large volumes of data in real-time make it the ideal technology for implementing master data synchronization tasks, which happen to be most common integration requirement in Salesforce CRM implementations.

PowerCenter however was not designed for small to mid-size companies, and is probably too complex for their requirements. For those companies, Informatica has leveraged modern SaaS technology to build a new Integration-as-a Service solution that economically satisfies their requirements without sacrificing quality, scalability, or the ease of use that is necessary for broad adoption.

Options we could have considered to address the challenge in early 2006 included:

1. Host a copy of PowerCenter for each customer (old ASP model) and focus our resources on sales & marketing efforts. This would have been the fastest and easiest way for us to go to market with a cloud offering, but we knew that such a model would be too expensive to maintain and would ultimately not scale. It would also not provide the ease of use required by line-of-business users.
2. Turn PowerCenter’s mapping designer into a true multi-tenant application and allow customers to access it on a subscription basis over the internet. This could have been a viable solution for systems integrators and IT personnel, but we felt that it would still be too complex for analysts and line-of-business users who were the main drivers behind the SaaS revolution.
3. Build a true SaaS Integration platform capable of supporting turnkey integration applications that are multi-tenant, require zero maintenance, and designed specifically for line-of-business users. This approach would be the hardest and most time consuming to deliver, because it would require us to design and build completely new web based applications in addition to a hosted back end platform for delivering integration as a service.

As you may have realized by visiting the Informatica On Demand web site we chose the third.

In building our offering, we were able to greatly simplify the user experience and time to delivery by constraining the integration functionality for specific uses, and providing turnkey solutions to the most common tasks that Salesforce CRM administrators and analysts typically deal with (data loading, extraction, synchronization, replication and quality), while ensuring that these solutions could be expanded and customized by a more sophisticated IT user. Early results seem to indicate that we made the right choice. Informatica On Demand Data Loader was voted “Best data integration tool of 2008” by salesforce.com customers for its ease of use and simplicity.

By building a state of the art Integration-as-a Service solution that has a modern web 2.0 interface, and leverages PowerCenter’s proven back-end technology, we were able to simplify ease of use, and expedite on-ramping of new customers by an order of magnitude compared to traditional integration tools like PowerCenter or EAI technologies without compromising quality or scalability.

Our experience over the past 15 years has taught us that no single approach to integration will satisfy every customer’s needs, but Informatica’s On Demand Integration Services, combined with the market leading PowerCenter product, allow customers to scale with their SaaS deployment. You can now have your cake and eat it too!