Informatica Perspectives

A customer commented on this to me the other day – "your data is your business".  Two meanings in one phrase and eloquently stating the modern world that we live in today.  We have evolved computing in many ways over the last 20 years.  Today, with the launch of Informatica 9, we are evolving the computing model one further time because, quite simply “Your data is YOUR business” and "Your data IS your business".

It’s your organization’s most important proprietary asset. Are you really managing it that way?

The answer for most companies is “No”.

So how have we arrived at this place we find ourselves in, and why do we need another solution?

Quite simply, because we need to focus on driving the most competitive advantage out of our data.  We’ve become addicted to our computers and we have built systems for the business time, after time, after time.  Today most business users are presented with numerous applications that purport to provide the most timely, relevant and trustworthy data.  The problem is, they don’t.  There, I’ve said it – computer systems today cannot be trusted, they do not deliver the data that the business user wants and they do not provide it in the timely way that business users need it – no wonder business users are fleeing to the clouds!  The trouble is that we are about to make the same mistake again – numerous new systems now running on other people’s infrastructure with multiple versions of the truth.

Just think about it for a minute – which version of “Customer record” do you really, absolutely trust?  Is it the one that comes from your old creaking order processing system?  Or is it the one in your sales support system, or maybe the one in your CRM, or your financial system, or the one in that custom built application that went live last month but still needs tweaking, or is it the version in your new cloud-based SaaS application running .. well … no idea where really!

In fact, we have ended up with an IT hairball that is costly to maintain, precarious to modify and fragile.  This house WILL come tumbling down if we don’t do something about it.  SOA was going to fix the problems – but the original designers forgot about the data.

You see, our IT infrastructure has become commoditized – it no longer matters where the IT infrastructure is.  On-premise, hosted on Amazon or underneath the latest fancy cloud computing service.  Indeed, applications are becoming commoditized.  It’s the data that matters, it’s the data that provides the competitive advantage, it’s the data that ultimately lets you understand who your customers are, what they have, how they work and what they can buy.  It’s the data that allows you to run marketing campaigns to promote your goods and services, it’s the data that is moved between enterprises, it’s the data that represents health care records, it’s the data, it's the data, it's the data.

As one of our salespeople so eloquently put it to me, “Follow the data - it’s all about the data”.

Today with Informatica 9 we are launching an infrastructure platform that will, quite literally, transform your business and transform your world because, for the first time ever, you can really focus on becoming a data-driven enterprise.  It is designed to help IT deliver timely, trustworthy and relevant data to the business.  This is not a job for IT alone – it is about the Business and IT collaborating together more effectively, driving out data quality issues and delivering data to the enterprise in the most timely and applicable format – whether that is in traditional IT systems or in the internet cloud.

Welcome to Informatica 9, welcome to YOUR data.