Informatica Perspectives

I am a technology opportunist. I stay away from unproven segments when they are overhyped with no sustainable business model, or too amorphous with definitions and segmentations debated at every turn. But I like to get in early enough so that we have the opportunity to reshape and redefine the requirements to lead the segment. So I made a point to visit the Dreamforce Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this year to hear directly from the customers and partners to assess the maturity of cloud computing. The timing was good as Informatica had just released Informatica Cloud 9 (Learn more about the Informatica Cloud Platform).

At the show, I had a chance to catch up with John Bair, CTO of Launchpoint. Launchpoint offers cloud-based information management services. Since John built Amazon’s EDW in its early days, was a Chief Technologist for HP and CTO for Knightsbridge, I thought he would be a great person to bounce ideas off and get a sanity check on where we are as an industry.

According to John, there are two categories of clients that Launchpoint attracts. The first group is the CIOs who are mandated to deliver a cloud strategy for business. CIOs are careful about outsourcing decisions, including “cloud strategy outsourcing”, seeking rather to be on top of the current adoption trend and best practices. This IT-led cloud strategy appears more focused on hyper-efficient data centers and cloud to/from premise architecture, enabling virtualization, dynamic provisioning and resource optimization. The second category is business executives including CMOs, VP of operations, heads of business units, etc, to leverage the cloud services directly. They are tired of long development cycles, high capital costs, and maintenance headaches. They are keen on accessing IT services over the Internet without having to own the computing resources or even think about IT. For data integration and data quality, Informatica supports both IT and business needs at various stages of maturity and architectural progressions with flexible configurability and time-based model and thus is unique in the cloud offerings.

If you are a small- to medium-sized business, it makes more sense for you to tap usage-based IT and lean towards the “rented” applications and infrastructures. If your environment is large and complex, your focus is on how to extend the existing infrastructures or replace some of them to make IT more efficient with cloud computing. For instance, instead of building expensive fail-over and recovery infrastructures, organizations can sign up for auxiliary, elastic scaling environments in the event of an outage or periodic usage spikes, like an insurance policy. Based on my conversations with people at Dreamforce, I believe that this hybrid internal and external cloud model will be here to stay for at least 5-7 years or longer. (Watch the Crossing the IT – Business Divide Dreamforce 2009 presentation.)

So whether you are in IT or business, it is an opportune time to review your current environment and see what pains can be resolved by cloud computing in the next 1-3 year horizon. What “commoditized” activities can be in the cloud to focus more on other “differentiating” projects that directly help your company innovate? What “turn-key” solutions are you looking for to accelerate on-boarding and minimize administration costs?