2009 was a banner year for Informatica's OEM business. We grew the number of ISVs (Software Companies), BPOs (Business Process Outsourcers) and SaaS/Cloud providers who use the Informatica platform as part of/with their offerings by 24 new partners. What was really interesting throughout 2009 was the variety of use cases across the spectrum of new partners addressed by various platform capabilities. You can read about this breadth and more details on specific examples in "2009 OEM Momentum".
For software, application or service providers faced with data acquisition, data conversion, data quality, data exchange, or other related challenges in the cloud or on premise, using the Informatica platform can alleviate that pain and allow them to focus on their core business.
With the delivery of Informatica 9 and the acquisition of Siperian, I expect that variety and growth to continue in 2010!
Informatica's annual sales kickoff took place in mid-January in Las Vegas. In attendance were members of over 39 partner companies, a 50% increase from 2008. I'd like to thank the attending partners, their presence and enthusiasm helped make this the most successful kickoff in Informatica history! We also recognized our top alliances partners with our annual Informatica Alliances Partner Awards. Congratulations to Accenture, Cognizant, HP and Teradata, our 2009 award winners.
Informatica 9 debuted last November to tremendous partner support, especially around the new Data Quality capabilities and their applicability to partner solutions. This release has been in the hands of partners in early access/beta or in a generally available version for six months now.
In 2010, we are anticipating SI practices to transition to Informatica 9 Data Quality and our OEM/ISV partners pick up this release for their offerings. Here’s some early feedback that I thought I’d share: [Read more]
Last Tuesday’s virtual launch of Informatica 9 was the most widely attended and covered Informatica event ever due in large part to our partners’ overwhelming support. Informatica’s partners proved themselves to be truly an extension of our own organization. Not only did we have record partner participation in the form of validating quotes for the event site and press releases that went out, our partners referred over 2,500 of their own customers to the launch event! This type of momentum is a great example of both the level of commitment we have worked to create within our network of partners and validation of the fact that our partners truly believe in the central objective of the Informatica 9 platform – to deliver relevant, trusted data when, where, and how it’s needed to support the changing needs of customers. 2009 has been a very successful year for Informatica, for the INFORM partner program and for the majority of our partner community. We look forward to the opportunities that 2010 will bring as we continue to build on the momentum created by the launch into the end of the year and beyond when we in the Alliances Organization will focus our efforts to fully enable our partner community to bring Informatica 9 to the market place through a combination of educational web seminars, demos, hands-on technical training and live events.
If you haven’t heard, HP and Informatica announced an expanded partnership last week detailing the choice of Informatica’s data integration, data quality and identity resolution products for a new portfolio of integrated business intelligence solutions that HP will sell through their BIS or Business Intelligence Services organization. Having been involved with the HP-Informatica partnership since it was formed in 1997, this announcement is particularly gratifying as it shows how successful the historic collaboration has been between the two companies and offers potential for a new generation of joint customers facing ever broader data-related challenges. Of particular note from the announcement is the breadth of solution areas including MDM, Information Quality, Data Integration and solutions with HP Neoview. I look forward to detailing customer successes as they emerge from these joint offerings, stay tuned!
Ah, the Nokia 6160. In 2001, I loved that phone. I could drop it and it still worked. Have you seen one lately? I haven’t in years!
Let’s examine the evolution of the cell phone. If you consider all the necessities added over time, the addition of usable email, text messaging, calendar management even multi-media capabilities, the evolved cell phone aka the “mobile device” is now critical to delivering against ever pressing productivity goals. It’s also used in many different and valuable ways by a wider audience than ever. [Read more]
I recently attended HP’s Software Universe and a big theme of the conference was ‘winning the war of managing application performance’. Having spent time walking the solutions showcase floor, speaking to attendees and SI partners, I can say this is still a really big deal. As the growth and size of production applications at the core of business continues, organizations are faced with a significant and costly challenge that will only continue to get worse.
Another audience in attendance, namely members of the QA and testing teams responsible for ensuring the quality of production applications, building and protecting realistic testing environments for their internal applications is another huge challenge. These team members need to sub-set and create test environments without impacting production systems performance or requiring a duplicate hardware footprint. Masking and protecting the data once it’s pulled from production is also a necessary step of ensuring control of the information housed within these critical systems.
It was refreshing to hear these challenges from real practitioners trying to solve problems for some of the largest organization in the world. Their pain validated the need for Application ILM solutions. These are real production-impacting issues that if not addressed will have huge cost and productivity impacts. If you’re an Informatica partner or practitioner, expanding your knowledge of these new offerings might make you a hero! I urge you to take a look.
As a follow up to my last Alliances Momentum post, I wanted to call attention to a recent press release highlighting Zyme Solutions, one of our OEM partners and a leading provider of hosted channel intelligence services to the high-tech industry.
Zyme is a great example of an Informatica OEM partner that hand-coded data integration initially but to scale their business, made a buy decision and purchased/deployed Informatica’s platform for address their data integration requirements.
To start, for Zyme’s "manageable" number of data feeds and clients, hand-coding was sufficient. But Zyme had aspirations to scale their business and foresaw needs to significantly improve customer on-boarding time and to be able to process millions of transactions per week from over 140 countries around the world. And each new customer would potentially provide data in new/different formats across a wider set of industry standard message types, XML, spreadsheets and free-form text files.
The Informatica’ platform addressed these needs for Zyme and also allowed them to improve the data quality during the data processing lifecycle.
You may be facing similar challenges, either in scaling your business, improving your customer experience, broadening your market offering or other means of expansion. If you’re at a similar precipice, Informatica can help.
If you work for an ISV or a SaaS provider, there is a good chance you or members of your team have spent countless hours and precious resources hand-coding solutions to your data integration challenges. If you haven’t, great! If you have, you have a chance to save money and resources while gaining a competitive advantage by leveraging Informatica for your data integration needs.
As noted in the October 20th InformationWeek cover entitled, "SaaS Under Stress"; Integration is the next big test for software as a service. By ensuring data integration is an integral part of your application and architecture, you can alleviate stress.
It’s been 12 months since the launch of Informatica’s “Data Quality Assessment Partner Program” and I thought I’d share some of the progress, success and observations.
In working with the four partner Systems Integrator (SI) companies currently enrolled in the program, we’ve seen a significant increase in customer attention and need for Data Quality in a variety of project areas including Compliance initiatives, Master Data Management, Data Migration in the context of application delivery and Data Warehousing/BI.
The program provides SI partners access to free software for the assessment duration, a “pluggable” delivery methodology with sample deliverables and a robust enablement framework customized for partners on the program. Each portion or asset of the program has advanced to maximize SI success and thus value to their end user clients. [Read more]
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2009 was a banner year for Informatica's OEM business. We grew the number of ISVs (Software Companies), BPOs (Business Process Outsourcers) and SaaS/Cloud providers who use the Informatica platform as part of/with their offerings by 24 new partners. What was really interesting throughout 2009 was the variety of use cases across the spectrum of new partners addressed by various platform capabilities. You can read about this breadth and more details on specific examples in "2009 OEM Momentum".
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