Informatica Perspectives

An Integration Competency Center (ICC) can save a ton of money.  You've all seen references from industry analysts singing the praises of Business Intelligence Centers of Excellence (COEs) or ICCs, but most of them are either qualitative statements or, if they have been quantified, they refer to aggregate industry numbers.  For example, here are a couple of headlines from a quick Google search: "Enterprise Business Integration Market to Reach $3.9 Billion" and "Worldwide Network Consulting and Integration Services Spending to Increase 7.8% to Reach $29.3 Million". [Read more]

I was delighted to see last week a couple of industry awards won by our customers.  It's always nice to hear about such things, because I think it's a testament to the value we deliver to our customers.

The first award went to the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) at the annual UK 2008 CNET Networks awards.  They won "Financial Services Technology Project of the year" award with a project called "SPOT" (Shared Product Opportunity Tool).

"With SPOT, RBS overhauled its client management to drive profitability and success through the development of a collaboration network".

The judges said: “RBS implemented a new system to integrate client information previously held on disparate corporate and investment banking systems. We were impressed by the implementation’s ability to increase sales opportunities exponentially.” 

The second award went to telecoms giant KPN who were awarded top spot at the Ventana Research 2008 Leadership awards for the Information Management Awards category. 

“By introducing the 360-degree view of our customers and providing clean, trusted data in near real-time, Informatica is helping KPN raise the bar in terms of customer satisfaction, target customers with compelling cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and reduce marketing and sales time to market" said Thomas Reichel, Senior IT Architect, KPN

Jan Muchez, CIO, KPN added, “Informatica products and services have been critical to driving shareholder value through improved customer service. To realize our strategic innovation goals, we built our customer data cleansing platform with Informatica soft ware; it gives us real-time cleansing and standardization of our customer data.”

If you're interested in reading more about how KPN is using Informatica, please visit our knowledge center 

We take great pride in the value our customers obtain from our solutions and I would like to congratulate both RBS and KPN on winning these prestigious industry awards.  Well done to you both!

If you would like to see more about the success our customers are obtaining from using Informatica please visit our knowledge center on the Informatica website.

The number of articles and blog postings on cloud computing is staggering. Here is one from Chris Boorman Cloud Computing - integration is key which in turn references several other blogs. And check out this Architecture and Integration Summit taking place in Minneapolis on October 30th www.architectureandintegrationsummit.com. Informatica is leading a keynote presentation along with participation from Amazon and Salesforce.com.  The presentation by Sanjay Krishnamurthi, Peter Coffee and Jeff Barr will conclude with a live demo showing how salesforce.com can be integrated with Amazon using Informatica’s On-Demand integration – cloud computing to cloud computing using cloud integration.  [Read more]

In one of my earlier posts I discussed the need for a sophisticated data services-driven technology serving as the foundation for SOA and BPM.

When I was poking around the web recently, I ran into a powerful statement by Michael Blechar from Gartner, covered in the DAMA keynote, titled Survival of the Data Management Fittest:

"Data and processes are intertwined. It will fundamentally change the way organizations think about your roles, and your roles are going to need to evolve".

At this year’s Data Management Association (DAMA) International Symposium,
Michael is quoted saying that:

"In this world there's a very loosely coupled user interface from the assembled services that in turn share access to data. SOA exposes data issues to more people, places and processes, and what I tell companies is that without a focus on information management and meta data management they're going to fail."

It is in speaking to numerous customers, prospects and technologists that I had gathered that without accurate, consistent and timely information, SOA and BPM deployments will face serious information-centric hurdles, affecting the cost-effectiveness and success of the project. As we move towards more agile architectures, I believe that we need to grow typical process-centric approaches to include information centricity as well.

As Michael states:

"Where we are going is beyond the first generation of BPM and SOA [that is process-centric]," he said, "to the next generation of SOA that is information-centric."

Observe that the key word here is "information-centric." Reading such statements from Michael and many others definitely validates the strategy I have been defining for building out an effective IT infrastructure that can benefit from the flexibility of a services and process-driven approach, in the data integration layer. Simply wrapping data access with a web service does not qualify as a sophisticated data service and hence, stringing together such simple services with a BPM tool also does not guarantee agility.

As discussed in Services to Orient your Enterprise Data Layer, Joe McKendrick is of the opinion that neither SOA nor enterprise-application integration alone can effectively handle the enterprise data layer. However, data services delivered within an SOA framework can create a data-abstraction layer to address the complexities seen across enterprise data environments.

I have always said that without serving up good quality, consistent and timely information as a data service or a comprehensive data service built using a sophisticated data integration platform, SOA and BPM deployments will not be able to deliver on their promise of agility.

What are your experiences? What kind of information-centric issues have you run into in your service-oriented deployments? Is inaccurate, stale and inconsistent information passing through your IT infrastructure holding you back?

Governance is a tricky and ill-defined area. For example, in the emerging SOA space, listen to the drumbeat of messages from consultants, analysts, and vendors, and the message is clear: Service oriented architecture won’t work without governance.

However, establishing effective governance has been a vexing challenge, with a lot of disagreement and debate amongst governance proponents. [Read more]

 It is "all about the data" is the response to this blog post by Joe McKendrick on ZDNet

I couldn't have said it more eloquently than as described below:

"The data is a pivotal piece of an SOA (most IT approaches, really), and is often under-served by SOA initiatives and projects. Data is diverse, duplicated, dispersed, dirty, and just generally chaotic. You need to rationalize it into meaningful business information for the rest of the architecture to work well. This is the data abstraction layer that Ash mentions. This is not an ESB, but rather a data services layer that feeds an ESB and other components in the architecture."

In my previous posts and in the webinar that this post refers to, I have stated that SOA promises to deliver business agility by breaking down barriers between silos of applications, and by reusing business services. However, in speaking to a number of customers and prospects, it is becoming very clear that if the data stuck inside silos is bad, is stale, or is inaccurate, it does not matter if the most elegant architecture or technology is used. Data is at the heart of the modern enterprise and as pointed out in the referenced blog, data integration is the "pivotal" piece that can ensure the availability of accurate, consistent and timely information.

In one of my earlier posts I mentioned that in order to effectively enable business agility, businesses need access to information at the speed of business, or what is called "right-time" information.

In that post I had also introduced the terms "Right-Time Information" and the "Information Latency Continuum."

In the recently concluded TDWI World Conference in San Diego, my colleague John Haddad recorded a podcast with Claudia Imhoff where he spoke on data latency issues, including the need to deliver data in real-time so organizations can operate at the "speed of business."

Listen to John Haddad speak about the "Information Latency Continuum" and the business value of timely and accurate information delivered across a range of latencies, real-time, near real-time and batch.

This blog post is part of an ongoing series highlighting the importance of EIM and how a properly strategized and architected EIM initiative can remove the cost, complexity and risk associated with enterprise integration infrastructures.

Thus, in my opinion, in order to effectively enable business agility, businesses need access to information at the speed of business, or what is called “right-time” information. “Right-time” information, as we have discussed, is information that is made available to the business at exactly the speed or latency that it is required, be it batch, near real-time or real-time. When businesses have access to holistic and accurate information exactly when it is needed, it becomes extremely easy to respond quickly to changing compliance laws, roll-out new and differentiated functionality, improve the overall customer service experience, rapidly and effectively support mergers and acquisitions, and hence enable true business agility.

It has been a busy 2 months for me as I have been trying to catch-up on all the post-Informatica World activity, as you can follow here in "Informatica World." As promised in my earlier post in this series, I want to round-off this discussion around Getting EIM Right, with a summary of how I define "right-time" information. I would like to hear from you to see if you see it in the same or different light. As I see it, it is extremely important that accurate and consistent information is available at exactly the time it is needed in order to respond effectively to the needs of the business, supporting timely decision making.

If we look around, it’s a new world driven by powerful macroeconomic conditions such as globalization, growth, governance and risk mitigation. With growing challenges in achieving agility and flexibility under these conditions, businesses are starting to see increasing demand to support sophisticated operational scenarios such as consolidation of customer data in real-time to support a call center, or delivery of timely and precise forecasts for supply chain operation optimizations, etc. People and businesses seem to want to access their information much faster than ever before. Also, in speaking to a number of CIOs, IT executives and IT managers, enterprise IT organizations are increasingly trying to use their enterprise data within their analytic domains for more mission-critical applications.

As we can see around us, enterprise data is constantly being accessed, manipulated, and used by more users, through more applications, in increasingly shorter time spans. I can see this trend being reinforced as businesses increasingly adopt industry standards like SWIFT in the financial services industry, ACORD in insurance and HL7 in healthcare, to exchange information with their partners. While in some use cases it could be sufficient, effective and possibly the requirement to get information using a batch data movement mode, in other more real-time, 24×7 or mission-critical operations, live or current information may be needed to maximize operational efficiency.

Here is a graph that I like a lot and that I use frequently to explain this point, as it succinctly depicts all these factors in what I call the enterprise information latency continuum. This graph showcases both the increase in demand for more current or live information as well as a blend of analytical and operational data for enabling businesses to better respond to macroeconomic conditions all around us.

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Maximizing operational uptime or minimizing operational downtime, whichever way you look at it, presents a daunting challenge and an exacting need for a business and its supporting IT infrastructure. Business drivers such as improving customer service with say Straight Through Processing or increasing operational efficiency by say supporting 24/7 operations are placing great pressure on IT organizations looking to support the business' goals for increased agility.

In yet another customer feature, this session put the technologist directly in contact with a real customer to understand how Informatica's real-time data integration capabilities supported a business model that could not tolerate any operational downtime. The session opened with a compelling video showcasing the customer's business background, the integration challenges and the benefits of the Informatica solution, in particular Change Data Capture.

The session had some very well laid-out use cases and before and after scenarios showcasing how Informatica's right-time data integration technologies provided the customer with a structured, repeatable, predictable design, development and operational process. As expected, the audience really relished the opportunity to hear other customers speak to common integration challenges and their solutions. This fact seemed to be reflected yet again in the involved Q&A session that followed the presentation.

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