Informatica Perspectives

The main goals of any Application ILM project are to reduce cost, improve application performance while maintaining compliance.  To meet these goals, data has to be moved from a production database to either an online, accessible archive or purged completely from the system.  In either case, data is deleted from production.  Deleting data can have a significant impact on the production system’s performance if not executed carefully.  However, once the data is gone – the benefits have a ripple effect.  Production tables are smaller and more manageable.  Recovery times and maintenance windows can be reduced.  The cost of managing a smaller production database is reduced proportionally with the amount of data removed. 

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The cover story on the March 8th issue of Computerworld is “Swinging Toward Centralization”. It talks about the pendulum moving toward IT consolidation as organizations strive to save money and improve controls. This article is not alone. A growing number of analysts are talking about consolidation, Lean IT practices, and taking “a production line approach to integration”.  When you combine all this rhetoric with the industry fundamentals, the stage is set for 2010 to The Year of the ICC. [Read more]

Over the last few blogs, we have stepped through a project to implement Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) on corporate databases.  First, we evaluated the target databases, then we determined the Business Objects and assigned retention periods to the data – including both Legal and Operational requirements.  Now that we are ready to start applying the retention policies and deleting data, it is a good idea to set up an archive database as an intermediate repository for business objects classified as legal records.
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This is the last of the Data as an Asset series and what better way to wrap up the theme than with a view to the future. As stated by Thomas Redman, author of Data Driven, “Your company's data is a key business asset, and you need to manage it aggressively and professionally.” The future vision then is around Agile Data-Driven Enterprises. [Read more]

A key benefit of implementing an Application Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) project is to reduce the amount of structured data in the data center.  Application ILM is a combination of a strategy and process that assesses information based on its business value and aligns the technology it resides on.  This process assures that the data center does not over allocate IT resources if the business doesn’t need it.  And likewise, if the business can provide detailed requirements for what it needs for its data, the IT department has a better idea of its technology forecasting needs.  Application ILM is a capacity planner’s friend.

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The only way for HealthDetail to hold or increase margins was to think differently. The company’s provider directory business supplies accurate and compliant healthcare directories for Medicaid and other health insurers. The problem was that the volume of data coming in and the breadth of different sources it was derived from threatened to overwhelm the existing database. HealthDetail could either invest in dedicated database administration resources, at great expense, or consider a more innovative solution: cloud-based data integration.

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One aspect of an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) project that often gets overlooked is deleting data. Once information has reached the end of its usefulness, delete it. It is the single-most cost effective task you can execute on an ILM project. If you don’t have the data, you don’t have to store it, manage it, or worry about it getting into the wrong hands. Delete it.

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Continuing with the Data as Asset series, in this posting I explore the negative side and what can happen when data becomes a liability. Physical assets such as buildings, equipment, or even money, can become a liability if not managed properly; buildings can become unsafe to work in, machinery can be dangerous to operate, and business investments can turn into money-sinks. Similarly, data and information systems can also be assets that provide economic value to the enterprise or they can be liabilities that destroy value or put the business at risk if not managed well. Here are three common scenarios. [Read more]

As the market continues to consolidate and companies sell off assets, not only are the physical assets separated and sold, so are the digital assets – or liabilities. John Schmidt covered it in one of his recent blogs.

When the information to be separated and sold resides in a database, you need to understand the data model and determine what master data, or reference data, and transactions belong to the new company.  In the case of separating master data this may involve understanding the relationships between multiple systems to make sure that when the data is moved into the new company, it maintains context, is accurate and complete.  With transactional data, you need to know the tables and rows that comprise a complete transaction so that when data is moved, no orphaned rows are left behind.

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Call me a convert. I have a renewed faith in the power of the community. I finally started using Twitter today in order to keep up with the real-time commentary flowing out of our industry analyst conference (#infaanalyst). It’s been enlightening (and often amusing) getting plugged into the thoughts of the analyst community/blogosphere around data integration and information management.

And today, we announced the Informatica Marketplace. This is going to turbocharge the already robust community for data integration. Tens of thousands of Informatica developers are already using LinkedIn, Facebook, Informatica’s TechNet and other venues to connect with each other, sharing knowledge and solutions for data integration, data quality, MDM and more. The Marketplace is going to make that 10x easier and more productive.

Buyers will have a single place to go to find pre-built solutions that will let them deliver their projects faster and cheaper. Sellers will have a way to reach the broad data integration community to market their wares and show off their expertise.

And it’s going to be fun. To get things going, we are organizing a pre-launch contest to let developers strut their stuff. The top gurus will get top billing on the marketplace, and their 5 minutes of fame onstage at InformaticaWorld 2010.

I honestly can’t wait to see what starts coming in. There’s going to be great stuff that we never would have thought of on our own—and that’s the whole point of the marketplace.