Informatica Perspectives

Loraine Lawson did a great job covering the topic of the integration challenges around the cloud and virtualization. She reports that “…a recent Internet Evolution column [by David Vellante] looks more broadly at the cloud integration question and concludes that insufficient integration is holding up both cloud computing and virtualization.”

In fact, what currently limits the number of cloud deployments is the lack of a clear understanding of data integration in the context of cloud computing. This is a rather easy problem to solve, but it’s often an afterthought.

The core issue is that cloud computing providers, other than Salesforce.com, don’t consider integration. Perhaps they are thinking, “If you use our cloud, then there is no reason to sync your data back to your enterprise. After all, we’re the final destination for your enterprise data, right?” Wrong. [Read more]

I am very fortunate to have a CIO role that extends beyond the traditional responsibilities of IT. Part of my role includes the strategy and implementation of the recently launched Informatica Marketplace.

The Informatica Marketplace has generated a lot of buzz with our customers and partners. Last week while I was presenting at the Pacific Crest Annual Cloud Computing Conference I heard the excitement about our new offering from many of the attendees. Mostly, people appreciated our continued thought leadership and commitment to providing an open platform to host solutions for data integration, data quality and data management. And yes, it is an open platform to host solutions that not only support Informatica, but other vendors too - even competitors. Our fundamental belief is that the hand of free enterprise will ultimately win, so we are willing to provide an open platform to do so.

Here are a few questions I've heard and answered over the last few weeks: [Read more]

Today Informatica announced that Bay & Bay Transportation has used Informatica Cloud Services to achieve a six month project payback on their total Salesforce.com investment and a 900 percent return on their critical data integration project.

Bay & Bay is using the turnkey, on-demand Informatica Cloud Services to provide robust, bi-directional synchronization between its logistics management databases and applications with Salesforce CRM. Using an intuitive web based integration wizard, the company automatically maps source and target fields, configures powerful data transformations, and sets automated synchronization schedules. And being a true multi-tenant cloud-based service, there is no hardware, software, or infrastructure for them to install, manage, or maintain.

[Read more]

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.

[Read more]

Time and time again, technology is proving itself to be an enabler of both organizational and personal transformation. Initiatives such as service oriented architecture, cloud and pervasive analytics are opening up new possibilities and opportunities for growth.

More than anything, SOA, cloud and analytics are paving the way for the composite or loosely coupled company - which may be an entity that delivers solutions to customers via an aggregation of third-party services, provided on an on-demand basis to meet customer demands. Most of these services will be passed through as cloud-based services, both from within the enterprise and from outside.

The first phase of the Informatica Marketplace, which opens up a 52,000-member-strong community of buyers and sellers to share and leverage data integration solutions, is a great example of this emerging trend. [Read more]

Last week we completed the acquisition of Siperian – the proven leader in multi-domain MDM.  This is our fourth acquisition in the last 12 months and potentially the single most important acquisition that Informatica has ever done since moving beyond ETL with the acquisition of Similarity Systems in 2006. You can read the press release about Siperian here, and watch a video of my colleague Ivan Chong, General Manager of our Data Quality Business Unit, here.

There has also been a lot of talk about the acquisition in the last few days – such as the commentary from Forrester research analyst Rob Karel, Ventana Research analyst Mark Smith, or Lorraine Lawson over at ITBusinessEdge.  However, I wanted to give my perspective on why I believe this is important to you, our customers: [Read more]

This week we announced that salesforce.com customers have once again recognized Informatica Cloud Services with the Data Integration AppExchange Best of '09 Award. It’s a tremendous honor to win this award as it is 100% driven by customer reviews. According to the salesforce.com Community site:

“The Best of '09 Customer Choice Awards are given to partners based on exceptional user reviews posted to the AppExchange during 2009; and, are a special way for the community to recognize partners for their ongoing commitment to driving customer success.”

There are two fundamental drivers for the growing adoption of cloud integration services:

1. Growing adoption of cloud-based applications and platforms like Salesforce CRM and Force.com are leading to an even greater data fragmentation challenges in companies of all sizes.
2. Departmental, line of business purchases and implementations of software as a service (SaaS) applications have led to a need for easy to use, self-service integration solutions that non-technical users can manage, while IT organizations remain in control. (See the post on Avoiding a Cloud Data Disaster if this sounds familiar.) [Read more]

In his whitepaper, Best Practices in Leveraging a Staging Area for SaaS-to-Enterprise Integration, David Linthicum outlines the difference between direct, point-to-point data integration and staging integration. He defines them as follows:

• Direct: “Moving information from one data source and data schema to another, and translating the differences in semantics from the source to the target system.”
• Staged: “A temporary location where the data from the source system or systems is replicated in order to support more complex and valuable data integration operations, including support for many large data sets and data operations that are more complex and of higher value.” [Read more]

Lately, we've had a great deal of discussion here at the Perspectives community over the emerging role of data services within a service-oriented architecture (SOA) context.

At the end of October 2009, I had the honor of joining a group of thought leaders and industry experts at the SOA Symposium in Rotterdam to sit down and worked to clear the air, once and for all, as to what it means to service-orient a system, and arrive at a consensus as to what SOA should mean to organizations. The result was a document called the "SOA Manifesto". [Read more]

Cloud computing is proving to be a disruptive force when it comes to how organizations procure and manage enterprise software. The web has truly democratized who can try and buy business applications and line of business (LOB) managers have never felt more empowered to make technology purchasing decisions – in many cases bypassing the IT organization altogether. But as software as a service (SaaS) application adoption grows and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) becomes viable for IT organizations, it’s apparent that many of the traditional barriers to on-premise software implementation success are no different in the cloud.

Do these issues sound familiar?

• Lack of integrated data across systems leads to information silos and multiple versions of the truth.
• Poor data quality leads to low application adoption and limited ROI. [Read more]