Informatica Perspectives

Over the last couple of months we have been running user conferences across the world.  Our user community is incredibly important to us and we are delighted with the assistance our chapter leaders provide in guiding these meetings and helping us to maintain a strong community.

So it was with great delight that I read an article in the "examiner.com" about our recent user group meeting over in Florida.  Entitled "OMG, an afternoon at the Oscars or a Florida user's group " it espoused the value of the group.  In fact, it had me laughing merrily:

"If I were rating the most fun and entertaining users’ group meeting I've attended this year, Florida IUG would have walked away with the following awards: Best Location, Best Actor, Best supporting actor and actress; Most Prolific Presenters; Best Buffet".

OK, so the article was humorous - well, certainly to me.  However, there is a very serious side to this.  Our user group meetings are an opportunity for our users to come together, to meet others and to discuss the latest trends and developments in data integration.  We hold user group meetings all over the world.  If you would like to know more about them visit our community site. Connect with your peers through our newly launched Informatica Technology Network, or our online user community.

We are continually looking at ways of improving how our users connect with each other.  If you think we can do more, then please let me know.

If banks and financial institutions had invested in more data integration and business intelligence tools to spot issues arising within their portfolios, could they have avoided the recent credit mess?

Perhaps, to a degree. But it is human beings that are ultimately making the risk judgments, and oftentimes, bad decisions may have looked good at the time they were made.

Still, technology has improved to the point where troubles could have been more effectively flagged. [Read more]

I find this rather an interesting and profound question!  Trusted data.  What does this mean, and how does it affect us all?  We've built all these systems over the years and we implicitly trust that the data provided is correct.

For years I have used online banking and I trust my bank (well, things have been OK up to now and I always check my statements and cross-reference incomings and outgoings).  Why do I check it - basically because I'm still a little nervous, it makes sense and I hear horror stories about hacking, stolen identities and all sorts of security issues.  The latest high profile example of this of course was the Sarah Palin hack (take a look at View From The Bunker for an interesting blog on security).

We make decisions all the time based on trust.  We buy presents for our loved ones, or cars and houses because we think we have enough funds - we trust our data.  I was chatting to a journalist recently over at the Oralce Openworld conference and he brought up the word trust … apparently he was using a very popular on-demand service (you know … the gorilla in the market!) to sell to customers and wasn't able to reconcile with his finance people.  They were telling him that his top 10 customers were completely different to the top ten in his SaaS system.  Hmm … a great example of "which data do you trust"?  The CRM system , or the finance system?  After investigation he found out that the problem was because the two systems were not connected and his company was relying on human process to update both systems.

That's the whole point of integration - to help ensure that your systems are connected and that the right information is available to you to help you improve your decision making process, and operate more effectively.  Today data is the lifeblood of every company, it's the true currency that we all deal in when we trade on the stock exchanges, or run drug trials across hospitals, or manage supply chains across continents.  You have to be able to trust your data - and yet the world is full of examples of mistakes made or mishaps occuring because of poor quality data.

Take a look at "Do You Trust Your Data?". It's a new site we've pushed out highlighting real-world examples of stories relating to trusting your data.  You can add your own (anonymously if you'd like).   We've love to hear from you.  Go on… I know you want to

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.

Ok, so I can't believe it either.  However, it's true - registration is now open for Informatica World 2009!   The premier industry data integration annual event, this will be our eleventh worldwide conference and we're delighted to be going to the MGM in Las Vegas next year. 

For a glimpse of what to expect take a look at our conference website.  We will be host an executive summit and partner event alongside the main conference.  You can expect to hear stories from our cusomters about how they are diving operational excellence across their organizations.  Of course all the well-known and successful activities will be there also - like Meet the Experts, Birds of a Feather and tons of peer and industry networking.

Everyone at Informatica looks forward to welcoming you to what is going to be an exciting and informative conference.

Just as they say success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, it can also be said that the success of a data integration project is 10% technology and 90% chemistry. And when I say chemistry, I'm not talking about hydrocarbons and nitrates, but the chemistry of people.

The success of any complex data integration depends on how the people that make things happen - the teams of administrators, analysts, managers, end-users, and business partners - can collaborate in establishing the business case, setting requirements, selecting technology, and putting all the pieces together.

However, two of the key players in data integration - analysts and administrators - don't necessarily see eye to eye, and this is costing enterprises in terms of staff resources and quality. [Read more]

"Despite certain rumors to the contrary, data warehousing is thriving."

I couldn't agree more with Judy Ko in her recent post, in which she points out that predictions that data warehousing was going to be abstracted away — by service-oriented architecture (SOA) and other new approaches — didn't quite pan out. Instead, if anything, the need for data warehousing solutions only continues to grow. Data volumes are growing, and businesses are demanding ever-more sophisticated business intelligence and analytics to run against that data.

If anything, approaches such as SOA promise to greatly enhance - not replace - data warehousing, [Read more]

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]

A blog at IT-Director.com caught my eye yesterday.  Entitled "IT Budgets, Clouds and Virtualization" it included the following comment:

“For Cloud computing, chief amongst these concerns is the readiness of commercial organisations to trust significant proportions of their essential, and hence incredibly valuable, corporate information to platforms and suppliers over whom they have little control and who might hold the data wherever they wish. Such a leap of faith is today beyond consideration in many business scenarios.”

This is spot-on.  There is so much talk about "cloud computing this, and cloud computing that".  When it comes to corporations there are many examples of outsourcing non-core business processes to the cloud.  Here at Informatica we use over 17 different services ourselves. I'd say the most mission-critical of these is our email marketing system (can't tell you who or I'd have to shoot you!).  We're rolling it out worldwide across our marketing team and have spent the last few months integrating it with our own on-premise CRM system, contact hub and datawarehouse.  Not a trivial task but incredibly important for me (well, I'm a marketeer) but probably less mission-critical to our CFO!

At the end of the day corporations WILL move data into the clouds so whilst I agree with Tony in the above-mentioned article, I also disagree with him (OK, bit of a split personality here now).  I agree that it is foolish to simply “go to the clouds”, but I disagree about the state of the industry.  It is possible to keep the data secure and we, amongst others, have proven that with our on-demand integration service.  It is also possible to integrate such services into core business processes.  My statement would be - don't overlook the integration. You do it at your peril.  We've had a LOT of experience of helping companies do this effectively - after all we're the data integration company!

Oh … and we can do it from in the clouds too

There is a lot of worry on Wall Street and Main Street these days. Are we in a mild or severe recession? Is it the next Great Depression? How long will it last? No one knows the answers to these lofty questions, but Forrester Research has been busy recalibrating on the impact the economy is having on IT spending.

First, the good news, IT spending was better in the first half of this year than expected. The bad news, IT spending is being hit adversely now and probably into 2009. According to Forrester Research:

“The economy's affect on IT spending is evident in some specific data points contained in the report: Forty-three percent of firms have already cut their overall IT budgets in 2008 in reaction to the slow down in the global economy, while 24 percent of firms have put discretionary spending on hold. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said the economy has had no impact on their IT budgets.”

“Forrester: Impact Of Economic Downturn On Tech Spending Varies By Region And Sector”, Forrester Research, September 9, 2008

Even under the best circumstances it’s important to maximize the value from your BI/DW projects.  But with these conditions it becomes even more of an imperative.

No one can afford to be sloppy or wasteful in their business intelligence and data integration strategies. Cost cutting and getting by with what you have is the norm.

But mistakes are expensive. Businesses, now more than ever, need to understand who their current and potential customers are as well as how much revenue and profit each product or service line generates. This demands current, consistent, clean and comprehensive data. [Read more]