Informatica Perspectives

Our third stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was ‘across the pond’ in London England.  Salesforce saw an early opportunity to expand the footprint (or should I saw ‘cloud print’) of their leading SaaS CRM system beyond the US and so we found a strong following and interest there.  While primarily a UK audience, the event drew enterprise users from across Europe as well as many budding startups and systems integrators looking to build cloud-based applications on the force.com platform.

We again sponsored a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast with local prospects, and our local UK customer sportingbet presented a case study describing how they have significantly improved their overall marketing automation efforts by integrating their operational platform with their Salesforce CRM and Eloqua marketing automation systems.  Linking the three platforms together enabled them to leverage information on their customers’ service usage and behavior to more effectively target marketing programs and promotions to sustain and increase their overall business.  Essentially achieving every marketers dream (including the author’s). [Read more]

The following are the remaining five "HBIs" (half-baked ideas) I am formulating to explore how SOA, cloud computing, Enterprise 2.0 and virtualization are shaping our information and business environments in the coming decade - the 2010s. These are based on a keynote speech I presented at the recent Cloud QCamp online event. (For HBIs 1-5, click here.)

HBI #6: Made to order — application vendors will become assemblers of made-to-order, pre-built software components. [Read more]

Our second stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was New York City.  The impact of the economic downturn was clearly apparent in both the business and social conversations we had with Tour attendees.  But like the Cloudforce Tour event in Atlanta, the New York audience was very focused on SaaS and Cloud Computing and came prepared to learn what was new from salesforce.com and their partners, including Informatica On Demand.  While most were looking for ways to reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies, an equal number were interested in finding innovative ways to deliver new services in the cloud.  As the Financial Services industry has been on the forefront of application development, these seasoned professionals were interested in learning how they could integrate new cloud-based applications with the back office systems and databases of their firms and their clients.  After all a cloud without integration is really just a cloud adrift.

We sponsored a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast with local prospects, and our customer comScore presented a case study on how they are integrating and synchronizing their Salesforce CRM system data with an on premise database for operational analytics and reporting.  Their approach enables them to bring business analytics to their Sales and Marketing teams by integrating their on premise and cloud-based CRM systems while improving operational efficiency. [Read more]

I just delivered the keynote address for ebizQ's latest Cloud QCamp, exploring the growing convergence of SOA with cloud computing, Enterprise 2.0 and virtualization, and I thought I would share some salient highlights here at the Perspectives site.

There are several key forces converging that are reshaping the way we will do business in the 2010s (you know, that next decade that is almost upon us). [Read more]

For those of you following along from my last blog post, first stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour is Atlanta, GA.  It’s interesting to see the difference a year makes in the attitude and awareness of the people attending.  Last year Informatica On Demand sponsored the Salesforce.com conference, then called Tour de Force.

While the ’08 audience was curious, they seemed more interested in socializing with their fellow attendees and colleagues.  This year the tone was much more business focused and attendance was up nearly 50% over ’08.  SaaS and Cloud Computing are now top of mind for businesses looking to reduce and manage costs, and integration of back office systems and databases with Salesforce CRM is a pressing topic for all who we spoke with.

We sponsored a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast with local prospects, and our customer Atlanta Dental Supply (ADS) presented a case study on how they’ve integrated their Salesforce CRM system with their MS SQL Server-based order management system.  It’s an interesting example of how a relatively straight forward ‘out of the box’ (or should I say ‘out of the cloud’) integration can significantly streamline sales and operations for a rapidly growing mid-size business. [Read more]

As the head of marketing for the Informatica On Demand Business unit focused on meeting the Data Integration needs of the SaaS and Cloud Computing markets, I’m keenly aware of how critical it is to ‘know your customer’, especially in a relatively new and dynamic market like SaaS and Cloud Computing.

A variety of methods exist for marketers to engage with prospects, but there’s no substitution for 1:1 face-to-face interactions to hold in-depth discussions related to their needs and challenges as their businesses react and respond to the turmoil of the economy we all find ourselves in.

While the tradeshow industry is reeling from a loss of attendance due to travel restrictions and budget cuts, we have discovered to our good fortune that the salesforce.com Cloudforce ‘Success Tours’ has seen the opposite, a solid stream of regional attendees who come to hear the latest news from Salesforce.com and their strategic partners. The conferences are free, are only 1 day long, and are held in major metropolitan areas around the US, Canada, Europe and Asia. Informatica is a strategic partner with salesforce.com and participation in these regional events has proven to be an extremely valuable method for us to ‘know our customer’. [Read more]

I had the pleasure recently to attend a briefing by CxO media (publishers of CIO magazine).  They had completed their annual CIO survey looking into the world of the CIO with the objective of understanding how the role of the CIO continues to evolve in today’s business climate and to help define the CIO agenda for 2009.   They had over 500 CIOs from North American headquartered midsize and enterprise companies participate.

There were a few very interesting trends that jumped out at me which I wanted to share:

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If you’re in the market for a SaaS integration tool, then you’ve probably come across one or more of the following marketing messages: "Integrate in days", "Designed for non-programmers”, "Configuration, not coding approach"… which, of course, are all messages associated with one of the main value propositions of Software-as-a-Service: Ease of use and rapid deployment.

The notion of an integration tool that has a graphical user interface, is configuration based (metadata driven), easy to maintain, and requires no programming skills is not new. Those of you who were involved with DataMart projects in the mid to late 90’s may still remember Informatica’s PowerMart 3.0 product which was the predecessor to our current PowerCenter product.

It had all those characteristics, and was quite revolutionary at the time. Its target audience was data analysts or a data warehousing administrator who had a good understanding of their organization’s data structures and business processes, but didn’t have the deep programming skills of an IT specialist. [Read more]

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.

We’ve recently published a comprehensive whitepaper called, Solving Cloud Data Integration: A Key Challenge for SaaS Providers that outlines the key requirements and challenges facing ISV and SaaS providers in delivering a complete solution to market. It also covers how Informatica’s data integration platform and On Demand integration offerings can help. Take a look, I think you’ll find it worth your time.

As I discussed before, it’s not enough to walk through a functional checklist for a data integration platform.  It’s important to make sure that it works in the right way.   In my last posting, I discussed the concept of a “unified” platform and its implications for the user experience.

The second key aspect of how a data integration platform works is its openness—how much it is designed to work with the broader IT environment.  Data integration, by definition, touches a large portion of the IT environment, which could mean thousands of different applications and data sources in large organizations.  Moreover, it’s not just the systems inside the firewall you need to be concerned with.

In most cases, it’s important to also support integration with the systems of B2B partners such as customers, suppliers, distributors, etc., as well as any SaaS partners.  And the platform has to support any technology standard such as those for operating systems or databases which have been instituted.  Frankly, there’s not much use in a data integration platform that isn’t designed to work with as broad a range of applications and systems as possible. [Read more]