Informatica Perspectives

Last month I posted an article about cloud computing and cloud integration (see Keep your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds for the full article) and encouraged readers to come to the Architecture and Integration Summit to see Informatica, salesforce.com and Amazon.com tell the story and see a demo. Those that came were not disappointed – the keynote presentation by Sanjay Krishnamurthy, Jeff Barr and Peter Coffee was electrifying! [Read more]

OK, I'm excited.  What do AAA, Dolby and Bax Global all have in common besides all being Informatica customers?  Give up?  Let me tell you … they’re all presenting at this week’s San Francisco Dreamforce event alongside our On Demand general manager, Ron Papas (you know the one who’s been ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’). Guess what they’ll be talking about … give up? Their presentation is called "Salesforce Integration – It’s not just for IT any more".

The responsibility of SaaS integration often lies outside of IT; in fact SaaS administrators have different skillsets to IT admins and these guys are going to explain why software (like ours) that addresses the needs of the SaaS admins is imperative for success in today’s business environment. 

By the way, did I tell you I was excited?!  Well, I have reason to be. For the first time in a long time, the industry is witnessing a momentous shift in the way companies manage their data integration processes – and you know what?  Without us, it wouldn’t be possible!

Informatica data integration is critical for SasS!

[Read more]

On October 29th my colleague Sanjay Krishnamurthi is joining Peter Coffee from salesforce.com and Jeff Barr from Amazon.com at the Architecture and Innovation summit in Minneapolis.

They are discussing the state of the industry around one of the hot new architectures climbing the technology hype cycle - namely Application Platform as a Service (APaaS). Offerings in this space include Informatica On-demand, salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services to name just a few.

The really big question of course is … "Is Cloud Computing a valid strategy for large mission-critical applications or is it just for quick ramp-up of new capabilities and low-volume department solutions?"

The reality is that core business solutions are being implemented today in the cloud by companies of all sizes with impressive results. An enterprise could, in principal, implement their entire suite of applications with the only purchased software being a browser!

If you are in the vicinity, please drop by and listen to Sanjay, Peter and Jeff explore the promise of APaaS and the present day reality. I'l write-up a brief summary of their presentation and post it afterwards.  Here's what you can expect:

• a broad overview of cloud computing; what it is and what it means for business leaders, architects, and system integrators.
• the challenges, such as data fragmentation and information security, and solutions that are available to address them.
• an overview of their respective offerings including real-life case studies.

I've also been told that they will show a live cloud integration demo showing how salesforce.com can be integrated with Amazon Web Services using Informatica On-Demand.

Sounds exciting - you can find out more about the summit here.

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

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?

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

The airways are a buzz with cloud computing.  I was reading an article just yesterday on a blog posting about building datawarehouses in the clouds.  Entitled "Google, Panorama and the BI of the Future" the article made reference to ourselves and the work we are doing in this area:

 … Once your data’s in the cloud, you’re going to want to load it into a hosted data warehouse of some kind, and I don’t think that’s too much to imagine given the cloud databases already mentioned. But how to load and transform it? Not so much of an issue if you’re doing ELT, but for ETL you’d need a whole bunch of new hosted ETL services to do this. I see Informatica has one in Informatica On Demand;

I think there are great opportunities here in helping to utilize the cloud to deliver not just business applications but also areas such as CDW (or cloud-based data warehousing).  This is something that we are looking at closely.  It starts with being able to access data in different systems (both on-premise and on-demand).  You may have already seen the work we are doing in this area:  take a look at our on-demand web-site at www.informaticaondemand.com.   Here you can see our cloud-computing data integration services - multi-tenanted, in the clouds with no software!  Pretty cool.  If you want to see a demo of what it's all about, take a look at our cloud computing integration demo.

There's a lot happening in the world of cloud computing and I'm delighted to see Informatica leading the charge in helping corporations to integrate and drive data quality across the clouds. 

Cloud computing cannot succeed without integration.  The last thing anyone wants is to simply fragment their data across the clouds.  Integration prevents this and ensures you can retain control of your data assets.

Do you agree?  let me know!

In my last post, I talked about the enterprise integration challenges that still challenge enterprises, even if they have moved processes to cloud computing or Software as a Service providers.

Will integration issues dampen the enthusiasm around cloud computing? What's the role of data environments in these new scenarios? To address these questions, I recently had the opportunity to speak with Chris Boorman, chief marketing officer with Informatica, and Ron Papas, senior vice president and general manager for Informatica On Demand, about the enterprise data management implications of this growing trend. (Chris also recently posted some of his observations here.) [Read more]

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.