Informatica Perspectives

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.

It's been an interesting week over at Informatica.  The airwaves have been buzzing with comment.  A blog posting appeared from Vincent McBurney looking in detail at our success and customer growth - it sometimes amazes me where all this information comes from.  I loved the title - "Data Integration Olympics: Informatica versus IBM, SAP, Microsoft and Oracle".  Take a read - it's very insightful.

Then we were named as a Market Leader in the 2008 CRM Awards for Data Quality.  Meanwhile over at the TDWI conference a good colleague of mine, 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."  You might like to check it out here.

I was also delighted to see an article appear in InternetNews talking about "IBM catching up with Informatica".  Welcome to the party!  Since the close of our acquisition of Identity Systems three months ago, we’ve heard first-hand from many customers how much they value Informatica’s ability to provide them with a single view of their customers, and in particular the ability to do cross-language matching.

If you only have time for one sentence, here’s one of my favorites … "Right now, IBM is playing catch-up to Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA) in a rapidly growing market."

You might like to check out our demo showing how we have already completed the integration between our data quality solutions and Identity resolution.  It's a neat demo showing "making the complex simple, and the impossible possible".

A few years back, Thomas Friedman wrote a best-seller, The World is Flat. He spoke about how the world is becoming increasingly interconnected, specifically in business. Have you recently wondered just how quickly this notion of globalization is spreading? If you’ve been watching the 2008 Summer Olympics, you may come to the conclusion that globalization is occurring at a rate even faster than Friedman had predicted.

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That question has been raised several times in recent weeks by various analysts and journalists. First, Informatica acquired Identity Systems, which provides the core matching technology used by several Master Data Management (MDM) solutions. At that point, Rob Karel of Forrester speculated on what our next step would be in MDM. Then, partnerships with Initiate and Siperian were announced a few weeks ago during our Informatica World user conference. This posting by Loraine Lawson comments on those announcements and whether Informatica is getting into the MDM space.

So-are we getting into MDM? The simple answer is Informatica is already in MDM-we have been helping customers for years to create a meaningful, trusted and valuable system of master records. Informatica provides the critical data integration and data quality underpinnings for MDM. Customers use Informatica to get data out of other systems and loaded into their master data solution, to make sure that the data is clean and stays clean, and to get the master data back out to consuming applications. And, of course, several MDM solution providers embed Informatica identity resolution technology for matching master records.

So yes, we are in the MDM space. But we don't provide the MDM application or solution itself. We support whatever MDM application the customer chooses-be that a packaged or homegrown solution. That's why we partner with MDM vendors including Initiate, Siperian, Orchestra Networks, Oracle and D&B (Purisma) - to make sure our solutions work well together for customers.

I just wanted to close out this year's conference news to let you all know that all of the content is now available on our post-conference site. This includes all keynote presentations, and video's of them, plus breakouts given by Informatica, our partners and our customers.

Remember - the challenges we face today are in delivering trusted information to the business and gaining the maximum value from our data assets. For those of you who joined us in Vegas, please help yourself to the materials at our post-conference site. 

See you next year!

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