Informatica Perspectives

Flipping around traditional ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) on its head is not a new practice.  ELT (Extract-Load-Transform), where processing is handled in the database, instead of the ETL server, has been proven to enhance performance in many types of data warehousing deployments.

For example, Oi, a leading telecom provider in Brazil, implemented an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) consolidating information on 36 million customers, speeding response time to customer requests.  The right-time EDW also enabled Oi to rapidly launch a successful new service offering, which made it easier for customers to recharge their pre-paid accounts for telecom service.

By implementing ELT with Informatica’s pushdown optimization capabilities for this Teradata data warehouse, Oi accelerated its data warehousing loading process two-fold.  This has led to even more timely updates of Oi’s customer information, while lowering costs.
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In the post "SOA's Last Mile Part III: How to Address SOA's Hidden Data-Centric Pitfalls Effectively," David Lyle spoke about some high-level approaches to handling the data-centric pitfalls in an SOA.

I would like to introduce you to the solution…what I call data services, a flexible and cost-effective technology that can be the cornerstone of an SOA and EIM strategy by simplifying the complexity of both integrating diverse enterprise data that exists in individual silos as well as delivering a single, accurate and consistent view of all enterprise information, at the speed of business.
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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 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.

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?

 It is "all about the data" is the response to this blog post by Joe McKendrick on ZDNet

I couldn't have said it more eloquently than as described below:

"The data is a pivotal piece of an SOA (most IT approaches, really), and is often under-served by SOA initiatives and projects. Data is diverse, duplicated, dispersed, dirty, and just generally chaotic. You need to rationalize it into meaningful business information for the rest of the architecture to work well. This is the data abstraction layer that Ash mentions. This is not an ESB, but rather a data services layer that feeds an ESB and other components in the architecture."

In my previous posts and in the webinar that this post refers to, I have stated that SOA promises to deliver business agility by breaking down barriers between silos of applications, and by reusing business services. However, in speaking to a number of customers and prospects, it is becoming very clear that if the data stuck inside silos is bad, is stale, or is inaccurate, it does not matter if the most elegant architecture or technology is used. Data is at the heart of the modern enterprise and as pointed out in the referenced blog, data integration is the "pivotal" piece that can ensure the availability of accurate, consistent and timely information.

The "last mile" is a powerful metaphor from the world of telecommunications and cable TV which can serve as an analogy for modern-day SOA challenges.  The issue in telecommunications is related to the fact that the high-bandwidth fiber-optic links between major centers are extremely efficient and cost effective, but the cost of fanning out cabling in the last mile to homes and offices drives up the cost and complexity tremendously.  [Read more]

The success of pervasive business intelligence is all about trust in data. Enterprise data warehousing plays a crucial role in delivering information so that users can drive real-time decision-making reliably, and accurately reflects existing business conditions.

However, the enterprise information needed for pervasive BI comes in many forms, exists in many silos, and has many degrees of latency. The challenge is, before we hand off decision-making to more automated processes, how can we be sure this information presents a true picture of business?  You need a stronger foundation to ensure freshness, completeness and accuracy of data.

These are the issues that James Markarian, CTO of Informatica, along with Stephen Brobst, CTO of Teradata, pondered and explored in a recent Webcast.

The goal of pervasive BI is [Read more]

Okay, so the band Coldplay will never release a song by that title (and I probably wouldn't want to hear it if they did.)  But it would be timely, because despite certain rumors to the contrary, data warehousing is thriving.

We weren't supposed to need data warehousing in an era of SOA/data services, data federation and other new-fangled technologies.  Data warehousing was old-fashioned and tired and a bit boring.  But the need for data warehousing solutions just continues to grow– companies aren't getting less data, and their environments aren't getting simpler.  The discipline of integrating data from multiple systems and conforming it to a common structure so that is can be analyzed and used for business intelligence and reporting is still invaluable.  This is not to say that the new technologies don't play a role– they can greatly enhance data warehousing by providing more real-time data and new ways of delivering data where it's needed. [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.