Informatica Perspectives

Time and time again, technology is proving itself to be an enabler of both organizational and personal transformation. Initiatives such as service oriented architecture, cloud and pervasive analytics are opening up new possibilities and opportunities for growth.

More than anything, SOA, cloud and analytics are paving the way for the composite or loosely coupled company - which may be an entity that delivers solutions to customers via an aggregation of third-party services, provided on an on-demand basis to meet customer demands. Most of these services will be passed through as cloud-based services, both from within the enterprise and from outside.

The first phase of the Informatica Marketplace, which opens up a 52,000-member-strong community of buyers and sellers to share and leverage data integration solutions, is a great example of this emerging trend. [Read more]

Darren Cunningham, in his recent blog post How to Migrate To The Cloud, made some great points around the use of staging for data integration for cloud computing. The reasons he would leverage a staging area for cloud computing include:

• It enables better business control before the data is pushed from one system to the other.
• It enables tracking and reconciliation of a business process.
• It enables the addition of new sources or targets with reuse instead of building the spaghetti plate of point to point direct interfaces. It responds to the SOA paradigm.
• It breaks the dependencies between the two systems enabling asynchronous synchronization or synchronous with different size of data set (single message or bulk). [Read more]

It’s not that often that I see such a great article on SOA. Most of the time these types of articles are full of theory or are written by software vendors pushing their own solutions.
It makes much more sense to read from an experienced hands-on expert, as they share their SOA journey. In fact, take a look at William El Kaim’s extensive article entitled MySOA: Agile, Governed and Sustainable. [Read more]

Lately, we've had a great deal of discussion here at the Perspectives community over the emerging role of data services within a service-oriented architecture (SOA) context.

At the end of October 2009, I had the honor of joining a group of thought leaders and industry experts at the SOA Symposium in Rotterdam to sit down and worked to clear the air, once and for all, as to what it means to service-orient a system, and arrive at a consensus as to what SOA should mean to organizations. The result was a document called the "SOA Manifesto". [Read more]

A painting typically starts with broad brush strokes after which the artist painstakingly fills in each detail, until the masterpiece finally reveals itself. In my last post, Revive Enterprise Architecture With Transformational SOA Data Integration, I introduced you to the broad brush strokes of SOA-based Data Services, the daunting data-centric integration problems it can solve and a high-level summary of its transformational capabilities. As promised, in this short series of posts, we will take a look at each of these transformational capabilities, in detail. So, let's start with the most logical and fundamental capability - Multimodal Data Provisioning Services. [Read more]

Is data architect a role that's interchangeable with enterprise architect? Many observers see the two roles are overlapping to some degree. However, perhaps it’s time that data architecture be recognized for having a distinct role in today's enterprises.

With the rise of service oriented architecture and distributed computing, enterprise architects have been emerging as key players in their organizations – assuring that applications and systems are designed within a coherent framework and follow a roadmap designed with the business in mind. Now, the same discipline needs to apply to an enterprise's data resources. [Read more]

The year 2009 – and the first decade of the 21st century – is drawing to a close, and what a time it's been.

The economy was buffeted around by the financial crisis, companies tightened their spending, and cuts hit hard and fast. But there has also been a deepening realization that the secret to success in this new environment wasn't to batten down the hatches and cut away, but rather, to run businesses smarter. More companies learned that to forge ahead, they needed to better leverage both their human and technology resources – employing smarter data strategies, including business intelligence and analytics.

The year ahead promises more of the same. Here are some up-and-coming trends that will shape the data management space in the year 2010: [Read more]

It is that time of the year again. A tough year comes to a close and we all look forward to the coming year with varying degrees of anticipation. What will the new year bring? Before I comment on various predictions, I wanted first to say that I hope 2010 brings you happiness and prosperity. I hope you get what you want and I send good wishes to all - whether friend or competitor! In terms of business and technology, I believe that 2010 is going to be another challenging year. However, there are several trends that I believe will assert themselves strongly in the enterprise. So, here goes with my 2010 predictions:

1. The Data Driven Enterprise becomes a reality in 2010. Significant change will start occurring as enterprises recognize the value of data and the negative impact on business success coming from decades of Application-centric lock-in. CIO's will turn to architects to remove the IT hairball that threatens their tenure. This IT hairball (a mismash of various application integration technologies) will bring down at least one large enterprise due to operational failure propagating across application integrations. [Read more]

On November 10, Informatica made history with the launch of Informatica 9. In my mind, being a SOA enthusiast, another equally significant event transpired – the birth of SOA-based Data Services – transformational SOA data integration that can revive your enterprise architecture.

So, what exactly are SOA-based Data Services and why am I so excited?

[Read more]

Since recently attending the Gartner MDM Summit, reading the latest report on MDM Trends from Forrester, and speaking with several customers, a few trends are starting to emerge:

• There is no one single technology that will help organizations solve all of their MDM challenges
• While some MDM products are supporting multiple domains, they are still either customer-centric or product-centric
• Analytical style of MDM is gaining in importance, and
• The common challenges across all data domains and hub styles are data integration and data quality

[Read more]