Informatica Perspectives

While the market is showing signs of recovery from the "Great Recession" most state budgets have been feeling the squeeze from the lag in recovery. In a recent article titled The Sorry State of Finances, Liam Denning explained that, "55% of state revenue, before federal transfers, comes from personal and corporate income tax." Denning also stated that, "the first three quarters of 2009 were the worst for state tax since at least 1963."

There is an apparent lag between recovery in the private sector and a state receiving tax revenue. So what can states do about this problem while they suffer in the red? Mr. Denning said, "Since states can't run general funding deficits, closing gaps mean raising taxes, cutting services and resorting to one-time measures." Mr. Denning's list of solutions is certainly accurate, but does it include all options that states have? What about employing new technology to discover fraud or recover uncollected revenue? [Read more]

I am very fortunate to have a CIO role that extends beyond the traditional responsibilities of IT. Part of my role includes the strategy and implementation of the recently launched Informatica Marketplace.

The Informatica Marketplace has generated a lot of buzz with our customers and partners. Last week while I was presenting at the Pacific Crest Annual Cloud Computing Conference I heard the excitement about our new offering from many of the attendees. Mostly, people appreciated our continued thought leadership and commitment to providing an open platform to host solutions for data integration, data quality and data management. And yes, it is an open platform to host solutions that not only support Informatica, but other vendors too - even competitors. Our fundamental belief is that the hand of free enterprise will ultimately win, so we are willing to provide an open platform to do so.

Here are a few questions I've heard and answered over the last few weeks: [Read more]

Today Informatica announced that Bay & Bay Transportation has used Informatica Cloud Services to achieve a six month project payback on their total Salesforce.com investment and a 900 percent return on their critical data integration project.

Bay & Bay is using the turnkey, on-demand Informatica Cloud Services to provide robust, bi-directional synchronization between its logistics management databases and applications with Salesforce CRM. Using an intuitive web based integration wizard, the company automatically maps source and target fields, configures powerful data transformations, and sets automated synchronization schedules. And being a true multi-tenant cloud-based service, there is no hardware, software, or infrastructure for them to install, manage, or maintain.

[Read more]

The only way for HealthDetail to hold or increase margins was to think differently. The company’s provider directory business supplies accurate and compliant healthcare directories for Medicaid and other health insurers. The problem was that the volume of data coming in and the breadth of different sources it was derived from threatened to overwhelm the existing database. HealthDetail could either invest in dedicated database administration resources, at great expense, or consider a more innovative solution: cloud-based data integration.

[Read more]

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]

This month’s Informatica Newsletter features an interview with Ron Papas, General Manager of the Informatica Cloud. He’s asked, “What should Informatica customers know about the Informatica Cloud?”

I thought his answer was worth sharing here:
[Read more]

This week ChannelWeb announced their 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors. As they note:

“What makes these 100 cloud vendors collected here so cool isn't just the technology. These guys attack the cloud with a certain panache. A sort of swagger, if you will. They get the job done and they look good doing it.”

ChannelWeb divided the “Cool Cloud Computing Vendors" into five categories:

• 20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors
• 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Vendors
• 20 Coolest Cloud Productivity App Vendors
• 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors
• 20 Coolest Cloud Security Vendors

Informatica was recognized as a Cool Cloud Infrastructure Vendor. Here’s what they had to say: [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]

This week we announced that salesforce.com customers have once again recognized Informatica Cloud Services with the Data Integration AppExchange Best of '09 Award. It’s a tremendous honor to win this award as it is 100% driven by customer reviews. According to the salesforce.com Community site:

“The Best of '09 Customer Choice Awards are given to partners based on exceptional user reviews posted to the AppExchange during 2009; and, are a special way for the community to recognize partners for their ongoing commitment to driving customer success.”

There are two fundamental drivers for the growing adoption of cloud integration services:

1. Growing adoption of cloud-based applications and platforms like Salesforce CRM and Force.com are leading to an even greater data fragmentation challenges in companies of all sizes.
2. Departmental, line of business purchases and implementations of software as a service (SaaS) applications have led to a need for easy to use, self-service integration solutions that non-technical users can manage, while IT organizations remain in control. (See the post on Avoiding a Cloud Data Disaster if this sounds familiar.) [Read more]

In his whitepaper, Best Practices in Leveraging a Staging Area for SaaS-to-Enterprise Integration, David Linthicum outlines the difference between direct, point-to-point data integration and staging integration. He defines them as follows:

• Direct: “Moving information from one data source and data schema to another, and translating the differences in semantics from the source to the target system.”
• Staged: “A temporary location where the data from the source system or systems is replicated in order to support more complex and valuable data integration operations, including support for many large data sets and data operations that are more complex and of higher value.” [Read more]