Informatica Perspectives

Over the past few weeks we’ve been talking to Informatica customers about cloud integration at the Informatica 9 World Tour events. In most of the cities, we’re hosting a Cloud Breakfast to dive in to what Gartner has listed as one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. Not surprisingly, interest has been widespread. Attendees include people in IT and line of business (LOB) roles; people with PowerCenter skills and long-time Informatica Cloud customers; CRM administrators and IT architects; sales and marketing operations; ISVs and quite a few consultants.

One thing that they all have in common is that they’re thinking about the opportunities and challenges that the shift to cloud computing represents. As one attendee put it, “we can either get on the train or get run over by it!”

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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]

It’s pretty common for those of us in the data management world to talk about managing data as an asset, just as you manage assets like equipment and capital. One trite but telling mental test that I’ve seen many times goes something like this:

“In your office you have a rare antique desk, an expensive computer, and a 50 cent CD that has the only list of your top 500 customers and their purchase history. If there’s a fire, which do you save?”

The answer is meant to be obvious (the CD, duh), illustrating the enormous business value intrinsic to your data. And most of us nod our heads and say “yes, data is a critical asset, and we should manage it that way.” In fact, this concept of maximizing the value of data is core to our upcoming Informatica 9 launch.

But it’s easy to say and hard to do, not least because it is seemingly impossible to quantify the value of data. If you can’t put a specific dollar figure on it, how can you know how much you need to invest in managing it?
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Ignoring the current firestorm concerning health care reform that is sweeping the country; I would like to focus on the major health care event of 2009 that seems to have slipped under the radar but is the cornerstone of all future health care reform.

As part of the stimulus package known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the President signed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. This act includes billions of dollars in incentive payments through Medicare to digitize and automate the health care industry starting in 2011 and going until 2015, with the goal of providing the platform for the implementation of a nationwide interoperable, privacy-protected health information technology infrastructure. What this infrastructure will be is being worked out now by various committees established by the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Dr. David Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.P.. However, the starting point for these committees was defined, and incentive payments will only be dispersed if providers meet the following high level tenets: [Read more]

Enterprise data integration is often brushed over in projects involving approaches such as enterprise application integration (EAI) or service-oriented architecture (SOA).

People who attempt to manage data within these types of initiatives often find themselves in hot water: Data issues are very complex — and typically greatly underestimated — and EAI and SOA-based approaches just aren't up to the task. Successful data integration requires finding the right tool for the job.

This October 1st (at high noon Eastern Time), I have the pleasure of moderating an Informatica-sponsored Webinar, hosted by ebizQ, featuring Dave Linthicum, CEO of the Linthicum Group and one of the world’s leading authorities on SOA, Cloud, and application and data integration.

Dave will take the mystery out of data integration, providing his recommendations for the best implementation approaches and technologies. He will also provide a method for understanding your own data integration requirements, review existing solution patterns, and discuss the technology that is available today to make sure you can get your job done.

Topics to be discussed include emerging data integration patterns; limitations of existing data integration approaches; approaching SOA with "A"rchitecture; Informatica’s Data Services; and a plan of action.

Dave has been contributing his insights here at the Informatica Perspectives community, with posts on bringing enterprise data integration into SOA domains.

Dave’s latest book, Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide, connects the dots between SOA and cloud, and is scheduled for released in October.

Tune into the Webinar on October 1st, at noon Eastern Time, to learn more about data integration.

Our fifth and final stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was Minneapolis.  This was our first visit to this mid-West business hub and we were very interested to see what types of businesses were looking at Cloud Computing and how they saw the challenges of integrating their operational systems with the new cloud-based world.  We were both surprised and overwhelmed by the attendance and the response.  You might have thought we were in the ‘show me’ state by the interest in our On Demand data integration demonstrations.

We held a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast for a ‘standing room only’ crowd prior to the start of the day-long Cloudforce conference.  Our local customer, Andersen Windows and Doors presented an engaging case study describing a Master Data Management Hub architecture that they implemented to tie their operational systems into their Salesforce CRM system.  As with the case study presented at our last Cloudforce Roundtable, Andersen employed a combination of Informatica On Premise and On Demand solutions to bring their various operational and customer case data together to integrate into Salesforce CRM as well as to replicate Salesforce data to their centralized BI reporting system.  Their ultimate goal was to assure timely, accurate customer data across the organization to improve customer relationships and operational efficiencies. [Read more]

Our fourth stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was ‘the windy city’ of Chicago (and yes it was very windy that week). Situated in the middle of the country the Greater Chicago Area is headquarters for a diverse set of companies from large manufacturing and financial services firms to mid-sized business services organizations. The common thread seems to be that regardless of size or industry everyone is looking to reduce costs, streamline operations and improve overall operational efficiencies. SaaS applications and Cloud Computing are ideally suited to meet those objectives.

Our fourth CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast was held in conjunction with the Cloudforce conference. Attendees were treated to a case study presentation by our local customer, TransUnion who described their efforts to improve Call Center efficiencies by integrating various ‘systems of record’ to provide a true 360 degree view of the customer to their call center reps. Initially integrating five separate data sources from IBM and Oracle-based applications, enabled the call center group to increase ‘first call’ resolution rates by over 200 percent while significantly reducing incoming call times. [Read more]

Our third stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was ‘across the pond’ in London England.  Salesforce saw an early opportunity to expand the footprint (or should I saw ‘cloud print’) of their leading SaaS CRM system beyond the US and so we found a strong following and interest there.  While primarily a UK audience, the event drew enterprise users from across Europe as well as many budding startups and systems integrators looking to build cloud-based applications on the force.com platform.

We again sponsored a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast with local prospects, and our local UK customer sportingbet presented a case study describing how they have significantly improved their overall marketing automation efforts by integrating their operational platform with their Salesforce CRM and Eloqua marketing automation systems.  Linking the three platforms together enabled them to leverage information on their customers’ service usage and behavior to more effectively target marketing programs and promotions to sustain and increase their overall business.  Essentially achieving every marketers dream (including the author’s). [Read more]

Our second stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was New York City.  The impact of the economic downturn was clearly apparent in both the business and social conversations we had with Tour attendees.  But like the Cloudforce Tour event in Atlanta, the New York audience was very focused on SaaS and Cloud Computing and came prepared to learn what was new from salesforce.com and their partners, including Informatica On Demand.  While most were looking for ways to reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies, an equal number were interested in finding innovative ways to deliver new services in the cloud.  As the Financial Services industry has been on the forefront of application development, these seasoned professionals were interested in learning how they could integrate new cloud-based applications with the back office systems and databases of their firms and their clients.  After all a cloud without integration is really just a cloud adrift.

We sponsored a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast with local prospects, and our customer comScore presented a case study on how they are integrating and synchronizing their Salesforce CRM system data with an on premise database for operational analytics and reporting.  Their approach enables them to bring business analytics to their Sales and Marketing teams by integrating their on premise and cloud-based CRM systems while improving operational efficiency. [Read more]

For those of you following along from my last blog post, first stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour is Atlanta, GA.  It’s interesting to see the difference a year makes in the attitude and awareness of the people attending.  Last year Informatica On Demand sponsored the Salesforce.com conference, then called Tour de Force.

While the ’08 audience was curious, they seemed more interested in socializing with their fellow attendees and colleagues.  This year the tone was much more business focused and attendance was up nearly 50% over ’08.  SaaS and Cloud Computing are now top of mind for businesses looking to reduce and manage costs, and integration of back office systems and databases with Salesforce CRM is a pressing topic for all who we spoke with.

We sponsored a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast with local prospects, and our customer Atlanta Dental Supply (ADS) presented a case study on how they’ve integrated their Salesforce CRM system with their MS SQL Server-based order management system.  It’s an interesting example of how a relatively straight forward ‘out of the box’ (or should I say ‘out of the cloud’) integration can significantly streamline sales and operations for a rapidly growing mid-size business. [Read more]