Informatica Perspectives

Over the last couple of months we have been running user conferences across the world.  Our user community is incredibly important to us and we are delighted with the assistance our chapter leaders provide in guiding these meetings and helping us to maintain a strong community.

So it was with great delight that I read an article in the "examiner.com" about our recent user group meeting over in Florida.  Entitled "OMG, an afternoon at the Oscars or a Florida user's group " it espoused the value of the group.  In fact, it had me laughing merrily:

"If I were rating the most fun and entertaining users’ group meeting I've attended this year, Florida IUG would have walked away with the following awards: Best Location, Best Actor, Best supporting actor and actress; Most Prolific Presenters; Best Buffet".

OK, so the article was humorous - well, certainly to me.  However, there is a very serious side to this.  Our user group meetings are an opportunity for our users to come together, to meet others and to discuss the latest trends and developments in data integration.  We hold user group meetings all over the world.  If you would like to know more about them visit our community site. Connect with your peers through our newly launched Informatica Technology Network, or our online user community.

We are continually looking at ways of improving how our users connect with each other.  If you think we can do more, then please let me know.

Ok, so I can't believe it either.  However, it's true - registration is now open for Informatica World 2009!   The premier industry data integration annual event, this will be our eleventh worldwide conference and we're delighted to be going to the MGM in Las Vegas next year. 

For a glimpse of what to expect take a look at our conference website.  We will be host an executive summit and partner event alongside the main conference.  You can expect to hear stories from our cusomters about how they are diving operational excellence across their organizations.  Of course all the well-known and successful activities will be there also - like Meet the Experts, Birds of a Feather and tons of peer and industry networking.

Everyone at Informatica looks forward to welcoming you to what is going to be an exciting and informative conference.

I was reading a report the other day about the fact that most M&A activity fails to deliver shareholder value.  Apparently 79% of M&A activity ignores IT integration and this then undermines the success of M&A through poor planning and execution of the IT integration process post-merger or post-acquisition.  The piece entitled "Mergers and Acquisitions and their IT impact" comes from UK-based analyst firm Bloor Research.

It had me wondering "why?"

Interestingly enough most M&A activity does not naturally involve the IT organization.  OK, I get this - after all it is usually the CEOs who get together, agree on the merger and then go to their boards for approval.  After that functional teams start working and progress is made.  There’s an interesting observation made by the report’s author, Phillip Howard:

“The overwhelming impression that one gets from studying these results and from reading the comments provided by respondents, is one of CIOs and IT managers struggling manfully against huge odds.” 

Why is this?

Firstly, it’s because combining IT functions is complicated.  Here is just some of what one needs to do: 

• Merge the general ledgers for regulatory requirements within a defined timescale - by consolidating data from disparate systems and ensuring the resulting data can be trusted.
• Pull together customer service functions - by consolidating data from disparate systems and ensuring the resulting data can be trusted.  
• Determine which applications should be kept, and which should be retired - and then consolidating data between the various applications and ensuring the resulting data can be trusted.
• Ensure a single view of your product information - by consolidating data into a single combined system and ensuring the resulting data can be trusted. 
• Align outsourced functions - by consolidating data to the chosen services and ensuring the resulting data can be trusted.

The list goes on, and it’s clear that the amalgamation of IT functions is a major obstacle to the successful completion of a merger or acquisition.  I would even go so far as to say that the success aspired to by the CEO is significantly dependent upon the ability of IT to bring together the systems necessary to drive the new organization forward. 

Data integration and data quality are critical components of ensuring success in this process.  Just yesterday we announced an example of this with one of our customers, Brazilian telecoms giant, "Oi": 

Oi, however, is a study in complexity. At the turn of the century, Brazil privatized its telecommunications companies. Sixteen companies, operating as monopolies in sixteen Brazilian states, merged to form Telemar. In 2002 Telemar launched Oi as their mobile branch with independent operations. Three years later, Oi merged operations with Telemar, and Oi emerged as a full service telecommunications company.

Oi’s challenge: How do you make a highly complex structure look simple to the users of your data and, most importantly, to your customers?

At this year’s Informatica World we showcased another one of our customers who turned to Informatica to help with their M&A processes.  That time it was Virgin Media and we acknowledged all the work they’ve done in this area with one of our 2008 innovation awards: 

"There's only one way to compete effectively in the communications/entertainment industry - customer service, outrageously fine customer service, supported by real-time access to customer data every second of every day. And that data has to be up to date. In spite of the merger of three companies over a brief period, that's what we promise our customers. This nomination acknowledges how much what we've accomplished means for Virgin Media and how much it means for our customers."

– Paul Froggatt, Information Management Manager, Virgin Media

Data integration is a critical enabler to successful M&A.  Without it failure is far more probable - with it at least organizations have a chance of delivering shareholder value.

Have you gone through M&A recently? I'd be interested in your views on the role data integration plays in helping corporations achieve success in M&A activity.

In my last post, I talked about the enterprise integration challenges that still challenge enterprises, even if they have moved processes to cloud computing or Software as a Service providers.

Will integration issues dampen the enthusiasm around cloud computing? What's the role of data environments in these new scenarios? To address these questions, I recently had the opportunity to speak with Chris Boorman, chief marketing officer with Informatica, and Ron Papas, senior vice president and general manager for Informatica On Demand, about the enterprise data management implications of this growing trend. (Chris also recently posted some of his observations here.) [Read more]

There's been no shortage of excitement about "cloud computing" - the idea that applications, databases and even entire data centers can be managed by someone else somewhere else, and be accessed online on an as-needed basis. Instead of maintaining complex software or systems that need constant maintenance and upgrades, a company could theoretically "rent" processing power, through the cloud, from service providers, only paying an incremental fee based on usage.

Major systems and applications vendors have announced cloud-computing initiatives, and leading analyst firm Gartner has named cloud computing - along with green IT and social-computing platforms - among technologies that are "poised to reach broad enterprise adoption in the next two to five years." Cloud computing is also known as Software as a Service and on-demand computing.

However, while cloud computing hands off many of the aches and pains associated with systems and application development and management to someone else, this does not relieve enterprises of the requirements and responsibilities around effectively managing enterprise data. Many observers, in fact, are concerned about the implications of cloud computing on enterprise data management and integration, since much of the processing and storage of information shifts to outside providers.

For example, cloud computing - which everyone suddenly seems to want - puts new strains on enterprises and vendors alike. A new study from Saugatuck Technology states that users want SaaS throughout the enterprise, whether their enterprises are ready for it or not, and whether vendors are ready to deliver it or not. The study, based on interviews with 400 executives and 30 SaaS solution provider and independent software vendors, finds that while users are increasingly demanding and expecting SaaS versions of everything from email to ERP, they often don't understand the technological and organizational resource constraints to enterprise-wide cloud computing.

And cloud computing does nothing to solve tricky data integration problems that companies may be wrestling with. Todd Biske, a practicing enterprise architect and former industry consultant, recently observed that cloud-based systems do not do the hard integration work - that's still up to the enterprise. He put it well when he pointed out "if an organization chooses Salesforce.com CRM on demand instead of SAP or Oracle CRM deployed within their firewall, does anything really change? Yes, there's no doubt that there are potential benefits as far as getting CRM up and running goes, but then what? In the enterprises I've worked with, the bulk of the projects were not about implementing some new vendor package. Some of that was always occurring, but there was plenty more that was about integration, enhancements, and other development activities."

Will these integration issues dampen the enthusiasm around cloud computing? In my next post 'Cloud Computing' is Ready for Enterprise Prime Time, But… (Part 2), I talk to Informatica's Chris Boorman and Ron Papas about how enterprises should handle integration issues.

Many of our customers express frustration that even though it is quite obvious how their business suffers from poor data quality, they find it difficult to convince their associates to invest in initiatives that correct the problems.

Earlier this year, we participated in Rob Karel's Forrester research that addresses this issue. The resulting research paper is titled "A Truism for Trusted Data: Think Big, Start Small" and its getting a lot of interest. Recently, there was a nice writeup in Intelligent Enterprise where they interviewed Rob and also made mention of the Data Quality ROI calculator that we've developed by working alongside our customers.

The article states

While Forrester is often suspect of vendor-supplied calculators, the research firm lists Informatica as an example of a vendor that has taken an approach that matches Forrester's bottom-up strategy. The Informatica Data Quality ROI Calculator enables customers "to capture and visualize the benefits of a data quality investment " before that investment is made," Forrester said.

The report is available from Forrester's web site. It contains some nice examples of how customers have built a business case for justifying investment in Data Quality. If you would like to share some previous successes in building a Data Quality ROI, feel free to post a comment!

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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Tony Baer was at our analyst day on Wednesday at Informatica World and has some interesting thoughts about how the market for data integration is rapidly broadening. One of the key technologies that is enabling our customers to do much more than data warehousing, Data streaming through products like our Real Time Edition.

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Mark Smith, CEO and EVP of Research at Ventana Research (and one the attendees at Informatica World this week), posted the following blog entry last night - "Informatica Bets Big on Information Economy."

Here's a snippet from Mark's entry:

"Informatica recently has brought forward new products and organizational leaders to continue their growth across the globe. I believe that Informatica is beginning to truly understand the larger benefit of data integration which is a required component of a CIO strategy and larger information economy."

The information economy and the role of broader data integration - this is the key theme that we and our customers and partners are talking about this week at Informatica World.

In fact, Ron Swift from Teradata is talking about it right now during the closing session of our conference.

Stay tuned for a more detailed post of Ron's session and the rest of today's proceedings…

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During yesterday's keynote session and on this blog, both Sohaib and I talked about cloud computing, the fragmentation of data, and how you need to access it, move it, clean it and trust it in order to succeed in today's global information economy. Enter Informatica.

We're not the only ones talking clouds these days - check out the post on Salesforce.com's force.com blog, titled "The Right Stuff is Better than More Stuff."

Here's a good snippet from Peter Coffee's entry:

Clear supremacy for the cloud is now emerging, though, in the form of superior integration among cloud-based tools (e.g., salesforce.com and Google Apps) and — probably even more important — both cloud-based and on-premise data sources (viz. today's announcement from Informatica).

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