Informatica Perspectives

As the market continues to consolidate and companies sell off assets, not only are the physical assets separated and sold, so are the digital assets – or liabilities. John Schmidt covered it in one of his recent blogs.

When the information to be separated and sold resides in a database, you need to understand the data model and determine what master data, or reference data, and transactions belong to the new company.  In the case of separating master data this may involve understanding the relationships between multiple systems to make sure that when the data is moved into the new company, it maintains context, is accurate and complete.  With transactional data, you need to know the tables and rows that comprise a complete transaction so that when data is moved, no orphaned rows are left behind.

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Last week we completed the acquisition of Siperian – the proven leader in multi-domain MDM.  This is our fourth acquisition in the last 12 months and potentially the single most important acquisition that Informatica has ever done since moving beyond ETL with the acquisition of Similarity Systems in 2006. You can read the press release about Siperian here, and watch a video of my colleague Ivan Chong, General Manager of our Data Quality Business Unit, here.

There has also been a lot of talk about the acquisition in the last few days – such as the commentary from Forrester research analyst Rob Karel, Ventana Research analyst Mark Smith, or Lorraine Lawson over at ITBusinessEdge.  However, I wanted to give my perspective on why I believe this is important to you, our customers: [Read more]

There’s been a lot of hoopla this week about Informatica 9, and rightfully so.  A lot of people at Informatica have been working on this release for a long time, and we’re all excited about the potential it has to help our customers get to the next level.  Informatica 9 can be used in many different ways to help organizations deliver more value from their data to the business.  But there are several business use cases which are really a sweet spot for Informatica 9, based on the traction we have seen already with real-world customers.

• Regulatory/compliance/financial reporting.  Informatica’s heritage is in data warehousing, which is a fundamental underpinning to reporting systems.  But even with all the great advances that both business intelligence and data integration technologies have achieved, CFOs are still challenged in many ways.  Hidden data quality issues put them at risk for non-compliance, leading to penalties, brand degradation, or even jail time.  Minor changes in data sources—say a business rule that has been changed or a format has been adjusted—if not handled correctly and quickly also can mean that reports are incomplete or erroneous.  And it simply takes too long for any new sources of relevant information to be incorporated into the reporting structure.  Informatica 9 can really help in these areas by making data quality issues much more visible, and by drastically reducing the amount of time it takes to accommodate changes in the data underlying the reports. [Read more]