Informatica Perspectives

Last month I posted an article about cloud computing and cloud integration (see Keep your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds for the full article) and encouraged readers to come to the Architecture and Integration Summit to see Informatica, salesforce.com and Amazon.com tell the story and see a demo. Those that came were not disappointed – the keynote presentation by Sanjay Krishnamurthy, Jeff Barr and Peter Coffee was electrifying! [Read more]

OK, I'm excited.  What do AAA, Dolby and Bax Global all have in common besides all being Informatica customers?  Give up?  Let me tell you … they’re all presenting at this week’s San Francisco Dreamforce event alongside our On Demand general manager, Ron Papas (you know the one who’s been ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’). Guess what they’ll be talking about … give up? Their presentation is called "Salesforce Integration – It’s not just for IT any more".

The responsibility of SaaS integration often lies outside of IT; in fact SaaS administrators have different skillsets to IT admins and these guys are going to explain why software (like ours) that addresses the needs of the SaaS admins is imperative for success in today’s business environment. 

By the way, did I tell you I was excited?!  Well, I have reason to be. For the first time in a long time, the industry is witnessing a momentous shift in the way companies manage their data integration processes – and you know what?  Without us, it wouldn’t be possible!

Informatica data integration is critical for SasS!

[Read more]

It’s been 7 months since we launched INFORM, Informatica’s updated Worldwide Partner Program and the underlying beINFORMed partner portal. Partner response has been overwhelmingly positive and we’ve seen a significant uptick in user registration, use of free eLearning-based education and collaboration between our sales force and partner field teams.

Our channel, comprised of System Integrators, ISVs and OEMs, has played a major role in Informatica’s ongoing 4+ year growth run. Our platform neutral technology makes it easier for consultants to implement across customer engagements. By making it really simple for partner sales, presales and implementation personnel to understand Informatica’s message, follow a role-based enablement path and find materials/content, working with Informatica is now dramatically better!

The portal itself, beINFORMed is a place for partners to manage their ongoing relationship with Informatica. They can order software, find resources/content and above all else become implementation experts across all of Informatica’s product lines. If you’re a partner, let us know how we’re doing, we look forward to continued success with you!

That question has been raised several times in recent weeks by various analysts and journalists. First, Informatica acquired Identity Systems, which provides the core matching technology used by several Master Data Management (MDM) solutions. At that point, Rob Karel of Forrester speculated on what our next step would be in MDM. Then, partnerships with Initiate and Siperian were announced a few weeks ago during our Informatica World user conference. This posting by Loraine Lawson comments on those announcements and whether Informatica is getting into the MDM space.

So-are we getting into MDM? The simple answer is Informatica is already in MDM-we have been helping customers for years to create a meaningful, trusted and valuable system of master records. Informatica provides the critical data integration and data quality underpinnings for MDM. Customers use Informatica to get data out of other systems and loaded into their master data solution, to make sure that the data is clean and stays clean, and to get the master data back out to consuming applications. And, of course, several MDM solution providers embed Informatica identity resolution technology for matching master records.

So yes, we are in the MDM space. But we don't provide the MDM application or solution itself. We support whatever MDM application the customer chooses-be that a packaged or homegrown solution. That's why we partner with MDM vendors including Initiate, Siperian, Orchestra Networks, Oracle and D&B (Purisma) - to make sure our solutions work well together for customers.

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!

ShareThis

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…

ShareThis

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).

ShareThis

Read about Informatica 8.6's great impact on Informatica customers and partners.

ShareThis

We're here at the opening keynote, planning to capture as much as possible.

9:06am: Here we go… packed house, music pumping as people are getting seated. Standing room only at the back. Lights down, and a nice video plays about how fast the world is moving, and how data can help you manage the pace of change.

9:09am: Chris Boorman, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, is giving the introduction. 10th annual Informatica World - this year is the largest ever. Chris is describing how people got here, planned their trips, and how they communicate, shop and travel - how all of them have Informatica in common. Many airlines, car companies, travel companies, phone companies, banks, etc. - all Informatica customers.

Click To Enlarge

9:16am: Chris introduces Informatica's Chairman and CEO, Sohaib Abbasi. Sohaib mentions how much this user conference has grown since the first one ten years ago… he says (I'm pretty sure tongue in cheek) that the entertainment at the first one was a local high school marching band.

9:20am: Sohaib talking about the launch of Informatica 8.6 and how it will help customers grow beyond the traditional capabilities they've known from Informatica over the years… more on this later in the keynote.

Talking about customers and why Informatica is so focused…mentions a third-party survey which concludes that Informatica has retained the #1 customer loyalty rating among data integration vendors.

Sohaib is now outlining the key trends driving the Information Economy: Globalization, Growth, and Governance, and how these drivers are creating more and more need for organizations to be able to integrate and trust their data.

Click To Enlarge

9:25am: On the topic of the current uncertain times, Sohaib shows a quote from the CEO of a large financial services company… "A number of times people have seen a light at the end of the tunnel… and it has ended up being a train coming down the tracks." Ouch.

9:24am: Sohaib is discussing consolidation in the industry and how it is driving a platform shift. Application vendors in particular are gobbling up smaller competitors, leaving a huge need for a neutral party that can help customers make it through this platform shift.

He shows a great quote from an SAP executive: "Business Objects is coming to SAP with more than 70 percent of its revenue based on non-SAP environments. SAP did not spend more than $6 billion to lose 70 percent of the revenue."

Another quote from Oracle's web site about the nasty intellectual property dust-up between Oracle and SAP. Not pretty to say the least.

The point behind those two quotes: customers need these big vendors to work together, but clearly they don't like each other.

9:37am: relentless pace of innovation - continue to work with customers to refine products, create new products, and roll them out at a pace beyond what any other vendor does.

9:40am: Launch of Informatica 8.6 - first comprehensive, unified, and open platform for data integration. Based on flagship product PowerCenter, but now expanding out to new roles, data exchange between business partners, and delivering data in real time.

9:32am: Sohaib is talking about how Informatica has been a pioneer in cloud computing. Laid out a strategy for software as a service two years ago, and is now launching 3rd service - Data Loader Service for Salesforce.com. Invites Ron from the On Demand group onstage for a demo of "cloud-to-cloud" integration.

This is getting interesting… integration from one cloud to the next. Showing list of fictitious sales leads (funny list of famous, rich executives) in Salesforce.com. Sohaib wants to analyze this data in a spreadsheet, so Ron does point and click integration from Salesforce to Google Spreadsheets. They are doing this live… let's see what happens. Yep, the Google spreadsheet automatically pulls up the Salesforce data.

Click To Enlarge

Now Sohaib wants to make changes in the spreadsheet… increasing probabilities of deals closing, increasing deal sizes… etc. Ron makes the change in Google Spreadsheets, and it automatically shows up back in the Salesforce system. Pretty cool… the crowd is eating this up.

Ron pulls the "one more thing" trick ala Steve Jobs… and pulls out an iPod Touch. Shows how you can do the same scenario on the iPod touch or any device with a browser and an internet connection. Probably the first time an iPod has been used for a data integration demo!

9:50am: Sohaib moves into new product announcements - talking about the launch of B2B Data Exchange. Brings out a customer from Paramount who is describing how they manage flow of information for iTunes royalty payments. They are using Informatica to automate the process now and have cut their development time in half.

9:55am: Final product announcement: Data Quality 8.6. Describing how, now that Data Quality is natively integrated with Informatica's data integration platform, customers will be able to manage data quality at "the point of entry" within their systems. Discussing the identity resolution capabilities that came through with Informatica's recent acquisition of Identity Systems. Sohaib brings up Ivan Chong, SVP and GM of Informatica's Data Quality business unit.

Ivan makes a claim that he is going to show how "Informatica can make the complex –> simple, and the impossible –> possible. Ivan is showing a customer database in the Data Quality Assistant - tons of duplicate entries, partial entries, etc. Ivan shows how a few clicks can remove the duplicates, but then shows how the problem can be compounded when you bring in multiple languages. He shows a customer bases in multiple languages: English, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian. Yikes. Ivan then makes a few more clicks and does cross-language matching. And just like that, the list is narrowed down, shows which languages they came in, etc. Very cool… you can see the obvious use cases for things like goverment security/intelligence, but also things like fraud detection, CRM, etc.

Click To Enlarge

10:02am: Sohaib is wrapping up now - excited to bring Informatica 8.6 to the customer base, thankful to Informatica's customers for their contributions.

Sohaib is now bringing up Girish Pancha, EVP and GM of Informatica's Data Integration business unit. We'll capture Girish's comments in a separate post… stay tuned.