Informatica Perspectives

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]

On October 29th my colleague Sanjay Krishnamurthi is joining Peter Coffee from salesforce.com and Jeff Barr from Amazon.com at the Architecture and Innovation summit in Minneapolis.

They are discussing the state of the industry around one of the hot new architectures climbing the technology hype cycle - namely Application Platform as a Service (APaaS). Offerings in this space include Informatica On-demand, salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services to name just a few.

The really big question of course is … "Is Cloud Computing a valid strategy for large mission-critical applications or is it just for quick ramp-up of new capabilities and low-volume department solutions?"

The reality is that core business solutions are being implemented today in the cloud by companies of all sizes with impressive results. An enterprise could, in principal, implement their entire suite of applications with the only purchased software being a browser!

If you are in the vicinity, please drop by and listen to Sanjay, Peter and Jeff explore the promise of APaaS and the present day reality. I'l write-up a brief summary of their presentation and post it afterwards.  Here's what you can expect:

• a broad overview of cloud computing; what it is and what it means for business leaders, architects, and system integrators.
• the challenges, such as data fragmentation and information security, and solutions that are available to address them.
• an overview of their respective offerings including real-life case studies.

I've also been told that they will show a live cloud integration demo showing how salesforce.com can be integrated with Amazon Web Services using Informatica On-Demand.

Sounds exciting - you can find out more about the summit here.

A blog at IT-Director.com caught my eye yesterday.  Entitled "IT Budgets, Clouds and Virtualization" it included the following comment:

“For Cloud computing, chief amongst these concerns is the readiness of commercial organisations to trust significant proportions of their essential, and hence incredibly valuable, corporate information to platforms and suppliers over whom they have little control and who might hold the data wherever they wish. Such a leap of faith is today beyond consideration in many business scenarios.”

This is spot-on.  There is so much talk about "cloud computing this, and cloud computing that".  When it comes to corporations there are many examples of outsourcing non-core business processes to the cloud.  Here at Informatica we use over 17 different services ourselves. I'd say the most mission-critical of these is our email marketing system (can't tell you who or I'd have to shoot you!).  We're rolling it out worldwide across our marketing team and have spent the last few months integrating it with our own on-premise CRM system, contact hub and datawarehouse.  Not a trivial task but incredibly important for me (well, I'm a marketeer) but probably less mission-critical to our CFO!

At the end of the day corporations WILL move data into the clouds so whilst I agree with Tony in the above-mentioned article, I also disagree with him (OK, bit of a split personality here now).  I agree that it is foolish to simply “go to the clouds”, but I disagree about the state of the industry.  It is possible to keep the data secure and we, amongst others, have proven that with our on-demand integration service.  It is also possible to integrate such services into core business processes.  My statement would be - don't overlook the integration. You do it at your peril.  We've had a LOT of experience of helping companies do this effectively - after all we're the data integration company!

Oh … and we can do it from in the clouds too

The airways are a buzz with cloud computing.  I was reading an article just yesterday on a blog posting about building datawarehouses in the clouds.  Entitled "Google, Panorama and the BI of the Future" the article made reference to ourselves and the work we are doing in this area:

 … Once your data’s in the cloud, you’re going to want to load it into a hosted data warehouse of some kind, and I don’t think that’s too much to imagine given the cloud databases already mentioned. But how to load and transform it? Not so much of an issue if you’re doing ELT, but for ETL you’d need a whole bunch of new hosted ETL services to do this. I see Informatica has one in Informatica On Demand;

I think there are great opportunities here in helping to utilize the cloud to deliver not just business applications but also areas such as CDW (or cloud-based data warehousing).  This is something that we are looking at closely.  It starts with being able to access data in different systems (both on-premise and on-demand).  You may have already seen the work we are doing in this area:  take a look at our on-demand web-site at www.informaticaondemand.com.   Here you can see our cloud-computing data integration services - multi-tenanted, in the clouds with no software!  Pretty cool.  If you want to see a demo of what it's all about, take a look at our cloud computing integration demo.

There's a lot happening in the world of cloud computing and I'm delighted to see Informatica leading the charge in helping corporations to integrate and drive data quality across the clouds. 

Cloud computing cannot succeed without integration.  The last thing anyone wants is to simply fragment their data across the clouds.  Integration prevents this and ensures you can retain control of your data assets.

Do you agree?  let me know!

Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you've probably heard the term "cloud computing" enough to make your head spin.  This phenomenon is shifting the technology industry and getting a lot of exposure in the media, amongst the analyst community and more and more amongst our customer base. People have asked me how I would describe cloud computing, and in fact how an enterprise software company like ours has become involved in this, the biggest shift that I.T. has seen for some time.

The first thing you need to understand is that the "cloud" is just another word for the Internet.  I did a post on this in June during our annual Informatica World conference. Basically, cloud computing is “services and applications that are hosted on and accessed through the Internet.” I saw this as the simplest explanation so far in a piece entitled Cheat Sheet, or as I like to call it, "Cloud Computing for Dummies."   It breaks down the components of cloud computing as well as the value of doing business in this way.

So how do we fit into the picture?  [Read more]

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article last week entitled "SAP, Oracle Boost Software Prices" The conclusion, as summarized nicely by Forrester’s Ray Wang is that consolidation has resulted in less competition between the big vendors. This in turn can have a significant negative effect on customers …

Less competition means these large consolidators have much more control over your data and can pretty much do whatever they want  - for instance as it relates to maintenance pricing.  So if I am a buyer and looking at their solutions (largely obtained through acquisitions), should I believe that they are magically going to have the same pricing now that they are part of SAP or Oracle? [Read more]

Last week we sent out two press releases talking about the role of "data" in delivering on Governance, Risk and Compliance. It had me wondering on the importance of data integration - strategic or tactical?

The first "Informatica Delivers Comprehensive, Timely, and Trusted Data For Governance, Risk, and Compliance" was designed to kickoff a campaign we are running on this subject. I think that this is something Informatica is good at - helping companies to pull together trusted, accurate data to meet these requirements. My colleague John Schmidt was commenting recently on why data integration should be considered as a strategic discipline, and not simply a tactical activity. I can't think of anything more strategic than delivering data for such purposes - after all, the alternative seems to be "go to jail"!

The second release "IDC EMEA Report Finds That SEPA Fatigue Leaves Banks in Limbo" results from a research report conducted by IDC in relation to the latest set of regulatory requirements to hit the finance sector - namely the Single European Payment Area (SEPA) which went live in January this year. We sponsored this research with Atos Origin because we felt that it was important to understand how financial institutions are implementing this regulation and what the results have been. The resulting paper, which you can obtain here, highlights the relatively lack-lustre approach that many banks have taken to this mandatory regulation. It also highlights the role that data plays in moving information between financial institutions. We now live within a society in which information is the primary currency being traded and anything that can be done to lowering the cost of transacting "information" between institutions is a good thing.

This comes back to the point made by John (above) in how data integration has become a strategic discipline and not a set of tactical processes. Whether you are looking for assistance in moving data between companies, or migrating data to a new system, or consolidating data from disparate systems, or integrating data within cloud computing services, or … [the list goes on], it is important to recognize that you should adopt a strategic platform in doing this because all the individual tactical processes that are talked about soon become strategic. The sooner one recognizes this, the sooner one can reap the benefits of a data integration platform to help drive efficiencies across all these processes and ensure that you are lowering your cost of managing data across your enterprise.

Executives should be asking themselves some pretty basic questions:

1. How much do you trust your data?
2. What happens if you use outdated information?
3. Do you have complete visibility and insight into your business?

These were some of the questions I was pondering while reading a recent white paper authored by one of my colleagues. It was talking about how the delivery of complete and trusted data can help your organization to manage Governance, Risk, and Compliance. With advice and knowledge from real-world customer stories, it explained both how to reduce the cost of producing timely and trusted data for Governance, Risk and Compliance as well as showing how timely, high quality information can satisfy regulatory data audit and documentation requirements.

Delivering trusted data is something that should be on the forefront of executives minds, and the technology is here now to help companies achieve this in a cost effective manner.

Seems pretty strategic to me - what do you think?

OK, so there is a lot of talk about cloud computing. It struck me that the fundamental problem facing enterprises is on two fronts:

Firstly, do you trust where your data is going. Security is just one aspect of ensuring trust. The leading SaaS vendors have done a ton of work to ensure that the data is secured once it enters their systems. They also provide interfaces that allow for secure reading and writing of data to and from their applications. Our software plugs in seamlessly into those interfaces (transport encryption, message encryption, etc.) and ensures that we can pick up, transport over the Internet, and deliver sensitive data to and from these SaaS applications for data integration. Furthermore, our own OnDemand service is in itself a SaaS application, and much like other SaaS vendors we also guarantee that data is secured and managed redundantly once it enters our OnDemand systems.

Secondly, can you link it into your core business processes? Achieving this is when cloud computing really transitions from non-core capabilities to truly core mainstream business processes. This is also where real-time data integration plays a critical role. Fundamentally you are looking to extend your existing enterprise into the clouds and leveraging some far-off, beyond-the-firewall service. We now live in a world where everything seems to have to be done at the speed of "NOW". Hence the need for real-time integration - after all, most web activities are in your face "NOW". You want to be able to see your query "NOW", you want to do your analysis "NOW". You don't want to wait for the batch process to happen and sit around until the data is ready for analysis tomorrow - you want it "NOW".

The cool thing about the Informatica platform is that you can have your cake and eat it - we think of a data source in the clouds as "just another data source". We enable you to reach out from your existing enterprise and integrate your chosen cloud platform as though it were just another data source in your existing enterprise. You pull the data in real-time using Orchestration and change data capture - just like you would for any other data source. And you get to see it "NOW"!

So we launched a real-time campaign about the importance of being able to use your data "NOW". If you have time, please go take a look at the Real-Time Data Integration section of the Informatica web site where you can find loads of materials focusing on the importance of Real-Time Data Integration. I hope you like it - let me know what you think.

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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