Informatica Perspectives

Now that the $700 billion dollar Troubled Asset Rescue Program (TARP) has been approved by the government, firms on Wall Street are preparing themselves for even more oversight and scrutiny by lawmakers and taxpayers. Survivors from the market meltdown will be required to establish tighter controls, policies, standards, and processes for managing and delivering trusted information for decision making, auditing, and regulatory reporting than ever before. [Read more]

As a follow up to my Alliances momentum post, I wanted to call attention to a recent OEM partners press release highlighting recent wins with OEM ISV partners leveraging Informatica for their own applications, be they "in the cloud" or on-premise installation based. Much of my time in Worldwide Alliances is spent working with prospective ISVs explaining the benefits of taking a 'buy' approach versus ‘building’ a hand-coded solution for data integration.

I continue to see market evidence that also explains our momentum. If you read the interesting October 20^th InformationWeek cover article entitled, "SaaS Under Stress; Integration's the next big test for software as a service", you’ll understand why SaaS software providers are trying to fill this large gap in their offerings.

This makes perfect sense when you take a step back and think about the moving parts of a SaaS application, namely data that needs to [Read more]

Over the last few months, I have had a number of discussions with clients at various stages of planning a data quality initiative. Some clients are just starting to take the data quality plunge, while others are evaluating how to leverage the successes of past projects into building out a formal data governance initiative. When I start talking to clients about their goals around data quality, I often start with the same basic question, regardless of where they fall from a maturity process around data quality. The question is simply – does the business care?

[Read more]

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.

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.

Alan Greenspan stated last week that poor data quality is part of the reason for today’s financial crisis. As many businesses have already learned, databases are only as accurate as the information fed into them. [Read more]

I find this rather an interesting and profound question!  Trusted data.  What does this mean, and how does it affect us all?  We've built all these systems over the years and we implicitly trust that the data provided is correct.

For years I have used online banking and I trust my bank (well, things have been OK up to now and I always check my statements and cross-reference incomings and outgoings).  Why do I check it - basically because I'm still a little nervous, it makes sense and I hear horror stories about hacking, stolen identities and all sorts of security issues.  The latest high profile example of this of course was the Sarah Palin hack (take a look at View From The Bunker for an interesting blog on security).

We make decisions all the time based on trust.  We buy presents for our loved ones, or cars and houses because we think we have enough funds - we trust our data.  I was chatting to a journalist recently over at the Oralce Openworld conference and he brought up the word trust … apparently he was using a very popular on-demand service (you know … the gorilla in the market!) to sell to customers and wasn't able to reconcile with his finance people.  They were telling him that his top 10 customers were completely different to the top ten in his SaaS system.  Hmm … a great example of "which data do you trust"?  The CRM system , or the finance system?  After investigation he found out that the problem was because the two systems were not connected and his company was relying on human process to update both systems.

That's the whole point of integration - to help ensure that your systems are connected and that the right information is available to you to help you improve your decision making process, and operate more effectively.  Today data is the lifeblood of every company, it's the true currency that we all deal in when we trade on the stock exchanges, or run drug trials across hospitals, or manage supply chains across continents.  You have to be able to trust your data - and yet the world is full of examples of mistakes made or mishaps occuring because of poor quality data.

Take a look at "Do You Trust Your Data?". It's a new site we've pushed out highlighting real-world examples of stories relating to trusting your data.  You can add your own (anonymously if you'd like).   We've love to hear from you.  Go on… I know you want to

One of our ISV Partners, Data Synapse, provides a solution for managing infrastructure more efficiently through virtualization and dynamic provisioning.  In today's cost-cutting/cost savings economy, their approach makes a lot of sense to get the most of our existing resources.  We've jointly developed a solution that allows for co-existence of Informatica PowerCenter and other applications to ensure best use of hardware assets and dynamic "capacity scaling".

This may seem complicated, but in reality, it's a great marriage between two solutions that are a natural fit together.  Many organizations leverage data integration as a night time function and BI during the day.  By sharing the same pool of hardware infrastructure, organizations can ensure optimal usage of their resources.

For more information on this concept and how the joint solution works, see an upcoming webinar next week
DataSynapse and Informatica Host Webinar On Reducing Infrastructure Costs for Data Integration - Wednesday, October 15 at 11 a.m. EDT

It's a movement that has momentum and can provide organizations a huge cost savings.

It’s funny that Forrester’s Boris Evelson recently received a slew of comments from data warehousing and business intelligence pros wondering why they hadn’t included an evaluation of Excel as a business intelligence tool. Boris goes on to explain why Excel doesn’t work as a standalone BI tool.

Here’s my take on the subject:

Like it or not, the most widely used BI tool today is the spreadsheet. If you are a BI or data warehousing manager, you need harbor no illusions that you are gathering and manually entering data into spreadsheet. Furthermore, you need to work with the logic captured in Excel spreadsheets and enable this logic to be used for analysis and decision support.

[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!