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]

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?

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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

I was delighted to see last week a couple of industry awards won by our customers.  It's always nice to hear about such things, because I think it's a testament to the value we deliver to our customers.

The first award went to the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) at the annual UK 2008 CNET Networks awards.  They won "Financial Services Technology Project of the year" award with a project called "SPOT" (Shared Product Opportunity Tool).

"With SPOT, RBS overhauled its client management to drive profitability and success through the development of a collaboration network".

The judges said: “RBS implemented a new system to integrate client information previously held on disparate corporate and investment banking systems. We were impressed by the implementation’s ability to increase sales opportunities exponentially.” 

The second award went to telecoms giant KPN who were awarded top spot at the Ventana Research 2008 Leadership awards for the Information Management Awards category. 

“By introducing the 360-degree view of our customers and providing clean, trusted data in near real-time, Informatica is helping KPN raise the bar in terms of customer satisfaction, target customers with compelling cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and reduce marketing and sales time to market" said Thomas Reichel, Senior IT Architect, KPN

Jan Muchez, CIO, KPN added, “Informatica products and services have been critical to driving shareholder value through improved customer service. To realize our strategic innovation goals, we built our customer data cleansing platform with Informatica soft ware; it gives us real-time cleansing and standardization of our customer data.”

If you're interested in reading more about how KPN is using Informatica, please visit our knowledge center 

We take great pride in the value our customers obtain from our solutions and I would like to congratulate both RBS and KPN on winning these prestigious industry awards.  Well done to you both!

If you would like to see more about the success our customers are obtaining from using Informatica please visit our knowledge center on the Informatica website.

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!

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.

It's been an interesting week over at Informatica.  The airwaves have been buzzing with comment.  A blog posting appeared from Vincent McBurney looking in detail at our success and customer growth - it sometimes amazes me where all this information comes from.  I loved the title - "Data Integration Olympics: Informatica versus IBM, SAP, Microsoft and Oracle".  Take a read - it's very insightful.

Then we were named as a Market Leader in the 2008 CRM Awards for Data Quality.  Meanwhile over at the TDWI conference a good colleague of mine, John Haddad, recorded a podcast with Claudia Imhoff where he spoke on data latency issues, including the need to deliver data in real time so organizations can operate at the "speed of business."  You might like to check it out here.

I was also delighted to see an article appear in InternetNews talking about "IBM catching up with Informatica".  Welcome to the party!  Since the close of our acquisition of Identity Systems three months ago, we’ve heard first-hand from many customers how much they value Informatica’s ability to provide them with a single view of their customers, and in particular the ability to do cross-language matching.

If you only have time for one sentence, here’s one of my favorites … "Right now, IBM is playing catch-up to Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA) in a rapidly growing market."

You might like to check out our demo showing how we have already completed the integration between our data quality solutions and Identity resolution.  It's a neat demo showing "making the complex simple, and the impossible possible".

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!

At Informatica, we take great delight in the success of our customers. Just today, in spite of the economic downturn, KPN announced that its Q2 revenues increased 22% and raised its outlook for the remainder of the year. To what do they attribute their results? Solid execution and successful integration of acquired companies. Watch the KPN CFO give his take on CNBC.

At our recent customer conference, KPN was the overall winner of the annual Informatica Innovation Awards. They made some strategic investment in Informatica products to achieve their business objectives.

“Informatica products and services have been critical to driving shareholder value through improved customer service. To realize our Strategic Innovation goals, we built our Customer Data Cleansing platform with Informatica; it gives us real-time access and cleansing of our customer data. Our nomination for an Innovation Award signifies an industry acknowledgement of the competitive advantage this project has brought to KPN.”
- Jan Muchez, CIO, KPN

At Informatica, we focus a great deal on how our customers link key business imperatives to the application of data integration and data quality technology. What an excellent example provided by KPN - Congratulations to them on a great quarter!

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?