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!

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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.

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!

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".

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]