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]

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!