Tag Archives: On-Demand
Informatica launches industry’s first on-demand data synchronization service for Cloud Computing
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!
Do you trust your data?
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 
IT Budgets, Clouds and Virtualisation
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