The Dozen 2002Informatica Corp.Redwood City, Calif.Visibility sells. For years, the world has been hearing about analytic applications and wondering what this expression means. We've had decision support, executive information systems, BI — grandiose variations on a theme. All rested on a pair of well-known, more prosaically described activities: querying and reporting. Analytic applications were just about rearranging the furniture to make people feel like they're going where they haven't gone before. That's it, right? Wrong. The difference, as far as Informatica is concerned, is the starting point. Today, companies have many operational data sources, generating mushrooms of data, all of which could potentially shed light on a complex query such as, "which of our products is most profitable, given our goals for revenue growth and cost efficiency?" Traditional BI and data warehousing solutions have helped. However, the knocks on these systems are first that the visibility they deliver is stale; and second — a worse problem — reports coordinated with only one of these data sources actually exacerbate the "stovepipe" problem. Thus, to advance the art, analytic applications need to address these two problems above all others. Informatica begins by making the data integration layer the center of the analytic universe. Informatica's flagship solution is the PowerCenter 5 suite, which automates and manages the movement and transformation of data into data warehouses and data marts. Founded in 1993, the company has had success in the BI/data warehousing arena, but perhaps more importantly, it has become a favorite embedded data integration function within prominent packaged applications. This experience has given Informatica a strong understanding of the challenges that must be conquered before the notion of an analytic application can be taken seriously. ANALYTICS, JUST IN TIMEJust like operational business processes, analysis too has a "workflow." Data streams in, according to schedules and rules; people interpret and interact with the data according to their roles. The best of all worlds would be for operational and analytic processes to fit together in a closed loop. But information latency gums up the works. By building out from the integration layer, Informatica can offer an independent infrastructure to support information workflow and eke out performance gains through efficient data movement. Then, all sorts of things become possible. Realtime analytics and performance metric "dashboards" are not toys: rather, they become the value-added BI features that keep business users in touch with the enterprise. Informatica emerged in 2001 as a complete analytic-application provider. With businesses desperate for visibility, Informatica is coming into focus at the right time. MAJOR MOVES IN 2001· Launched Informatica Analytics Delivery Platform, an analytic application package with business metrics and wireless solutions · Introduced a realtime analytics solution, based on its 2000 acquisition of Zimba Inc. CLASSIC CUSTOMERS· eBay uses PowerCenter to analyze market dynamics between buyers and sellers and dynamically improve customer relationships · Best Buy Co. Inc. works with PowerCenter to consolidate data integration between CRM and enterprise applications; the system handles 250 source data feeds and 330 million records per day
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