Upon hearing the name Informatica Corp., most of us think of PowerCenter, a leading product for extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL). But we all need to reposition Informatica in our minds, moving it from the ETL pigeonhole to a broader slot for business intelligence (BI). Informatica has successfully expanded its product offering to range from ETL at the back end to analytic applications at the front end.

Late in 2001, Informatica moved its position deeper into the client side of BI by releasing version 5 of Informatica Applications, a suite that includes analytic applications for four business domains: Customer Relationship Analytics (CRA), Web Channel Analytics (WCA), Business Operations Analytics (BOA), and Supply Chain Analytics (SCA). You can license each application separately, but they also integrate as an enterprise-scope suite that reveals interdependencies among domains.

NEW DASHBOARD REPORTING

Informatica Applications sits atop the Informatica Analytics Delivery Platform. Previously, the platform included PowerCenter (for data integration) and either Business Objects SA or MicroStrategy Inc. products (for the front end). With version 5, however, a new component — Informatica Analytics Server — provides a prepackaged front end. The Analytics Server is designed primarily for delivering reports organized as dashboards in a Web browser. (See Figure 1.) But it can also tailor reports to the form factors of pagers, wireless PDAs, and telephones (if you implement the mobile option).

Despite its name, the newest incarnation of the Analytics Delivery Platform doesn't actually support analysis. My idea of analysis involves realtime interaction with a data set, where an analyst slices and dices a cube as part of a discovery process. The Analytics Server, as I see it, would be more aptly called a report server. After all, it serves up reports that are largely static, not interactive.

This terminology disagreement isn't necessarily a criticism. I'm splitting semantic hairs so I can more accurately describe the ideal user. For example, the "BI for the Masses" movement presents us with a set of end-user requirements for BI technologies and practices that differs from when end users were mostly business analysts. Today, few end users among the masses need ad hoc query or interactive analytic capabilities. They instead need reporting that's largely static, although strongly visual. For this sort of end user, the dashboard reporting of Informatica Applications 5's new front end is a good fit.

LEADING-EDGE REQUIREMENTS FULFILLMENT

Informatica Applications satisfies requirements that I feel are signs of leading-edge analytic applications.

Business performance management (BPM) provides unambiguous, actionable signals, which is increasingly important as more users come to analytic applications without experience interpreting analyses. The General Encyclopedia of Metrics (GEM) included with Informatica Applications 5 provides a comprehensive data model for metrics-oriented BPM. It's packaged with more than 600 metrics, as well as 200 reports and 20 analytic workflows that access the metrics.

Informatica Applications is an enterprise-scope suite of analytic applications, in that its four applications cover the leading domains of an enterprise. The four applications integrate via the GEM's data model, which is a series of data marts with Ralph Kimballesque shared dimensions. Although each mart focuses on a domain (namely customers, operations, financials, and supply chains), the shared dimensions make the applications enterprise scope. The point is that an enterprise-scope suite of analytic applications provides visibility into cross-functional business processes that you can't get using the single-domain analytic applications most vendors offer.

The accuracy and usefulness of an analytic application is compromised unless the data under it is complete and up-to-date. Yet, data compromises occur regularly because the ETL process is too complex for many organizations. Informatica Analytics Delivery Platform addresses this problem by including packaged data integration in the form of prebuilt adapters that simply plug into popular packaged applications, such as ERP and CRM applications from SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Siebel. And the GEM has more than 2,000 mappings from back-end transaction sources.

One of the most significant innovations in Informatica Applications 5 is its support for two forms of guided analysis. In one form, users can link several reports together in an "analysis path": For example, if you always want to check inventory in relation to a product sales report, you can link the appropriate reports together in the order you wish to view them. This feature assumes that the path is a straight line. The other form is called an "analytic workflow," and it enables IT personnel and power users to create a path that can fork based on conditions.