Intelligent Enterprise

This week at Informatica's annual user conference in Las Vegas, they announced their role in the information economy that spans from their historical focus on enterprise to a new focus of supporting specific data integration needs of outsourcing, software as a services (SaaS) and business to business (B2B) markets. Informatica has created specific divisions to organizationally advance new products to meet specific needs of these markets. Informatica has a vision for providing data integration across geographic and business boundaries and down to the desktop. Informatica hopes to be the key provider of technology for enabling information management across and inside businesses and industries.

Informatica announced version 8.6 of PowerCenter which ships the end of June and will bring new enterprise capabilities to advance capabilities across enterprise. It also includes Informatica PowerCenter Real Time Edition that expands to immediate flow of data across enterprise closer to what organizations historically had used enterprise application integration (EAI) for across applications. New versions of Informatica Data Quality and Data Explorer brings forward consistency of user interfaces like those found in PowerCenter and specific advancements for integration with Oracle and SAP. Informatica is still working through the rationalization of the new identity management technology from a recently acquired Identity Systems and expect to see it be further integrated throughout this year and next.

Informatica also has new products to meet the specific needs of B2B with transformation, data flow, partner management and monitoring capabilities for specific business data formats. In the on-demand side, they have outlined a roadmap of specific product deliverables including a data loader, cleanser and synchronization services that will help in loading data into SaaS applications.

A view at Informatica's technology roadmap reveals that they are investing further to focus on a data services architecture that is role based where the product can best meet specific data life-cycle needs. Informatica will even expand its reach to new classes of users like business analysts who can use Microsoft Excel to rapidly do mapping and interfacing to Informatica PowerCenter. These advances are critical to meet the IT and interactions with business on projects and data governance.

Informatica recently has brought forward new products and organizational leaders to continue their growth across the globe. I believe that Informatica is beginning to truly understand the larger benefit of data integration, which is a required component of a CIO strategy and larger information economy. I do still see some gaps where Informatica is not aligning how they address business-driven projects for data integration, like financial information for finance, customer information for customer management, employee information for human resources and product information across manufacturing and supply chain. Their success will also place more pressure on them to meet more and more enterprise class needs. I see they are taking solid steps forward, with only the larger enterprise software providers like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle having data integration technologies as part of their product portfolio.