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April 8, 2003

VentanaMonitor™

Informatica: A New Wildcard in the BI Market

New product release brings simplicity to BI Market

by Mark Smith

Summary
On March 17, 2003, Informatica Corp. announced PowerAnalyzer 4.0, its business intelligence (BI) platform and tools software that lets individuals access, analyze, and share information inside and outside of an organization. This release is a significant milestone for Informatica as it provides a toolset with necessary baseline functionalities and new capabilities that can be deployed and utilized broadly in an enterprise. Informatica is the new wildcard player in the BI market. It has simplified its packaging, pricing, and architectural approach to challenge the BI market incumbents.

Assessment
Informatica's release of PowerAnalyzer 4.0 provides the basic reporting and analysis functionality required for a BI platform and toolset by offering a rich user experience and development interface for building applications. This product provides all the basic BI capabilities — drill, pivot, page and sort, filter, rank, and complete administration through a thin client DHTML Web interface.

These basic capabilities shouldn't be taken for granted: As a new entrant into the BI market, Informatica is the only vendor that had the luxury of starting with a clean slate to achieve these benefits. The other major BI vendors still lack complete flexibility for administration and usage.

This release addresses some key technology challenges found in the BI market that have prohibited mass adoption by IT and individuals in an organization. These challenges span usability, architecture, personalization, metric driven analysis, integration with desktop productivity applications, and information notification and updating capabilities. Informatica spent more than a year examining and addressing these challenges in this latest release. Although not all issues are completely resolved, Informatica is definitely on the right track to help organizations simplify BI.

One of the challenges for users accessing and sharing information is to easily understand relevant metrics that can help drive appropriate action. Informatica has developed a sophisticated thin-client, Web-based user interface that simplifies the user experience with wizards, context menus, and patent-pending, "analytic workflow" technology. This guided analysis capability lets users perform root cause analysis by navigating through information easily while maintaining context. Cognos Inc. and MicroStrategy Inc. have a similar type of functionality in their latest releases, but Informatica provides a richer user experience for creation and consumption of analytic workflows.

Informatica has also introduced new capabilities for leveraging Microsoft Excel as an extension to PowerAnalyzer. Users can dynamically create a Microsoft Excel workbook containing the presentation and data set for offline analysis. Dynamic creation of pivot-tables provides a similar level of drill, pivot, and page capabilities. The user can also have the data refreshed to utilize Microsoft Excel in a consistent and automated fashion.

Informatica launched an architecture that provides usability and information notification capabilities addressing a wide variety of application needs. PowerAnalyzer can integrate with Java Messaging Services (JMS) and PowerCenter RT to provide real-time data feeds to the PowerAnalyzer server for interpretation and delivery to end users. The product can provide these notifications to end users in a transparent fashion via charts that automatically refresh without annoying screen refreshes. With these features and an architecture designed to leverage application servers from IBM and BEA Systems Inc., Informatica created a single architecture that can adapt and integrate into the enterprise architecture.

Informatica is a powerful newcomer to the BI market thanks to its market-leading data integration technologies, Informatica PowerCenter. This lets it reach existing customers and partners rapidly to build deployed and referenceable clients. Informatica also uses the platform and tools with its analytic application offering, which validates the application usage of many of the new capabilities. Informatica will need to enhance the collaborative experience between user classes and beef up its Microsoft Excel capabilities to provide direct ad-hoc and distribution capabilities to PowerAnalyzer. If it can combine those enhancements with its existing ability to support delivery through mobile and voice interfaces, Informatica will have a strong BI platform.

Market Impact
Informatica is the new wildcard in the BI market. It brings a unique combination of differentiated capabilities through guided analysis, real-time notification and alerting, integration with Microsoft Excel, and an elegant Web user interface that raises the bar for BI products. This new and unique end-user empowered capability is quite refreshing to see from a BI provider and is just the beginning of the evolutionary BI market shift toward embracing Microsoft Office. With PowerAnalyzer 4.0, Informatica has the opportunity to challenge and compete effectively in a maturing market.

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Recommendation
Informatica PowerAnalzyer 4.0 is a robust BI platform and tools environment for end users, application developers, and administrators who are looking to integrate and leverage a sophisticated BI technology. Organizations looking for a new but solid approach to their BI projects should evaluate Informatica PowerAnalyzer based on its innovative and sophisticated capabilities. This product brings together the necessities of BI for business analysts and power users in a simpler architectural and technology approach than found in other vendors' products. A simple packaging and pricing approach along with integration with Informatica PowerCenter make this an attractive solution for global organizations.

Mark Smith (mark.smith@ventanaresearch.com) is the CEO and SVP of research at Ventana Research, an advisory services and research firm providing insight and education on best practices and technology in performance management.