User leanings towards Cloud Computing and Big Data are taking Informatica into the next phase of its evolution, according to CEO Sohaib Abbasi, with what he calls “the nexus of 3 secular technology trends - Cloud Computing, social computing and mobile computing - redefining the where, what and how of the industry.
Abbasi explains:
“The where is moving from on-premise computing to Cloud Computing, changing the economics of computing. we added over 100 new customers for our Cloud offering. We are seeing very good growth. It is, by far, our single fastest growing product line. The what is shifting from transaction processing with business applications like SAP and Oracle to interaction processing with social media services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn changing the role of computing. And finally, the how of computing is adapting from desktop computers to mobile devices, changing the face of computing. ”
Most importantly from Informatica's point of view, Cloud Computing represents the next wave of data fragmentation:
“Beyond on-premise applications, data is selectively fragmented and outsourced to Cloud service providers. Second, social computing represents the next-generation of data-centric applications and unprecedented volumes of interaction data, beyond business management using traditional transaction applications like ERP and CRM, social media enables holistic brand management, including proactive customer engagement and consumer sentiment analysis. And finally, mobile computing represents the next surge in data access devices. Beyond accessing data from a personal computer, users are increasingly accessing and replicating data on a variety of mobile devices. ”
To tacke these new challenges/opportunities, Informatica has a multi-pronged strategy in place:
“The first one is we have expanded our PowerCenter platform to provide remote connectivity. In other words, our existing customers retain control over the data whether it is on-premise or it's in the cloud. We make it possible for them to have near universal connectivity using our traditional platform. And that's an offering that we have for IT departments. The second element of our strategy is what we refer to as Informatica Inside. We've had significant wins, including partnerships with NetSuite, where they're promoting it as part of their two-tier ERP strategy. We've had a significant win Dun & Bradstreet D&B360 where they're becoming data as a service provider by embedding Informatica Inside. We have a couple of dozen partners that are using Informatica in order to deliver data as a service or their own Cloud offering. So the second strategy is a partner strategy. ”
The third element of our strategy is Informatica Cloud:
“We're going beyond the IT departments, and we're making data integration available for business users as a Cloud service offering. And we have very simple few services as important to use as Amazon.com, and we provide business users the ability, as an example, to take data out of sales force.com and replicate it in a spreadsheet that they can then use for reporting purposes. So this 3-pronged strategy of Informatica Cloud for hyper-deployment, Informatica Insight and Informatica Cloud for all users has allowed us to grow our Cloud offering faster than any of our other product lines, and it is only the beginning. ”
Meanwhile the trend towards so-called Big Data has seen enterprises aspire to become data-centric across the commercial industry and the public sector, reckons Abbasi which only plays to Informatica's strengths. This is delivering signficant customer wins on both sides of the Pond, he says:
“In Europe, one of the largest leaders in financial services selected Informatica as part of a near $1 billion IT project to replace their core general ledger application. The old general ledger, with more than 1,000 data feeds was too unwieldy for timely analysis of risk positions. By migrating and transferring the data from the legacy system to the new group-wide general ledger system, the firm will be better prepared for risk management with timely and accurate reporting. In the Americas, Hyatt, the global hospitality leader selected Informatica MDM to grow revenues by offering incentives for more hotel stays by frequent customers, particularly their gold passport members. By combining data from the reservations, sales, customer loyalty program, and property management systems, hired operators will have a single view of the customer. Using this customer data hub, Hyatt will promote more hotel stays by catering to the preferences of their top customers and targeting them with special marketing promotions. ”
Informatica's product portfolio is ideally suited to this new user interest, argues Abbasi:
“Big Data is a confluence of 3 related trends: Big transaction data, big interaction data and Big Data processing. Informatica 9.1 uniquely supports all 3 trends. First, for big transaction data, we support near universal connectivity through traditional OLTP and new analytic databases. Second, for big transaction data, we deliver connectivity to access interaction data from popular social media services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And third, for Big Data processing, Informatica 9.1 features connectors to move data in and out of the Hadoop file system, the highly scalable open source technology stack.Using Informatica 9.1, customers can access their transaction data from OLTP and analytic databases, enrich their master data with the interaction data from social networking sites. And finally, productively leverage the cost-effective, highly-scalable processing of Hadoop. ”
But there are still improvements that can be made, he adds:
“To further enhance our core data integration products for Big Data, last month, we acquired an early-stage technology innovator, WisdomForce, for high-speed data cloning and high-throughput data replication. As an example, big transaction data can be cloned from traditional OLTP databases such as Oracle and IBM DB2 to analytic databases, including Teradata Aster Data, EMC Greenplum, HP Vertica and IBM Neteeza. With high-speed data cloning, customers will benefit from timely data analytics of their big transaction data. Together, Informatica PowerCenter and WisdomForce will enable a broad range of data replication projects, ranging from high-speed data cloning to sophisticated data replication with complex transformations required by active data warehousing. With more than 50 active customers, the proven WisdomForce technology will further strengthen the core Informatica Data Integration product line. And our most recent acquisition of ActiveBase will further strengthen our ILM product line with dynamic data masking. Now, Informatica ILM offers a comprehensive data masking solution from irreversible obfuscation of all test data to policy-based selective dynamic masking of production data. ”
