VentanaMonitor™


Summary
Businesses increasingly demand data integration as part of information management initiatives. In response, Informatica has deepened partnerships with two vendors of business intelligence (BI) software. Extending announcements about on-demand data integration from Informatica’s recent user conference, salesforce.com will license Informatica’s products to customers for bidirectional data integration and cleansing. In addition, Hyperion has become an OEM and will embed Informatica’s data integration products in the next version of Hyperion System 9 to expand its enterprise-level capabilities. Ventana Research sees these two agreements as broadening Informatica’s appeal to global enterprises.

Assessment
Informatica has furthered its access to large enterprises by deepening its partnerships with Hyperion and salesforce.com. The demand for data integration within the enterprise and between businesses continues to grow, as IT organizations still struggle to deliver promptly to their lines of business the information they need, while managing complex data sources scattered across the enterprise. Organizations that cannot find suitable commercial packages to support data integration processes are forced to spend more time and money maintaining their data with custom programs.

That Hyperion is now an Informatica OEM and is embedding its data integration technologies is good for organizations using or evaluating Hyperion’s suite of BI technologies. Assembling data from across the enterprise to support reporting, dashboards and other analytic applications has never been more important to companies. Hyperion has been slow to act on this important demand by customers, but partnering with Informatica should fill a void in its product line and increase its ability to compete against Business Objects, Cognos and MicroStrategy. These new capabilities will be licensed under Hyperion’s product names and are expected to be available within six months.

Salesforce.com also has realized the importance of data integration in its quest to be a sophisticated provider of on-demand applications for customer relationship management ( CRM). Many organizations that use on-demand and hosted applications require replication, synchronization and integration of data assets inside and outside of the applications. Examples include customer-centric master data management, data warehousing and business intelligence, and providing single answers to customers’ questions wherever they touch the enterprise.

Market Impact
Informatica continues aggressively to apply data integration to various information management requirements, from on-demand, application-level integration to embedding it within BI technologies. Informatica’s mission to integrate data from business to business and throughout the information supply chain meets a need of many companies. To realize this vision, Informatica has outlined a new set of capabilities it will release over the next year. Others in this market (including IBM, Microsoft and Oracle) have not yet pursued this progressive use of data integration for large enterprises, though over time we expect them to.

Recommendation
The need for enterprise-class data integration has never been more pressing. Our research has found few readily available tools that IT can use to feed the enterprise’s hunger for information. Informatica’s progressive partnering will be welcomed by enterprises that are beginning to expect more sophisticated capabilities from their BI providers. Ventana Research recommends that organizations reassess their data infrastructures and adopt enterprise-class data integration tools like that from Informatica to lower costs in IT and risks in data governance and quality.

Related Research Note:
Informatica Offers Data Integration on Demand 
Software leader elevates importance of managing decentralized business data  

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