Thrifty Boosts Productivity With Informatica Software

Software that actually works as advertised. Go figure.

Something quite unexpected happened a few months ago when Vic Alonzi's department at Thrifty Inc. deployed Informatica Corp.'s data-integration software to replace a homegrown system that it used for moving car-reservation data into its data warehouse, says the VP of technology at Thrifty. "The software actually worked as advertised," Alonzi says. "In the software industry, it doesn't always work that way."

Thrifty, the Tulsa, Okla., parent company of Thrifty Car Rental, needed a way to simplify its data-transfer process, which could take four to six hours a day. The legacy system Thrifty used for more than three years was difficult to replace because the company didn't keep accurate, updated records about how, why, and where data was transferred. "Without having good documentation on the business rules, the legacy system was maintenance intensive," Alonzi says. The user interface on Informatica's data-integration software and its ability to reuse metadata helped Thrifty to cut the time spent on data transfer to two or three hours.

And Thrifty, which has been using the data-integration software for four months, was surprised to discover that the application could help the company convert its legacy mainframes into a client-server environment a lot quicker and with less hassle than originally anticipated.

Migrating systems is "time consuming and problematic," Alonzi says, because you often have to go over whether you put the right data into the right fields. "Using Informatica in the conversion of our legacy systems isn't something we had in mind when we bought the software, but we can see it has the potential to make the process quicker and easier because we can make changes to the code through the interface instead of changing the code directly."

Thrifty estimates it will be one to two years before it can quantify its return on investment. Alonzi says Thrifty's IT staff evaluated other data-integration offerings from Ascential, Cognos, and SAS before going with Informatica. Cognos offers solid business-intelligence software, but lacks the scalability and performance to be ideal for companywide use, says Mark Smith, an analyst with Full Circle Strategies. "Cognos might be good for small communities of users, but they're not doing anything industrial strength," Smith says about moving enterprise loads of data rapidly into a data warehouse.