Informatica Pioneers Data Integration As Online Service

A new form of data integration is emerging as Informatica seeks to pull together data sources outside the enterprise as well as inside it.

The online applications supplied by Salesforce.com capture key prospect and customer data. Through a set of connectors now available from Informatica, that data may be integrated with an enterprise's in-house applications.

"We want to break down the distinction between on-premises and off-premises data," says Brian Gentile, executive VP of Informatica.

Informatica supplies the PowerCenter set of data integration applications for in-house data integration, and that product set will be supplemented with a set of connectors called PowerCenter Connect for Salesforce.com.

It's the first of three steps Informatica plans to take to integrate data on demand over the Internet.

The on-demand service doesn't just move data around but rather brings the ability to migrate data from Salesforce into PowerCenter, where it can be cleansed, consolidated and synchronized with other data sources. A future example of using PowerCenter Connect would be to take data from Oracle's Siebel customer relationship management application and combine with customer data from other applications, says Gentile.

PowerCenter Connect for Salesforce.com will be available in the third quarter. PowerCenter Connect will also become an application available as an online service at Salesforce.com's AppExchange, an online application service.

Informatica will also be seeking to partner with software-as-a-service providers in addition to Salesforce.com. Pricing of the data integration services will be set at a later date.