Informatica

Analysis of Informatica and its PowerCenter line of data integration products. Related subjects include:

July 26, 2006

Informatica’s SaaS/Outsourcing story

The coolest part of Informatica’s visit today was the new SaaS story. Naturally, they’re starting with Salesforce.com, but they hope to use the technology they’re developing for Salesforce with other SaaS vendors, with Business Process Outsourcers, and with anybody else who needs robust cross-enterprise data integration. I don’t actually think there’s a lot of hard technology there; nonetheless, somebody had to build it. And they apparently have, in two main parts.
Read more

July 26, 2006

Informatica’s general story

Informatica came by today. In general their story is: Data integration is very important; all vendors except Informatica and IBM/Ascential are low end; IBM/Ascential is confused; most BI vendors except Business Objects are likely to follow Hyperion’s lead in partnering with them. Read more

October 18, 2005

EII marketing soup

In the comments to another thread, the subject of EII (Enterprise Information Integration) came up. It’s a tricky one, for several reasons.

First, it’s a marketing construction — a blend between between ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) and EAI (Enterprise Application Integration). It’s a legitimate category; all those things are getting smushed together as near-real-time apps become more prominent. Still, it’s also an attempt to grab marketing turf.

Second, it’s commonly associated with a marketing overreach — the claim that an EII “platform” or “suite” will do everything a DBMS does (almost), but fully and heterogeneously distributed as well. Yeah, right.

Third, two of the sharpest proponents have been acquired by behemoths that tend to obscure their acquirees marketing pitches — Ascential by IBM and SeeBeyond by Sun.

Fourth, some of the best grand integrated EII suites (at least the ones that started as ETL, which is the side I’m more familiar with) aren’t complete yet. So vendors didn’t want to be too clear for fear of freezing current sales. I’m referring here mainly to Ascential and Informatica. They told analysts of their grand plans, but they haven’t been so eager to openly publicize the full details.

Fifth, the area is getting integrated with development tools for composite applications. Good examples there are SeeBeyond and Intersystems’ Cache’.

Sixth, no EII vendors’ plans fully work unless they have full relational and XML integration, and nobody really has been doing a great job on that, typically being strong in one area or the other.

Obviously, this is an area I have to research actively; EII is the neuromuscular system that holds DBMS2 together. But all the research in the world won’t change the fact that as of now it’s the weak spot in the story. There’s lots of great database management technology, and lots of excellent reasons to use a variety of kinds of that technology in your enterprise. But the tools to knit the resulting heterogeneous databases together are still sadly deficient.

← Previous Page

Feed: DBMS (database management system), DW (data warehousing), BI (business intelligence), and analytics technology Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.