Data Integration Platform has multi-enterprise flexibility.

Informatica Corp. Jun 13, 2008

Press Release Summary:

Offered as open platform for data integration, Informatica v8.6 combines PowerCenter Real Time Edition, on-demand Data Loader Service, B2B Data Exchange, and Data Quality with identity resolution to mitigate risks associated with assembling technology components from various vendors. It supports array of OS, databases, middleware, BI, and application software, delivering near-universal access to all structured and unstructured, on- and off-premise data.

Original Press Release:

Informatica Announces First Comprehensive, Unified, and Open Platform for Data Integration

Informatica 8.6 delivers real-time data integration, integration-as-a-service, cross-enterprise data exchange and proactive data quality

LAS VEGAS, June 3 -- Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ:INFA) today announced the first comprehensive, unified, and open platform for data integration, Informatica 8.6. This latest release delivers new product and Software-as-a-Service offerings including PowerCenter Real Time Edition, on-demand Data Loader Service, B2B Data Exchange, and Data Quality with identity resolution. This comprehensive platform addresses the complete range of data integration requirements within the enterprise and beyond.

"Informatica 8.6 is the first comprehensive, unified, and open platform for data integration," said Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO, Informatica. "With a comprehensive platform delivering timely and trustworthy data, customers can gain a competitive advantage, while mitigating risks, in today's information economy."

Comprehensive Platform

Informatica 8.6 delivers the industry's first comprehensive platform with best-in-class technology in each of the following four categories:

- Real time, near-universal data integration within an enterprise
- On-demand data integration to retain control over outsourced, off-premise data
- Multi-enterprise integration to flexibly exchange data with partners
- Data quality solutions to gain confidence in all data

Real-time Data Integration

Informatica 8.6 includes the new PowerCenter Real Time Edition. With new features such as streaming changed data capture, PowerCenter 8.6 supports the entire continuum of data integration latency or timeliness requirements from batch to real-time. Developers are much more productive with powerful orchestration facilities to further automate the data integration lifecycle.

"PowerCenter's right-time data integration capabilities provide a framework for deriving information from data as soon as the data becomes available. The resulting increase in forecasting accuracy in the past year has delivered millions of dollars to the bottom line for both Electronic Arts and our retail customers," said Rajesh Gupta, PMP, Business Intelligence and Data Services at Electronic Arts, Inc.

Third On-Demand Integration Service

Informatica continues to deliver on its pioneering roadmap with its third software-as-a-service offering for cloud computing-based data integration. The new Data Loader service provides business users with a simple-to-use service to integrate their off-premise data managed by salesforce.com with their on-premise data. With Informatica On Demand services, data integration is as easy to use as consumer web sites.

"We used to write scripts to extract data from our local databases, transform the data, and schedule the file loads into Salesforce," said Mauricio del Rio, Senior CRM Analyst at Illumina Inc. "With Informatica's On Demand Data Loader Service, we can simply use a browser to configure and deploy our integration jobs. This service really enhances our Salesforce user experience and validates the fact that we can truly do everything On Demand."

New B2B Data Exchange

The new B2B Data Exchange category includes two products: B2B Data Transformation and B2B Data Exchange. B2B Data Transformation delivers near-universal support for unstructured data, such as Microsoft Excel and Word, as well semi-structured industry-specific standards like SWIFT for financial services and HIPAA for healthcare. B2B Data Exchange flexibly automates data exchange between organizations with orchestration and partner management facilities.

"In order to support billions of dollars of payment transactions for our commercial and large corporate customers, we needed to transform any type of customer data," said Terry Johnson, Payments Logistics, Wells Fargo Wholesale Services. "Informatica enabled our business analysts to integrate our customers' data in a matter of days instead weeks."

Proactive Data Quality with Identity Resolution

The new release delivers proactive data quality preventing problems from occurring at the point-of-entry. Additionally, identity resolution technology uniquely enables search, match and resolution of identification data across multiple systems and more than 60 languages. This unique capability will be available as an integral part of Data Quality 8.6.

"Informatica products and services have been critical to driving shareholder value through improved customer service," said Jan Muchez, CIO at KPN. "To realize our Strategic Innovation goals, we built our Customer Data Cleansing platform with Informatica; it gives us real-time cleansing and standardization of our customer data."

Unified Platform

The new product release, 8.6, offers the first unified data integration platform to mitigate risks associated with assembling technology components from a variety of vendors. Informatica products are all designed to work together. The new release significantly enhances developer productivity by providing a common user interface and reusability facilities based on a common metadata repository. The unified runtime engine and simplified administration reduces the total cost of ownership.

Open Platform

Informatica supports the broadest array of operating systems, databases, middleware, business intelligence and application software. As a result, the Informatica platform enables near-universal access to all data: structured and unstructured; on-premise and off-premise.

"Businesses are being driven by growing customer expectations, intense competitive pressures, and constantly changing macroeconomic issues to become more adaptive, agile and efficient," said Dave Stodder, vice president and research director, Ventana Research. "To thrive in this environment, leading businesses are actively evolving to stay ahead. Informatica 8.6 shows potential to help businesses to make the evolution by enabling them to access, integrate and utilize their data in real-time to improve decision making and improve operational efficiency."

Availability

Informatica 8.6 will be generally available on June 30. Try Informatica On Demand at http://www.informatica.com/ondemand.

About Informatica

Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ:INFA) is the leading independent provider of data integration software and services. With Informatica, organizations can gain greater business value by integrating all their information assets across the enterprise. More than 3,200 companies worldwide rely on Informatica to reduce the cost and expedite the time to address data integration needs of varying complexity and scale. For more information, call +1 650 38 5 5000 (1 800 653 9871 in the U.S.), or visit http://www.informatica.com/.

Note: Informatica, PowerCenter, Informatica Data Quality, Informatica Data Explorer, Informatica B2B Data Transformation, Informatica B2B Data Exchange and Informatica On Demand are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.

CONTACT: Deborah Wiltshire of Informatica Corporation, +1-650-385-5360, mobile, +1-650-862-8186, dwiltshire@informatica.com; Donna Lyon of Text 100, +1-415-593-8478, mobile, +1-650-248-1587, informatica@text100.com, for Informatica Corporation