INFORMATICA EXTENDS CROSS-VALUE CHAIN ANALYTIC REACH

Informatica Corporation, a leading provider of eBusiness analytic solutions, announced the general availability of Informatica Applications 4.1, a significant extension of the industry's only cross-value chain family of analytic applications. The Informatica Applications family is unique in its ability to integrate and analyze critical information from across a company's functional business areas, providing business managers with a 360-degree view of their business. This comprehensive view of the company is critical in order to maximize business performance and drive profitability across the extended enterprise.

The 4.1 release of Informatica Applications includes significant customer-driven enhancements to Informatica eCRM, Informatica eBusiness Operations and Informatica eProcurement, as well as the addition of a new application to the product family, Informatica eMarketplace.

Key functionality added to Informatica Applications includes the ability to analyze the success of marketing campaigns to improve their effectiveness, evaluate the efficiency of both direct and indirect procurement processes within a company's supply chain, and analyze various human resources functions. Also new in the 4.1 release, the Informatica eMarketplace application helps private and public exchange operators increase profitability, allows participating buyers to cut costs and improve purchasing efficiency, and helps sellers expand sales through the analysis of marketplace buying patterns.

Informatica Applications is today's only integrated family of analytic applications that helps businesses evaluate their customer, partner, employee and supplier relationships across the entire value chain, and act upon the results to achieve optimal business performance. This powerful cross-functional analysis is achieved by combining information from a wide range of disparate transactional systems across the business -- such as ERP, CRM and eBusiness systems -- into industry best-practice metrics for a consistent, holistic view of the business that spans functional areas, geographies and even enterprise boundaries.

"Our cross-value chain analytic applications enable companies to truly achieve a 360-degree view of their business. This comprehensive view is essential to obtaining business insight that can lead to improved efficiency, effectiveness and profitability," said Marv Mouchawar, senior vice president and general manager, Informatica Applications. "With Informatica Applications 4.1, we have further deepened and broadened our unique cross-value chain reach with new key metrics that address an even broader range of critical business functions."

"To drive their enterprise toward optimal performance and profitability, decision-makers in corporations of all sizes are calling for applications that deliver analytically driven insight into each link of their value chain. Informatica has responded with analytic applications that reach beyond this challenge -- that not only delve into each link in the value chain, but help decision-makers grasp the interplay among multiple links across the extended enterprise," said Bob Moran, research vice president and managing director, Decision Support Research, Aberdeen Group.

"Informatica's cross-value chain applications include key metrics built on best practices in specific industries. With this release, Informatica has leveraged its superior strength in data integration -- and the customer base that comes with it -- to boldly establish itself as a strong player in the analytic applications arena."

Companies that have licensed Informatica Applications since their introduction last June include industry heavyweights such as Brocade, Cisco, Motorola, Philips Semiconductor, Hewlett-Packard, GE and Freightliner.

"We selected the Informatica Applications family primarily because of its ability to enable analysis across our entire value chain. Also important to us was the strength and proven success of the Informatica data integration platform upon which the analytic applications are built," said Jim Cates, vice president, Information Technology and CIO of Brocade Communications Systems. "As Brocade continues to expand its operations worldwide, the integrated enterprise infrastructure behind Informatica Applications will provide us with a valuable cross-functional view of real-time business information. This will help us expand access to important information across the company."

With the new 4.1 release, Informatica Applications is now comprised of four integrated analytic applications -- three of which have been significantly enhanced and one that is entirely new:

• Informatica eCRM. To help manage customer acquisition, intimacy and retention, the Informatica eCRM application delivers hundreds of business metrics for analyzing areas such as marketing effectiveness, Web site traffic, eCommerce activity, sales activity, customer pipelines, lifetime value and retention/defection rates. The application provides a truly universal view of customers and their behaviors, and helps uncover new business opportunities and generate new revenue. Upgraded functionality in Informatica eCRM 4.1 includes the enhanced ability to analyze marketing and sales performance to increase their effectiveness across all sales channels, the ability to perform commerce analytics to obtain a better understanding of the interrelationships between products and customers, and the capacity to obtain unique insight into Web customers and visitors across multiple geographies.
• Informatica eBusiness Operations. Designed to help companies analyze and improve financial and operational performance, the Informatica eBusiness Operations application contains hundreds of business metrics for analyzing critical areas such as product profitability, quick ratio, day sales outstanding, employee attrition/headcount, employee benefits and operational costs. New functionality in Informatica eBusiness Operations 4.1 includes human resources analytics, which enable improved payroll measurement employee lifecycle events, human supply chain management, human assets management, recruitment and retention. Also in the 4.1 release are enhancements to business adapters for Oracle and PeopleSoft, which have been extended to incorporate human resources and financial information to the finest level of detail.
• Informatica eProcurement. To help companies evaluate the effectiveness of procurement and supplier relationships, the Informatica eProcurement application contains hundreds of business metrics for analyzing areas such as material acquisitions, requisition approval rates, price variances, buy/sell volumes, on-time purchase order deliveries and vendor ratings. Using Informatica eProcurement, companies can analyze purchasing from all sources across all procurement functions, obtain the insight needed to effectively evaluate supplier relationships, and reduce or eliminate costs associated with direct and indirect goods and services across their supply chain. New functionality in Informatica eProcurement 4.1 includes bill of materials (BOM) analytics, which supports the analysis of raw materials used in direct procurement toward finished goods. Other enhancements include the ability to analyze requisition and order split-line cost accounting by quantity or percentage, and improved Oracle business adapters to incorporate Oracle Application BOM information. Although designed to operate with all major eProcurement systems, Informatica eProcurement has also been optimized for Ariba Buyer.
• NEW Informatica eMarketplace. Designed to address the unique analytic requirements of online marketplaces, the new Informatica eMarketplace application helps B2B marketplaces improve their effectiveness, and provides value-added eBusiness insight to participating buyers and suppliers. This newest addition to Informatica Applications provides analytic power to optimize the use of increasingly popular Internet auctions and exchanges, both as a buyer and a seller. While built to interoperate with all eMarketplace systems, Informatica eMarketplace also comes optimized for Ariba Marketplace and Ariba Dynamic Trade applications.

"We are pleased to have contributed to the recent upgrade of the Informatica Applications family, and look forward to continuing our collaboration with Informatica to help companies face the challenge of integrating and analyzing customer, partner and supplier information across their entire value chain," said Mike Schroeck, managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers' Global Data Warehousing practice. "The ability to obtain cross-value chain business insight is absolutely critical to achieving optimal business performance."

Informatica Applications are an integral component of the Informatica Insight Network, which combines the company's award-winning data integration platform and analytic applications with wireless, voice and Web delivery technologies. This network allows companies to integrate data from disparate sources, analyze the information consistently across businesses, and deliver personalized, timely insight to a wide range of corporate information consumers via PC and Web portal, and soon via cell phone or PDA. The Informatica Insight Network complements and leverages companies' existing transactional systems -- such as ERP, CRM, supply chain management, procurement and eCommerce -- which have enabled operational efficiencies and generated a wealth of data containing potential untapped business insight.

Pricing and Availability

The release of Informatica Applications 4.1 is now available. Pricing is based on a named-user model starting at $600,000.

About Informatica

Informatica provides eBusiness analytic solutions that enable companies to leverage business insight for competitive advantage. More than 1,100 global customers, including over half of the Fortune 100, leverage the Informatica Insight Network to integrate, analyze and personalize critical business information to improve business performance and responsiveness across the entire business value chain. Informatica products include a comprehensive family of analytic applications, the industry's most powerful data integration platform and a wide range of supporting services and partnerships. The company's list of leading customers includes 3Com, AMD, American Airlines, BMW, Boeing, Borders Group, Chevron, Cisco, CNET, Deutsche Bank, eBay, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Merck, Merrill Lynch, MetLife, Motorola, Philips Semiconductor, Polo Ralph Lauren, Sprint and UBS. For more information, call 1-800-970-1179, or visit the Informatica Web site at www.informatica.com.