Analysis & Commentary:

INFORMATICA'S DIAZ NESAMONEY ON REAL-TIME DATA INTEGRATION
by Tim Staub, managing editor

DSstar: Why do you think the time is now for real-time data integration?

NESAMONEY: Our customers are telling us that their business cycles are operating at "clock speed," where performance and responsiveness are key. They're facing greater competitive pressures and need to keep pace with the expectations generated by the Internet and globalization. Real-time analytics combines transactional data generated by online systems and EAI applications with historical "time slice" information stored in enterprise data warehouses. So, the everyday information consumer can access information in the form of dashboards and reports, fully integrated with interactive alerts, delivered on any device at the point of work. As importantly, from a technology viewpoint, real-time data is needed to fuel emerging corporate initiatives like Web services, business asset management and performance management.

DSstar: What industries really need real-time data integration?

NESAMONEY: Real-time data integration is not limited to any particular vertical, but we have seen a great deal of interest from financial services and manufacturing. Real-time information can be a key differentiator in manufacturing, where inventory and other supply chain indicators translate into millions of dollars. But, any company that relies on data and metrics for performance management will need to look at next generation data integration to stay competitive.

DSstar: Can you give some examples?

NESAMONEY: Banking is highly reliant on data integration. Take loans, for example. If loan officers can access an up-to-date customer profile from their desktops -- and a full view of the all customer touch points -- they will be able to better manage risk and simplify the loan process for the customer. In manufacturing, purchasing managers with real-time information at their fingertips can do a better job of negotiating with suppliers. The beauty of real-time data integration is that all decision-makers throughout the enterprise can access critical information as business events occur.

DSstar: How is data integration different from, or related to, EAI?

NESAMONEY: Many companies have already invested in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technology -- a great source for capturing real-time transactional data. EAI technology focuses on moving small bursts of information between systems, and not on bulk data movement. Informatica's expertise and leadership is in extraction, transformation and load (ETL), which can perform complex transformations on large data sets with high performance. In most cases, EAI and ETL are complementary. ETL adds significant value in the analytic transformation and metadata capabilities that can address both historical and consolidated data on a large scale. So when ETL and EAI collaborate for real-time data integration, the EAI queue appears to the data integration platform as one more data source, along with data from underlying ERP, CRM relational databases, flat files, Web logs, XML sources and the legacy mainframe systems that are typical in most organizations.

DSstar: Tell us about your new real-time products.

NESAMONEY: Just yesterday we announced what we believe to be a breakthrough real-time data integration product-PowerCenterRT. We've spent the last 18 months developing enhancements to the conventional data integration technology to include zero latency processing of data, continuous sessions with bi-directional integration capabilities to EAI systems and message queues to support non-stop message detection and delivery. PowerCenterRT also has the ability to efficiently process incremental changes in data lookup and aggregation algorithms, and be transaction-aware throughout the entire integration flow. We also upgraded our data integration platform with PowerCenter 6, which features integration workflow, scalability and metadata to address the ever-increasing data load and user community. To address data marts, we've upgraded PowerMart as well.

DSstar: When are these products available and how are they priced?

NESAMONEY: All of the products will be available in Q3. PowerCenterRT is priced at $200,000; PowerCenter 6 costs $150,000; and PowerMart 6 is $80,000.

Contact Diaz Nesamoney, president and COO of Informatica Corporation, dnesamoney@informatica.com, 650-385-5000.