Informatica Ships PowerCenter 1.5, PowerMart 4.5
Latest Versions of Informatica`s Award-Winning Software
Deliver Scalable Platform for Integrating Operational
Data With Analytic Applications
ACTION ITEMS
Informatica Corporation has announced the on-time general availability of PowerCenter 1.5 and PowerMart 4.5, the latest versions of the company's award-winning software platform for deploying enterprise business intelligence and analytic applications. With these new releases, Informatica has directly addressed critical enterprise scalability requirements necessary for enabling customers to reduce the overall complexity of building and maintaining enterprise decision support solutions.
PowerCenter 1.5 is an enterprise data integration hub that enables large organizations to easily transform legacy, relational and ERP data into reliable information for strategic business analysis. PowerMart 4.5 is an integrated tool suite for designing, deploying, managing and maintaining line-of-business data marts and analytic applications. Together, they provide the industry's first two-tier architecture for building and managing an enterprise decision support system that facilitates application deployment while reducing complexity in the users' enterprise decision support environment.
"Organizations now face a greater array of operational sources and analytical tool options than ever before," said Diaz Nesamoney, president of Informatica. "Complexity in the enterprise is getting worse, not better, and customers want solutions that help them effectively manage that complexity. Informatica's PowerCenter and PowerMart products give customers a flexible, scalable solution for consolidating all their operational data, optimizing it for decision support, and delivering it to client applications that help decision-makers gain insight into business performance at any given time."
Said Patrick Nolan, MIS engineering principal, Data Warehousing Services at Stanford University, "As an Informatica customer for almost two years, Stanford has experienced firsthand PowerMart's evolution into a powerful, enterprise-capable product for deploying scalable data marts and data warehouses. With one PowerMart engine, we maintain several production data marts fed daily from the University Data Warehouse. We are currently installing PowerCenter to enable our departmental data mart customers to own their own repositories and utilize multiple PowerMart engines for data distribution."
Addressing Enterprise Scalability
With the GA (Generally Available) release of PowerCenter 1.5 and PowerMart 4.5, Informatica has addressed the challenges of enterprise scalability head-on. For most Global 2000-class customers, "enterprise-scalability" is not simply a matter of raw data throughput. Rather, scalability means managing complexity across the enterprise. To qualify as "scalable," enterprise decision support products must be able to consolidate and integrate data from the multitude of operational systems that the data exists on legacy, ERP and client/server systems. They must also run effectively on multiple hardware and software platforms, support parallel processing systems, handle large data volumes and complex transformation algorithms, and interoperate natively and efficiently with the many diverse tools that are used in today's enterprises.
"The scalability improvements Informatica has made to PowerCenter and PowerMart make it significantly easier for large global companies to leverage their current IT investments for strategic business analysis," said Henry Morris, research director of International Data Corporation. "The hub-and-spoke architecture coupled with strong metadata integration capabilities enable a controlled, managed expansion from application-specific marts to enterprise data warehousing."
The combination of PowerCenter 1.5 and PowerMart 4.5 delivers first-of-a-kind functionality that addresses the full spectrum of enterprise scalability requirements, including:
Informatica products lead the industry in source-database access capabilities. In addition to allowing access to Unix and NT databases, they feature native mainframe access, including support for IBM's DB2 Universal Database (UDB); native support for high-speed mainframe DB2 extractions and VSAM extractions; and wizard-enhanced support for flat-file transfers.
Informatica's Metadata Exchange (MX) architecture ensures customers can easily and rapidly integrate PowerCenter and PowerMart software with leading decision support tools such as those from Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, Microsoft and Microstrategy. MX permits dynamic metadata exchange between infrastructure components, a level of integration that improves usability of OLAP and analytic applications as well as accuracy of reporting data.
Through an integration partnership with Trillium Software, Informatica offers enterprises robust data-cleansing capabilities. This is necessary to ensure data accuracy, and is especially critical in large, fast-changing intelligent enterprise implementations.
At the heart of PowerCenter and PowerMart is a robust, rules-driven data transformation engine that employs advanced techniques such as overlapped extracts, scalable pipeline processing and bulk loading to enhance all aspects of data transformation performance. High data throughput is achieved using a combination of data partitioning and the parallel engines option of PowerCenter which combines processing power of several systems coordinated through a single console.
Advanced systems management capabilities let administrators manage, monitor and control multiple, networked data stores from a central console. They can easily log into distributed data marts to manage server processes, for instance, and they can easily view distributed metadata centrally.
All Informatica products are designed from inception to be multi-platform and run on Unix and Microsoft NT servers, use Windows 95 and Windows NT clients, and work seamlessly with all major databases, including Oracle, Microsoft, Informix, Sybase, IBM, VSAM, and flat file databases. Individuals interested in learning more about Informatica's software products can order a free demo CD-ROM by visiting Informatica's Web site at http://www.informatica.com or by calling 800-653-3871.
About Informatica
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Informatica develops and markets enterprise software products and services that enable many of the world's largest companies to deploy and manage business intelligence and analytic applications across the enterprise. Informatica has more than 350 data warehousing implementations worldwide, including Chevron USA, Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, Liz Claiborne, Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., Hearst Corp., MCI WorldCom, PG&E, Sprint, Toyota Motor Sales USA, US West and Warner Bros. The company also maintains strategic partnerships with Cambridge Technology Partners, EDS, Ernst & Young, Microsoft, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, SAP AG and Siemens Business Services. For more information, call 800-653-3871, or visit Informatica's Web site at http://www.informatica.com.