INFORMATICA CEO ADDRESSES GROWING IMPORTANCE OF DECISION SUPPORT TECHNOLOGY FOR E-BUSINESS
The CEO of Informatica Corporation has called on companies developing their e-businesses to pay close attention to the critical analytic infrastructure requirements needed to deliver on the true promise of e-business - near real-time, personalized, one-to-one interactions with customers across the supply chain.
In a keynote speech given Monday at Decision Processing '99, Informatica CEO Gaurav Dhillon outlined the significant role decision support technology has to play in powering customer intelligence in the new e-business world. He warned, however, that users and vendors alike are in for a period of disillusionment as the market moves beyond the hype phase to a new level of maturity, one in which point solutions, bad architecture and immature products will give way to more tightly integrated, scalable solutions.
"Decision support technology is essential to e-business," said Dhillon. "But to realize its benefits, steps must be taken to extend traditional data warehousing and data mining software to deliver solutions which address the unique aspects of the emerging e-business analytics environment.
"In the e-business world, data sources, cycle times and the overall magnitude of data volumes and transactions have created a whole new dynamic. E-businesses don't have the luxury of analyzing information over a period of weeks or months - they've got to do it in real-time, on a customer-by-customer basis."
What's needed, according to Dhillon, is a new e-business analytics software platform that tightly integrates applications, infrastructure and methodology. Such a platform, he said, would enable e-businesses - both brick-and-mortar as well as "dot-com" companies - to meet the new requirements for enterprise data integration, scalability, information granularity and response time.
Dhillon noted that Informatica's core data integration platform for traditional decision support is emerging as one of the leading choices for companies building and expanding their e-businesses. He pointed to Informatica customers Inktomi, Netcentives, Priceline.com, Shopping.com, Snap.com, 1-800 FLOWERS and Preview Travel as the most recent examples of e-business leaders that are incorporating Informatica technology into their infrastructure.
"Our technology is becoming integral to the core infrastucture powering some of the industry's leading e-businesses," he said. "We expect strong growth from this area as e-business data volumes skyrocket and big business everywhere embraces e-business."
Decision Processing '99 is focused on the dramatic changes occurring in the data warehousing industry as organizations move toward decision processing solutions that enable the rapid deployment of packaged data warehouse and analytic applications for corporate decision making. The conference is being held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif. from Aug. 1 through Aug. 5, 1999. Registration information is available at http://www.decisionprocessing.com.
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Informatica develops and markets enterprise software products and services that enable many of the world's largest companies to build and manage business intelligence and analytic applications across the enterprise. Informatica maintains an extensive list of industry-leading customers worldwide and supports partnerships with Cambridge Technology Partners, EDS, Ernst & Young, Microsoft, PeopleSoft, 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.