08/18/2003

Informatica, specializing in data integration and business intelligence software, has launched Informatica SuperGlue, which it says is the first completely Web-based metadata management solution for assembling, visualizing and analyzing information about data and systems across the enterprise.

"SuperGlue leverages Informatica's data integration and business intelligence software to integrate disparate enterprise metadata and vividly portray and control the movement, lineage and utilization of information assets, enabling organizations to reduce business risk and increase productivity while helping to reduce IT development and maintenance costs," the company said.

"The unique intelligent lineage capabilities inherent in Informatica SuperGlue will provide both our IT and business users with visibility into the origin and movement of metadata information we use to make critical decisions," said Brian Lillie, vice president, Management Information Systems at Verisign. "SuperGlue will enable us to graphically depict our complex integration architecture and allow us to easily provide an audit trail of the data used to conduct important business analysis."

Driven by mounting demands for business efficiency, corporate governance, accountability and responsiveness, today's enterprises require enhanced transparency into their integrated information assets and processes. As CEOs and CFOs face the difficulties of complying with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, CIOs are scrambling to produce required documentation. Metadata, or "data about data," is essential to understanding and managing how data is derived, its underlying relationships, and how it is used.

Informatic says SuperGlue is the first metadata management solution to provide business managers with personalized dashboard-driven views that enable them to better understand and more easily audit the complex information flows that inform their decisions and drive regulatory compliance. "It is also the first solution to empower IT managers with graphical cross-system visibility into enterprise metadata so they can more readily assess the impact of system and process changes, improve operational performance, and pinpoint data redundancies and opportunities for re-use," the company said.

"As evolving business opportunities drive organizations to move to the next generation of service-oriented architectures, methods and tools, CIOs will begin to see the growing importance of metadata management," said Mike Blechar, vice president and research director of Gartner. "Metadata management solutions which support the re-use of services, components and data allow enterprises to significantly reduce time-to-market and IT costs while improving application quality and developer productivity."

Informatica says SuperGlue provides broad benefits in three main areas: reduced business risk, improved business efficiency and reduced business costs. Organizations can use SuperGlue to catalog, associate and search information assets across any number of enterprise systems and data sources. Because the lineage of each piece of information is documented dynamically, organizations can minimize risk with an accurate information audit trail across all their processes. At the same time, managers are able to see at a glance how a modification in a business rule or process affects all other systems and processes, and are thus able to react more intelligently and efficiently to change.

Ultimately, the ongoing visibility into information and its origin enabled by SuperGlue helps lower IT costs. Also, visibility into data flows and the inter-relationships of assets means that the time spent on developing business intelligence, data warehouse and integration projects can be significantly reduced and such environments can be maintained with fewer resources.

"In today's environment, CIOs are increasingly focused on enabling documentation for regulatory compliance, but prior to our SuperGlue solution companies lacked the ability to efficiently track metadata across silos, as well as visibility into how their business data flowed from system to system. Informatica's proven, metadata-centric data integration and business intelligence software provides a foundation that can clearly demonstrate the context around global integration processes," said Girish Pancha, executive vice president of products at Informatica. "We designed Informatica SuperGlue as a FedEx-like tracking system for enterprise data integration - similar to monitoring package movements, our customers can now easily track and analyze key integration information."