10/29/2003

Informatica Corporation, a provider of data integration and business intelligence software, has reached an agreement with IBM under which the two companies will jointly integrate, market and sell business intelligence solutions worldwide. The agreement will help Informatica more tightly integrate its entire product line with key IBM hardware and software platforms, “enabling customers to significantly speed development, increase effectiveness and reduce the cost of their integration and business intelligence environments,” Informatica says.

The new agreement enhances the companies’ existing relationship, and will enable collaborative solutions to be implemented as an integrated whole. “This will empower customers to more efficiently utilize their full range of information assets, deliver comprehensive business intelligence to wider sets of knowledge workers, and respond more quickly and intelligently to business opportunities and change,” Informatica notes.

“From building more profitable customer relationships to streamlining supply chain operations to keeping a finger on the pulse of daily business performance, joint solutions from IBM and Informatica can help drive faster decisions and more effective actions for our customers,” said Mike Schroeck, global leader-Business Intelligence, Business Consulting Services IBM Global Services. “With Informatica’s strengthened commitment to the IBM platform, we look forward to building on the current synergy between our companies to the benefit of our mutual customers.” IBM products such as the IBM DB2 Universal Database, IBM DB2 Cube Views and IBM DB2 Information Integrator technologies, IBM WebSphere Internet infrastructure software, IBM eServer platforms, and related operating systems such as Linux – will be tightly integrated with Informatica’s leading products to provide customers with unified integration and business intelligence offerings, Informatica says.

Separately, Informatica and webMethods, which calls itself “the industry’s first Web services infrastructure company,” announced an OEM agreement in which webMethods has licensed Informatica’s PowerAnalyzer software to deliver dashboard capabilities to its customers. Leveraging PowerAnalyzer’s flexible dashboard features, webMethods plans to release a new product, webMethods Dashboard, within its larger business activity monitoring (BAM) solution. webMethods Dashboard will provide customers with “deep visibility into business processes within their integrated enterprise and will enable real-time decision-making by business users,” Informatica points out.

“Real-time visibility into mission-critical business processes and the ability to react to business events as they occur are becoming executive suite imperatives,” said Debbie Rosen, senior vice president and general manager, BAM Business Unit, webMethods, Inc. “webMethods already has a strong history of integrating business processes for more than 1,000 customers. With webMethods Dashboard, our customers gain the ability to easily analyze and respond to each transaction in real-time.” Informatic explains that, “Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) provides visibility and control of IT operations, business processes and transactions for real-time decision-making. As part of webMethods’ BAM offerings, webMethods Dashboard provides real-time reports on data flowing through the webMethods Integration Platform, along with real-time metrics and alerts. This solution offers organizations a way to avoid the increasing latencies associated with growing data volumes and non-integrated decision support infrastructure by providing a view of real-time data for continuous monitoring and management of critical business performance indicators. When the webMethods Dashboard detects changes for any business process or operating parameter, information is interpreted, an alert is formulated, and a user can respond immediately. All of this occurs in real-time, within the flow of the normal business process. “In the financial services industry, for example, loan officers cannot see the mortgage lending process from end-to-end, which can cause delays and cancelled customer applications. webMethods Dashboard provides visibility across the entire mortgage lending business process, helping loan officers to manage and monitor their mortgage pipeline in real-time to identify and resolve a lending qualification issue before a customer changes their mind or cancels their application. This ability provides improved revenues, customer satisfaction and response time for the mortgage lending industry.”