11/10/2003

Informatica Corporation, the provider of data integration and business intelligence software, unveiled what it calls “a significant advance in enterprise data integration” with the latest release of its PowerCenter data integration platform.

PowerCenter 7 “is the first data integration platform to provide adaptive capabilities in the face of today’s increasing information complexity, pressure to maximally leverage current IT investments, increased demand for real-time decision making, and need for unified business views, Informatica says.

Informatica also announced “extensive partner support for the extended Web services features” in PowerCenter 7.

Considered the next wave of innovation in enterprise software, “adaptive” software products intelligently adapt to changes in the IT environment and optimize performance by efficiently leveraging IT resources – all without requiring manual coding, Informatica explains. “Adaptive data integration can help businesses lower IT costs, accelerate return on investment from integration projects, and ensure confidence in real-time information during an era of compliance and governance,” the company adds.

“With the ebb and flow of today’s economic cycles, business survival depends on an intelligent IT infrastructure that can adapt quickly to changing market conditions,” said Girish Pancha, executive vice president of products at Informatica. “The adaptive data integration features of our new PowerCenter release represent a major leap forward in building greater intelligence into our products – freeing organizations to focus on their strategic projects, rather than on expensive and time-consuming maintenance of existing IT systems. In doing so, we are bringing ground-breaking technology to the industry to solve today’s practical data integration needs.”

“Informatica’s strength has continued to be providing a unified ‘Switzerland-type’ solution for end-to-end data integration and business intelligence, all in one well-architected software solution that helps a customer turn integration into insight,” said Steve McClure, a research vice president in IDC’s Software Research Group. “Informatica’s new PowerCenter 7 includes what IDC sees as the required components of a data integration platform – data quality, data profiling, metadata management and integration visibility – as well as important innovations in security, on-demand computing and data stewardship in the framework of a service-oriented architecture.”

According to Informatica, “To deliver adaptive data integration capabilities, PowerCenter 7 includes innovations in five main areas: Web services support, on-demand computing and data, data stewardship, team-based development, and robust security across all aspects of the integration process.”

“Informatica’s release of PowerCenter 7 is a result of its ability to both listen to customer requirements and raise the bar on technology standards – as evidenced by the platform’s new team-based development features, which ultimately bring down total cost of ownership and enable companies to use a single software platform for compliance with the Software Engineering Institute’s configuration management best practices,” said Tom Kato, business systems analyst and data warehouse architect at Motorola. “In addition, PowerCenter 7’s support for grid computing is giving companies like ourselves the ability to leverage existing hardware resources by maximizing the performance and utilization of those investments.”

PowerCenter 7 will be available in late Q4 of 2003, with pricing starting around $200,000.

As for partner support of the new release, Informatica asserts that it “provides the most data integration application programming interfaces (APIs) in the industry, helping customers integrate the Informatica platform with their IT environments. Informatica’s expanded Web services capabilities will now help customers more easily and quickly establish interoperability between their Informatica software and other enterprise applications. This approach to Web services is pervasive across the entire Informatica family – including PowerCenter, the PowerAnalyzer business intelligence (BI) platform and the SuperGlue metadata management software.”

“As interoperability becomes more of a priority for CIOs and the use of Web services continues to proliferate, systems architects and business users alike are exploring how best to leverage Web services for more adaptive, extensible data integration and business intelligence,” said Sanjay Poonen, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Informatica. “The expanded Web services interfaces across our entire product family make Informatica the industry’s leading service-oriented architecture for data integration and business intelligence, and we look forward to continuing to support the evolving needs of our partners and customers.”

Industry-leading systems integrator and software partners that Informatica says have expressed their support for its service-oriented architecture (SOA) and its significance to their customers include Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, HP, i2, Oracle, Sun, Tata Consultancy Services, webMethods, Teradata and Wipro.