05/03/2005

Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq: INFA), a provider of data integration software, and Wipro Technologies, the global IT services division of Wipro (NYSE: WIT), today announced that Prudential plc has standardized on the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform and PowerExchange data access software as the technology foundation for its data Integration Competency Center (ICC).

"As our integration partners, Informatica and Wipro have been pivotal to the success of Prudential's customer service transformation program, which is projected to achieve an annualized ROI of $48 million over 5 years by enhancing our customer responsiveness and satisfaction," said Jeremy Gray, head of architecture at Prudential's IT division, PruTech. "Our data Integration Competency Center is helping us gain a holistic view of customer information across our business -- including data residing on mainframes -- while ensuring we can scale our integration efforts as data volumes continue to grow.”

A release said that Prudential initially turned to Informatica and Wipro to create a large operational customer database, which provides a single touch point for over 13 million customers across numerous products, services and channels. The database is kept current by PowerCenter, which integrates information from a range of disparate operational systems, and by PowerExchange, which provides rapid access to data on multiple mainframe systems. Information timeliness is assured by PowerExchange's unique changed-data capture capabilities for identifying and moving only the small fraction of data that has changed within a given period.

Informatica said that other integration projects accomplished by PruTech's centralized data ICC include an enterprise data warehouse for visibility into customer trends and a forthcoming campaign management system for target marketing. Wipro's globally distributed consulting team and Informatica's seamless team-based development features enable a secure, onshore/offshore collaborative development model for Prudential with extensive reuse of processes and technologies across data integration projects.

"The success of PruTech's data ICC-driven customer service initiative illustrates the importance of having not only a best-in-class data integration platform, but also a best-in-class implementation partner," said John Entenmann, executive vice president of corporate strategy and marketing at Informatica. "Wipro helped Prudential establish best practices within a data ICC environment, while providing expert resources both onshore and offshore to help cost-effectively scale the enterprise's data integration efforts to reduce costs and accelerate time-to-value."

"Prudential's customer service transformation program illustrates the relevance of Informatica's best-in-class data integration platform for large scale projects," said Pawan Kumar, general manager of business intelligence and data warehousing at Wipro. "Our partnership, combining the quality, consistency and security of Informatica's products with Wipro's global delivery model, consulting and system integration skills, continues to ensure significant returns for Prudential."