Informatica Rolls Out PowerCenter 8

10/31/2005

Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq: INFA) today introduced Informatica PowerCenter 8. The company issued the following information on the new program:

Enabling customers to cost-effectively deploy data integration across the enterprise, PowerCenter 8 offers near-universal access to all enterprise data, unparalleled advancements in enterprise scalability and performance, and breakthrough capabilities delivering greater developer productivity.

"With PowerCenter 8, Informatica sets the new standard for data integration with technology innovations that best address the requirements of our customers," said Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO of Informatica. "The culmination of an unmatched, decade-long track record of technology leadership, PowerCenter 8 is by far our most innovative release -- delivering unprecedented advances within a single, unified and open data integration platform. Now, enterprises can dramatically reduce the costs and time to address even their most complex data integration challenges."

These data integration challenges include building multi-terabyte data warehouses, migrating off legacy systems, synchronizing operational data stores, consolidating applications and gaining a holistic view of all relevant data. The result of extensive input from Informatica customers and partners, PowerCenter 8 sets the standard for enterprise data integration with advances in three key areas: enterprise data access, enterprise-wide deployment and developer productivity.

To enable near-universal data access, PowerCenter 8 is the first data integration platform that allows customers to process unstructured, semi-structured and structured data in a single, unified environment. It is estimated that unstructured data -- including spreadsheets, email, Microsoft Word files, presentations and .PDF documents -- represents up to 90 percent of the information within today's enterprise. With PowerCenter 8, customers can tap into the wealth of enterprise data that was previously accessible only through time-consuming and expensive custom programming.

PowerCenter 8 broadens the means by which customers can access their enterprise data. Customers can now quickly access data "on the fly" from their operational systems, achieving a much more comprehensive view of their business. By providing customers with data-federation capabilities, PowerCenter 8 is the first unified data integration platform that combines both traditional physical data movement and virtual-federation approaches to data integration.

"Informatica's PowerCenter 8 release will provide us with a cohesive architecture for accessing and integrating all data types -- both structured and unstructured -- that reside across our enterprise," said Herve Grangeret, data and reporting analyst at MCI France. "It also offers us the flexibility to access this wealth of data either 'physically' or 'virtually.' Combined with a range of other valuable new features, PowerCenter 8 is a powerful new release that can even further meet our integration needs across the enterprise."

In order to help customers successfully deploy data integration across the enterprise, Informatica has made unparalleled enhancements to PowerCenter 8 resulting in industry-leading performance, scalability and reliability.

To gain greater efficiencies and lower costs, many organizations worldwide are adopting a shared-services approach to data integration. In fact, a recent survey showed that 63 percent of Informatica customers plan to implement this model -- commonly called an "Integration Competency Center." This centralized model is further driving customers' need for enterprise-grade scalability and availability in their data integration implementations.

For dramatic boosts in scalability and availability, PowerCenter 8 now includes comprehensive grid-computing capabilities -- allowing PowerCenter to intelligently distribute workloads across heterogeneous computing resources, enabling unlimited and cost-effective scalability.

PowerCenter 8 also provides high availability, seamless failover and increased resiliency of all PowerCenter components, eliminating single points of failure in the PowerCenter environment. This can help minimize service interruption in the event of hardware or software outages, and reduce the costs associated with system downtime.

In addition, PowerCenter 8 now features pushdown optimization, which improves performance by enabling processing to be "pushed down" to a relational database, minimizing unnecessary data movement. This flexibility provides optimal performance for both data-intensive and process-intensive transformations.

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