Informatica Corp yesterday announced a new initiative that it claims will enable users of IBM Corp’s DB2 Universal Database to build data warehouse solutions much quicker and easier than before. The Palo Alto, California-based data warehouse and data mart specialist said it will port its PowerCenter 1.5 and PowerMart 4.5 software to IBM’s DB2 database allowing customers to deploy data warehouses and data marts in heterogeneous environments using DB2 as the target database on Unix or Windows NT. Paul Albright, Informatica’s VP marketing, says the company has always been able to extract and support data from a DB2 database but it couldn’t populate the system natively. In order to design and integrate the data, the company would have to use a non-IBM database, he said. To overcome the problem, Albright says that the two companies worked together, under a joint development initiative, to port and tune Informatica’s products to run on IBM’s database. Now, Albright says that the whole data warehouse lifecycle can be carried out on DB2 without having to use any other databases. He says the companies will begin a joint sales and marketing push under which Informatica will offer support for DB2. He says the announcement was significant as it would expose Informatica to IBM’s already large installed base and give it the opportunity to expand into new markets. He highlighted telecoms, utilities and manufacturing as key areas.
