Informatica’s product strategy will be delivered in three major releases over the next two years. The first deliverable of this strategy is a major repackaging of its core PowerCenter 7.1 product suite. PowerCenter Advanced Edition is scheduled for general release in March and Informatica hopes it will coax companies into stepping up their data integration efforts from departmental to an enterprise-wide initiatives.
Advanced Edition bundles in the collaborative team-based development module which was previously offered as a separate option along with Informatica’s SuperGlue 2.1 metadata analysis and management tool and the PowerAnalyzer 5.0 data reporting and visualization tool.
The team-based development capabilities provide version control, configuration management, single repository and collaboration features for multiple distributed teams.
Also included are server grid computing capabilities (an option before) for managing heterogeneous hardware environments across a grid architecture. However, the Advanced Edition does not include the PowerXchange connectivity adapter suite, which Informatica says will remain a standalone a la carte offering.
Informatica said the new bundling will be that much easier and faster to deploy since customers no longer have to install separate products. Advanced Edition is really our first step towards providing a totally integrated data integration suite. We can now offer a faster out of the box experience…evident in our single CD install which takes less than an hour, said Informatica VP Karen Steele.
She also said Advanced Edition comes with a compelling price point of $180,000, which is a small premium compared to a standard PowerCenter edition which starts at $140,000. Purchasing all the products individually will cost you three times as much, she said.
Informatica’s goal is to ultimately shift its entire customer base over to Advanced Edition and it is offering attractive upgrades.
The majority of Informatica customers buy standard PowerCenter licenses with added options like team-based development. And over the last couple of quarters Informatica claims to have seen more traction with its SuperGlue metadata tool. Steele said this is why it is now bundling in both team-based development and rich metadata management as part of a single platform offering.
Informatica is still ironing out the details of an upgrade path for users of standard PowerCenter to the Advanced Edition.
PowerCenter Advanced Edition will provide the foundation for the next two major PowerCenter releases codenamed Zeus and Hercules that will extend data integration to mission-critical environments and deliver more on-demand integration capabilities for a range of enterprise users.
Zeus, which is slated for the autumn of 2005, is mainly an infrastructure release that will bolster enterprise-class security and scalability to confidently allow customers to extend data integration capabilities across their corporate firewalls.
Steele said enhanced security capabilities like RSA encryption and compression will be key for cross-enterprise data integration – akin to an outsourcing capability that moves integrated data across corporate firewalls.
Zeus will also represent Informatica’s first serious attempt to draw in semi-structured and unstructured data (documents) into its data integration platform. It will feature support for standards-based formats like SWIFT, UCCNET, FIX and HL7.
Another key upgrade in Zeus will be added in-line Java extensibility within the core design environment and more enhancements to the team-based development module to support better developer productivity.
Steele said: We already have a declarative platform that doesn’t require much coding. We’ll be opening this up to do Java written transformations and leverage Java coding that’s already out there.
Looking even further ahead, Hercules, which is scheduled for the autumn of 2006, will provide a full services oriented architecture which Informatica hinted at a year ago when it unveiled its ambitious Universal Data Services strategy, an attempt to deliver integration components as reusable and open components.
Hercules will allow customers to manage all their disparate data-centric integration initiatives within a single platform. It really aims to fulfill the promise of what Informatica calls full demand integration – the ability to blend a verity of data integration and delivery approaches based on when, where, and how data is captured integrated and delivered.
Hercules will be the final culmination of UDS and the full realization of a services-oriented architecture approach. It will allow customers to standardize on one data integration platform for all their needs by making integrated data easily available regardless of source, Steele said. It is an extension of our core platform that provides a single environment for delivering any flavor of integration…batch, real-time, or dynamically on-the-fly directly from transactional systems.
Hercules will be built on an all-embracing data surface layer that serves two tasks: to expose every piece of data in the system to anyone using a design tools; and to provide easy and consistent access to integrated data. A data manager component acts a broker to determine the best way to get at data – either batch, capture and save, or on the fly. The data surface translates business oriented requests for data while insulating the business user from any changes behind the scenes, Steele said.
The published data surface also contextualizes the request against a full range of integration-driven projects such as data warehousing, data migration, system consolidation, and synchronization.
Part of the new features planned in Hercules include a revamped self-service (task- or problem-specific) interfaces that accommodate a diverse community of data integration tasks. Hercules will also include an expanded metadata directory system and search capabilities to facilitate better reuse and data management.
Informatica’s move to broaden out is not surprising. The company has been seeking fresher more lucrative pastures for its core data integration stack ever since it decided to hand over its business analytics business back to Accenture in the summer of 2003.
Importantly, the latest announcements also clarify Informatica’s strategy to re-establish strategic partnerships with business intelligence vendors like Cognos and Business Objects that it may have previously alienated. Informatica is now sending out a strong signal to these vendors that it is no longer competing in the business intelligence market.
However, Cognos (DecisionStream) and Business Objects (Data Integrator) still have competitive offerings in the ETL market that go head-to-head against PowerCenter.
Informatica’s stance also provides fresh opportunities to get closer to larger business applications vendors, notably SAP AG and Siebel Systems Inc, which are now aggressively pushing their own business intelligence and analytic solutions.
