The two Californian software firms have extended their long-standing strategic relationship to deliver an initiative dubbed as the Informatica and Sybase mainframe Dynamic Operational Data Store (Dynamic ODS).
Dynamic ODS effectively pulls together three products: Informatica’s PowerExchange, for data connectivity; Informatica PowerCenter, for data integration; and Sybase’s Adaptive Server IQ analytic database platform.
This is a joint sales and market initiative for moving data off the mainframe for analytics, Karen Steele, vice president of corporate communications at Redwood City, California-based Informatica, told ComputerWire.
There’s still tons of data residing on the mainframe. But because there’s so much of it, its very costly to do anything with this data while it’s sitting on the mainframe, she said.
Steele added that apart from expensive and cumbersome hand coding, there’s not a great deal of alternatives for moving mainframe data into high-performance data query and analysis systems like Sybase IQ.
The joint Informatica and Sybase solution is flexible enough to allow for bulk, real-time, or incremental change data capture (i.e. only the data that has changed) connectivity schemes.
Steele emphasized the strengths of both companies in financial services – a sector the initiative will aggressively target. [Financial services] is an area that we’re both strong in and we’ll be focusing on large banking and insurance institutions, Steele said.
She pointed to the substantial joint Informatica-Sybase installed base of around 150 customers. Steele also added that both companies had been talking about working together on mainframe data access for some time. We see great scope for immediate traction in the field, having already invested heavily in demand training and marketing events.
Sybase’s direct sales force is fully committed to [Dynamic ODS] in the financial services area.
Informatica has been eyeing legacy data integration more closely ever since it acquired mainframe data access specialist Striva Corp in October 2003 for $62 million. Striva’s technology is now part of the PowerExchange line of products.
According to industry research, around 70% of critical financial data still resides on mainframe systems.
