Informatica said it expects net income of between break-even and a cent per share, while analysts had expected net income of $0.05 a share.
The quarter was disappointing as we were not able to see all of the benefits of a strengthening sales and marketing line-up, said Gaurav Dhillon, president and CEO of Informatica. We made a large number of new sales hires during the quarter and our focus in the coming quarters is increasing productivity and sharpening of our go-to-market strategy.
Meanwhile, in an interview with ComputerWire the day before the profit warning, Dhillon denied that the company has performed a spectacular U-turn by abandoning its business intelligence focus. It has been reported that Informatica is turning its back on the business intelligence market to concentrate on integration, the company launching a Universal Data Services framework to customers and partners at its Informatica World 2004 user conference in Edinburgh, Scotland in May.
According to Gaurav, the company is merely de-emphasizing its existing BI software such as PowerAnalyzer, not abandoning it altogether. We will absolutely continue to make investments in PowerAnalyzer and continue to develop it going forward, he said. But we felt that applications was not the best way to approach the market. We had to make a trade-off between infrastructure and applications, and to be successful in applications we would have had to take a more consultative approach, which we did not want to do.
Instead the company launched UDS and has remarketed itself as a pure integration infrastructure vendor, with the catchphrase Turning Integration into Insight. The company is focused on providing the back-end data integration required for data warehousing and other business intelligence tasks, according to Gaurav. The infrastructure software we provide is in support of data warehousing and provides a broader integration framework.
Gaurav said UDS is intended to provide a common set of services built upon a shared foundational metadata layer, that binds together enterprise data integration tasks within a managed framework. The framework draws together Informatica’s portfolio of ETL, metadata management and BI products.
The basis of UDS is available now in version 7.1 of the company’s suite, but additional services are likely to be launched later in the year. Version 7.5 will add more features in support of UDS, for example, when it is launched later in 2004.
The profit warning shows that the change of tack has not fed through into sales wins just yet, however.
