The announcement is part of a continued effort by the Redwood City, California-based company to dim its historical focus on data warehousing and shine more brightly as a broader data integration play. Significantly, this strategy also promises to reassert the strategic partnerships the company once held with leading business intelligence vendors.
Informatica’s strategy is underpinned by three key themes: scope (data warehousing to data integration); scalability (departmental to enterprise); and outsourcing (cross-enterprise data integration).
We’re moving on from our traditional data warehousing competencies into much larger data integration projects such as data consolidation, synchronization, and single view [of the customer], said Karen Steele, Informatica’s vice president of corporate marketing, in a pre-briefing with ComputerWire last week.
In order to drive data integration from tactical to more strategic projects, Steele said Informatica would be more actively pushing the concept of integration competency centers in 2005.
Steele said: Last year we spent a lot of time educating the market about ICCs. This year we’ll be helping customers to move forward with their implementations.
Informatica said it is working with Accenture and IBM Corp’s consulting group to help customers implement the company’s best practice integration models gleaned through its field experience and consulting organization.
IBM calls it shared services and we’ve already done a few things with them [around ICCs] in Europe. We’re also working closely with Accenture in the US, said Steele, but it is the notion of cross-enterprise data integration that Informatica really sees its business headed. Steele pointed to a boom in outsourcing as a key driver where more and more companies are outsourcing their key IT functions or internal HR and financial processes to companies like EDS, or are adopting on-demand ASP-models like Salesforce.com for customer, sales and marketing processes.
Steele believes this has created a further fragmentation of data and represents a huge opportunity for Informatica to step in with a true shared services model for enterprise integration.
