Informatica
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Informatica Corp. | |
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| Type | Public NASDAQ: INFA |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1993 |
| Headquarters | Redwood City, California, United States |
| Key people | Sohaib Abbasi, Chairman & CEO |
| Industry | Computer software |
| Products | Data management |
| Employees | 1200+ |
| Website | www.informatica.com |
Informatica Corporation provides data integration software and services for various businesses, industries and government organizations, including telecommunications, health care, insurance, and financial services.
The products of the company support various enterprise-wide data integration and data quality solutions including data warehousing, data migration, data consolidation, data synchronization, data governance, master data management, and cross-enterprise data integration.
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[edit] History
Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA) was founded in 1993 in the Silicon Valley by Indian Entrepreneurs Gaurav Dhillon and Diaz Nesamoney. It was based on the idea that data warehouses should not be "handcoded", but instead can be built more efficiently with graphical tools.
Acquisitions
- Influence Software, an analytics applications company in 1999. Informatica abandoned this line of business in 2002.
- Zimba Software, a mobile business intelligence company in 2000. For several years, Informatica tried in vain to compete directly against industry heavyweights like Business Objects and Cognos before abandoning its Business Intelligence strategy in 2004.
- Striva, maker of standards-based mainframe connectivity software in 2003. This software continues to exist as Informatica PowerExchange.
- Similarity Systems, maker of data quality products in 2006.
- Itemfield, maker of data mapping and transformation technology in 2006.
[edit] Major products
- Informatica PowerCenter can be used as a traditional Extract, transform, load ("ETL") tool or Extract, Load, Transform tool ("ELT").
- Informatica PowerExchange
- Informatica Data Explorer
- Informatica Data Quality Workbench
[edit] Informatica PowerCenter
PowerCenter 8.1 is the company's flagship product. The advanced edition includes Metadata Manager (formerly SuperGlue), Data Analyzer (formerly PowerAnalyzer) and other options.
New features in PowerCenter 8.1 include Grid Computing support for scalability, Java Custom Tranformation Support, HTTP Transformation Support, High Availability, Push Down Optimization (ELT Architecture), Enhanced web services to leverage a service oriented architecture and Mapping Template Creation support through Microsoft Visio. It also comes with adapters to various data source systems ranging from RDBMS to Message-oriented middleware's to Web Services to Applications.
Informatica PowerCenter, via Informatica PowerExchange, connects to Mainframe systems to provide access data in various formats such as VSAM, IMS, IDMS, ADABAS etc. through Data Maps that act as SQL Views.@
[edit] Competition
Informatica labels itself as a narrowly focused "best of breed" product in the Data Integration software market. Its direct competition in ETL space is Ascential Software (acquired by IBM, with a resulting change in competitive landscape) and Ab Initio software.
On the lower end, it competes with ETL tools from database vendors and startups like Embarcadero and Sunopsis. It also competes indirectly with Enterprise Application Integration, Enterprise Service Bus and Application Server vendors like BEA Systems, TIBCO and WebMethods.
