Informatica

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Informatica Corp.
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 5500+
Website www.informatica.com
This article is about US-based Informatica Corporation. For the unrelated information security consulting and privacy compliance firm, see Informatica Security.

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.

Contents

[edit] History

Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA) was founded in 1993 in 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 deprioritizing its Business Intelligence strategy in 2004 and folding it into PowerCenter Advanced Edition.
  • 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 2007.
  • Identity Systems, an identity resolution technology company in 2008.

[edit] Major products

  • Informatica PowerCenter Standard Edition - used as a traditional Extract, transform, load (ETL) tool or Extract, Load, Transform tool (ELT).
  • Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition which includes Standard Edition plus additional capabilities:
    • Data Analyzer (Reporting tool)
    • Metadata Manager (Impact analysis and metadata reporting)
  • Informatica PowerExchange
  • Informatica Data Explorer
  • Informatica Data Quality
  • Informatica Complex Data Exchange - for extracting and transforming data from unstructured and semi-structured documents like pdf, excel, doc, etc.
  • Informatica PowerChannel - for secure and encrypted data transfer over WAN

[edit] Informatica PowerCenter

PowerCenter 8.5 is the company's flagship product. The advanced edition includes Metadata Manager (formerly SuperGlue), Data Analyzer (formerly PowerAnalyzer), Data Profiler, and other options.

New features in PowerCenter 8.5 include Grid Computing support for scalability, Java Custom Transformation Support, HTTP Transformation Support, High Availability, Push Down Optimization (ETL Architecture), Enhanced web services to leverage service oriented architecture or event based architecture using SOAP, Tibco, MQSeries, or other messages in Batch and Real Time, as well as 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. PowerExchange also provides Change Data Capture and Real Time support from Mainframe, SQL Server, and Oracle database sources.

Informatica PowerCenter is available to run on Windows, various UNIX platforms, and Mainframe.

PowerCenter represents a paradigm shift in programming since it is a functional programming (such as XSLT for XML) tool instead of an iterative one (such as PL/SQL or Java). With Informatica, construction effort of ETL logic for Data Warehousing or Data Integration shrinks to less than half of traditional iterative languages and tools.

[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 (recently acquired by IBM), Ab Initio software and Business Object's Data Integrator.

It also directly competes with ETL tools from database vendors such as SQL Server Integration Services and Data Transformation Services; startups like Syncsort DMExpress, Embarcadero, and Sunopsis; as well as indirect competitors Enterprise Application Integration, Enterprise Service Bus and Application Server vendors like BEA Systems, TIBCO and WebMethods.

[edit] External links