Knowledge Integration Dynamics` (KID`s) recent acquisition of the rights to distribute Informatica locally sees it bringing a plethora of unified data integration and business intelligence (BI) software in a single suite to South African organisations.
The suite is a comprehensive collection of information capturing, organising and delivery tools that capture changed and bulk data in realtime or batch.
"Regardless of the organisation, the information that runs a business resides in different formats across countless systems," says Charl Barnard, GM BI at KID. "Users have unique information requirements with varying levels of sophistication for satisfying their needs. Informatica is the best at delivering on their needs."
Gartner confirms this in a recent report: "Informatica and Ascential Software continue to be leaders in the ETL tools market, but their positioning relative to each other has changed significantly in the past nine months."
"Nobody can address the variety of sources that Informatica does," says Barnard, "and 83% of companies on the Dow Jones use it. The Data Warehouse Institute puts Informatica at the front of the market, as does IDC, which says it has a share of 38%." The Informatica suite offers:
* Data integration;
* Connectivity;
* Business intelligence; and
* Metadata management.
PowerCenter is Informatica`s data integrator and is the only adaptive software that provides improved data integrity and greater visibility of organisational data and processes.
In terms of connectivity, PowerExchange and PowerCenter Connect link into transactional systems and applications, data warehouses, operational data stores, legacy systems and flat files.
PowerAnalyzer is Informatica`s BI tool based on a 100% Internet-centric architecture.
Metadata management comes in the form of SuperGlue, which integrates metadata from disparate systems and offers visualisation and analysis capabilities. Gartner states: "Informatica continues to refocus on its `roots` in data integration by discontinuing the direct sale of its packaged business intelligence applications and data models, placing more emphasis on ETL, and expanding its capabilities for metadata management via its new SuperGlue product."
According to Forrester Research, there are a number of issues driving this market:
* Increasing data volumes and timeliness of data delivery;
* Escalating project lifecycle costs for data integration/need to reduce IT costs for data integration;
* Desire for reusability and standardisation of data transformations;
* Supporting rapidly changing requirements for data integration;
* Increasing demands by the business; and
* Rearchitecting a home-grown data integration solution
The results speak for themselves. "Motorola saves $15 million every month through its deployment of Informatica," says Barnard.
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