Informatica sets standard for data integration with PowerCenter 8

Informatica has released PowerCenter 8, an enterprise data integration platform that allows organisations of all sizes to access, discover and integrate data from virtually any business system, in any format, and deliver that data through the organisation at any speed.

It addresses the challenges of data integration, resolving problems such as migrating off legacy systems, consolidating application instances, and synchronising data across multiple operational systems.

"PowerCenter 8 sets the new standard for data integration, and is Informatica`s most innovative release," says Chris O`Connell, COO of local Informatica distributor Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID). "It reduces IT costs and complexity, streamlines business operations and processes, and helps to drive revenue growth by enabling customers to derive value from their data, while also driving IT team productivity."

O`Connell says the product`s ability to automatically extract data from formats such as PDF invoices and integrate it with applications will replace manual retyping of that information in many organisations.

"Automated data extraction also helps companies comply with regulations by providing an audit trail for financial processes."

PowerCenter 8 is the first data integration platform that allows customers to process unstructured, semi-structured and structured data in a single, unified environment. It is estimated that unstructured data - including spreadsheets, e-mail, Microsoft Word files, presentations and .PDF documents - represents up to 90% of the information within today`s organisations. With PowerCenter 8, customers can tap into corporate data that was previously accessible only through time-consuming and expensive custom programming.

"PowerCenter 8 broadens the means by which people can access their data," says O`Connell. "They can now quickly access data `on the fly` from their operational systems, achieving a much more comprehensive view of their business. By providing data federation capabilities, it is the first unified data integration platform that combines both traditional physical data movement and virtual federation approaches to data integration."

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To gain greater efficiencies and lower costs, many organisations worldwide are adopting a shared services approach to data integration. A recent survey showed that 63% of Informatica customers plan to implement this model - commonly called an "Integration Competency Centre". This centralised model is further driving customers` need for enterprise-grade scalability and availability in their data integration implementations.

PowerCenter 8 includes comprehensive grid computing capabilities - allowing PowerCenter to intelligently distribute workloads across heterogeneous computing resources, enabling unlimited and cost-effective scalability.

It provides high availability, failover and increased resiliency of all PowerCenter components, eliminating single points of failure in the PowerCenter environment. This can help minimise service interruption in the event of hardware or software outages, and reduce the costs associated with system downtime.

In addition, PowerCenter 8 now features pushdown optimisation, which improves performance by enabling processing to be "pushed down" to a relational database, minimising unnecessary data movement. This flexibility provides optimal performance for both data- and process-intensive transformations.

With its metadata architecture, integrated developer environment and one-hour installation, the platform helps teams of developers collaborate, and standardise and reuse definitions across platforms and projects without having to recode, increasing productivity and project completion. PowerCenter 8 features new support for Java transformations, allowing developers to build complex business rules while still benefiting from a robust metadata model. It will also allow developers to leverage existing Java libraries.

PowerCenter 8 is also the first data integration product to support template creation and mapping generation from within Microsoft Excel and Visio. The use of mapping templates can result in enormous improvements in productivity and maintainability. Additionally, the support for popular design tools vastly improves collaboration between business analysts and IT developers.

PowerCenter 8 is available on the following platforms: Windows 32-bit, Solaris 32-bit, Solaris 64-bit, AIX 32-bit, AIX 64-bit, HP/UX 32-bit, Redhat Linux 32-bit, Redhat Linux and 64-bit.