Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID) has been awarded the South African distributorship for Informatica, a global provider of data integration and business intelligence software.
"Informatica already has a number of customers in SA due to global OEM and partner agreements with companies such as Accenture and PricewaterhouseCoopers, but we have had no constant presence here," says Francesco de Asmundis, distribution manager, southern Europe for Informatica.
"The company, founded in 1993, is engaged in a process of expanding its presence across the world. Last year we founded offices in eastern Europe and 2004 marks our entry into Africa through KID."
De Asmundis believes the local business intelligence (BI) market is set to grow, especially in the data integration segment and Informatica wishes to play a part in that growth. The company`s 2003 revenues reached a record $206.4 million, in a global BI market the IDC expects to reach $4.5 billion in 2007.
"Our previous experience using Informatica was as the BI tool of choice for JD Edwards," says KID MD, Aubrey van Aswegen. "The ease of use of the integrated BI ecosystem convinced us that these tools offered solutions the South African market needed."
Informatica provides corporations with only three products: data integration, analytical and reporting tools, and metadata management tools. Yet, De Asmundis notes that the company provides a simple, end-to-end BI ecosystem designed to assist customers in gaining insight from their various business data sources with as few problems or technical hitches as possible.
"From the extraction, transformation and loading process, through analytics and reporting, as well as managing metadata, our solution simplifies the process, allowing users to visually design their BI system," De Asmundis continues. "No coding or intricate scripting is needed. Users define what they need and the Informatica tools generate it, reducing the time and costs to deliver a productive system."
Informatica`s architecture permits customers to develop build-once-use-anywhere functionality to further speed the delivery of working BI solutions. Once modules have been designed, they can easily be reused in other projects.
In SA, KID will start out focusing on the most urgent requirements of large corporations, the need to control their data and move it between systems safely and securely - such as from mainframe to client-server or Web systems.
"Most local companies do not have an overview of their data," states Van Aswegen. "Documenting what data they have and where it is will help organisations become more agile, and subsequently more flexible and adaptable to changing market circumstances."
Informatica makes this possible by allowing companies to profile their data at the source to help determine what data they have, as well as its level of accuracy. This is one of the most critical aspects of a successful BI solution, not to mention of accurate and reliable operational processing.
The distribution deal is effective immediately. De Asmundis expects to quickly establish a foothold for the Informatica ecosystem in large South African corporations looking to gain control of and an insight into their data.
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