06.05.08
Informatica Wades into the Stream
During a day of briefings before analysts, we gained a glimpse at Informatica’s mid-long term product roadmap. The theme was reflected in a recent poll that the company conducted across a sampling of its installed base: while 90% of its customers use Informatica’s tools (principally PowerCenter) for its well known use as a data transformation and migration tool for data warehouses, almost all of them are also using its tools for other purposes such as feeding operational data stores, providing data services, or performing integration of unstructured data for B2B documents.
The not-so-dirty secret behind all this is, of course, that in an era where blades, storage, and bandwidth are almost like free beer, that the demarcation between classic business intelligence (which trends historical data) and business activity monitoring/corporate performance management (which tends to be more real-time, is evaporating. Adam Wilson, product manager for the PowerCenter and related products, displayed a chart showing Informatica extending its reach beyond classic ETL running up to, but stopping just short of full transactional two-phase commit.
In other words, if you’re talking data federation or operational integration of data from multiple sources, Informatica says it is or will soon be in that space. A major chunk of that was its announcement this week of a real-time edition of PowerCenter, which adds data streaming to its bag of tricks. In other words, you’ll have a spectrum of options, from classic batch-driven ETL through near real-time trickle feeds, to more real-time data streaming. It means that Informatica is potentially butting heads with EAI players like Tibco and IBM (on another front; thanks to its acquisition if Ascential, IBM was already its main competitor for the more classic data integration piece).
Data streaming is considered to be a more efficient means for transferring large volumes of data compared to conventional I/O processes, and in fact, it’s the foundation for business, or complex event processing. The operable notion is that, when you have large torrents of events and need some way of deciphering trends before they splash you in the face – such as scanning of RFID data to detect if contraband is slipping through. It’s a market that virtually every database and EAI platform provider, plus a bevy of startups, are pursuing – and it’s one where a new technical society is being formed. As Dana Gardner speculates, it’s an area that should spawn a wide variety of intelligent services, not only for financial services companies (where processes like trading are assumed to be masses of complex events, but also consumer applications.
The question is, where will Informatica play in all this? The company is in the midst of an aggressive partnering strategy that is seeing its wares become the official data integration and migration engine for Wipro’s outsourced services, not to mention starter packages offered by Teradata, and extensive alliances with Accenture and HP/EDS. So it’s clear that the company won’t become an application or database provider, but as it adds a streaming capability to its data integration offerings, it will dictate some careful butterfly strokes to figure out where those dips in the stream will lead.