Informatica Tuesday unveiled a new release of its flagship data integration software the company said offers improved data quality management and new Web-based services that deliver more timely data.
The debut of Informatica 9 comes as businesses increasingly find themselves wrestling with data integration problems as they rely more on software-as-a-service applications and cloud-computing IT resources, combined with information technology running within their data centers.
That can complicate a seemingly straightforward task such as collecting information about customers from disparate IT systems.
"Data today is fragmented across many systems. The value to a business is having timely, relevant and, trustworthy data that the business can execute against," said Chris Boorman, Informatica chief marketing officer, outlining the major themes of the new release in an interview.
The new software offers improvements in six technology categories: enterprise data integration, data quality, business-to-business data exchange, application information lifecycle management, complex event processing and cloud data integration.
Informatica 9 provides data that's more relevant to the needs of specific constituencies throughout a business, said Ash Kulkarni, vice president of data integration product management at Informatica. New browser-based analyst tools, for example, make it easier for data "consumers" to define their business data needs to IT developers. And a new common metadata repository makes it easier to provide data that's tailored for people with different roles across a company.
Data quality management is improved through the use of new role-based tools in Informatica 9 that allow users to specify their data quality requirements, and the ability to create data quality rules that can be applied across multiple applications.
The new software can deliver more timely data in a broad range of protocols such as Web services and SQL using the system's new multi-modal data provisioning services, Kulkarni said. And new policy-based data services governance tools make it easier to centrally manage data rules.
About two-thirds of Informatica's sales involve partners, Boorman said, including system integrator resellers such as Accenture and Wipro Technologies and OEMs such as Oracle and Hewlett-Packard.
Components of the Informatica 9 suite will be generally available by the end of this quarter, according to Boorman.
