Informatica Adds Realtime Support With PowerCenter

The goal of PowerCenter RT, unveiled this week, is to meld the ability to handle near-realtime data with historical trend data, the company said.

Most analytics companies "fall at either extreme. They are either very good at batch processing or only do realtime but can't handle bulk or aggregate data," said Diaz Nesamoney, co-founder of Informatica, based here. "Realistically, any business manager needs both trend analysis for historical perspective as well as the latest numbers.

"Companies are driven by cycle times,whether they're dealing with customers or suppliers,that have speeded up," Nesamoney said.

"To drive some of that, data warehousing and analytics, which have historically been more of a batch process,almost an offline activity,is more in the mainstream. People need information almost instantly."

The days of requesting a report and waiting for days or even weeks for the data are over in these competitive times, analysts and executives said. "Every manager needs a realtime cockpit, alerts when things change," Nesamoney said.

The fact that Informatica is offering this functionality is good news for the market, said Dan Vesset, research director at IDC. Other data warehousing powers such as Teradata are pushing similar realtime capabilities.

A realtime feedback loop is particularly important in fraud detection and national security applications, solution providers said. "Near-realtime analytics is critical to business in the future," said Dan Linstedt, CTO of Core Integration, a Denver-based systems integrator.

PowerCenter RT is a result of a partnership Informatica inked last year with several EAI vendors to create an API to help incorporate realtime analytics into its own products.

Analytics, or business intelligence, remains somewhat of a hot spot amid the moribund technology landscape. Vendors ranging from Microsoft to Oracle to Siebel Systems are integrating their own analytics into other bread-and-butter applications.