Extensive Definition
Informatica Corporation provides data
integration software and services for
various businesses, industries and government organizations,
including telecommunications, health care, insurance, and financial
services.
The products of the company support various
enterprise-wide
data integration and data quality solutions including data
warehousing, data
migration, data
consolidation, data
synchronization, data
governance, master
data management, and cross-enterprise data
integration.
History
Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA) was founded in 1993 in Silicon Valley by Indian Entrepreneurs Gaurav Dhillon and Diaz Nesamoney. It was based on the idea that data warehouses should not be "handcoded", but instead can be built more efficiently with graphical tools.Acquisitions
- Influence Software, an analytics applications company in 1999. Informatica abandoned this line of business in 2002.
- Zimba Software, a mobile business intelligence company in 2000. For several years, Informatica tried in vain to compete directly against industry heavyweights like Business Objects and Cognos before deprioritizing its Business Intelligence strategy in 2004 and folding it into PowerCenter Advanced Edition.
- Striva, maker of standards-based mainframe connectivity software in 2003. This software continues to exist as Informatica PowerExchange.
- Similarity Systems, maker of data quality products in 2006.
- Itemfield, maker of data mapping and transformation technology in 2007.
- Identity Systems, an identity resolution technology company in 2008.
Major products
- Informatica PowerCenter Standard Edition - used as a traditional Extract, transform, load (ETL) tool or Extract, Load, Transform tool (ELT).
- Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition which includes
Standard Edition plus additional capabilities:
- Data Analyzer (Reporting tool)
- Metadata Manager (Impact analysis and metadata reporting)
- Informatica PowerExchange
- Informatica Data Explorer
- Informatica Data Quality
- Informatica Complex Data Exchange - for extracting and transforming data from unstructured and semi-structured documents like pdf, excel, doc, etc.
- Informatica PowerChannel - for secure and encrypted data transfer over WAN
Informatica PowerCenter
PowerCenter 8.5 is the company's flagship product. The advanced edition includes Metadata Manager (formerly SuperGlue), Data Analyzer (formerly PowerAnalyzer), Data Profiler, and other options.New features in PowerCenter 8.5 include Grid
Computing support for scalability, Java Custom Transformation
Support, HTTP Transformation Support, High Availability, Push Down
Optimization (ETL Architecture), Enhanced web services
to leverage
service oriented architecture or event based architecture using
SOAP, Tibco,
MQSeries, or other messages in Batch and Real Time, as well as
Mapping Template Creation support through Microsoft Visio.
It also comes with adapters to various data source systems ranging
from RDBMS to
Message-oriented
middleware's to Web Services to Applications.
Informatica PowerCenter, via Informatica
PowerExchange, connects to Mainframe systems to provide access data
in various formats such as VSAM, IMS, IDMS, ADABAS etc. through
Data Maps that act as SQL Views. PowerExchange also provides Change
Data Capture and Real Time support from Mainframe, SQL Server, and
Oracle database sources.
Informatica PowerCenter is available to run on
Windows, various UNIX platforms, and Mainframe.
PowerCenter represents a paradigm shift in
programming since it is a functional programming (such as XSLT for
XML) tool instead of an iterative one (such as PL/SQL or Java).
With Informatica, construction effort of ETL logic for Data
Warehousing or Data Integration shrinks to less than half of
traditional iterative languages and tools.
Competition
Informatica labels itself as a narrowly focused "best of breed" product in the Data Integration software market. Its direct competition in ETL space is Ascential Software (recently acquired by IBM), Ab Initio software and Business Object's Data Integrator.It also directly competes with ETL tools from
database vendors and startups like Syncsort DMExpress,
Embarcadero and Sunopsis; and
indirectly competes with Enterprise Application Integration,
Enterprise Service Bus and Application Server vendors like BEA Systems,
TIBCO and
WebMethods.