Informatica Cloud Computing

Informatica [SaaS] Cloud Integration

Our customers first started experimenting with SaaS, and now more recently with a variety of cloud applications, like Salesforce.com. And now they're moving up to cloud-based infrastructure like Amazon EC2 and cloud platforms like Force.com, just as they did with building their on-premise model up and out.
— Informatica CEO Sohaib Abbasi

Informatica is the leader in the data integration space. That said, Gartner research notes in their Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, November 2009 research that numerous interactions with Informatica's prospects and customers highlight a sense of concern over the vendor's price points. Despite having broader functionality (and therefore broader applicability), as one of the higher-priced solutions in this market Informatica continues to face increasing pressure from competitors with a smaller cost footprint or alternative licensing models. By offering SaaS- and cloud-based delivery models with subscription-based pricing, the vendor hopes to address this challenge.

Informatica Cloud Services focus on solving common cloud data integration use cases such as:

* Back office synchronization. As more front office applications (e.g., sales force automation, customer service, human resources) are deployed in the cloud, your organization needs to synchronize the data within them with back office applications (e.g., general ledger, accounts payable, payroll). This synchronization is critical to ensuring timely, relevant, and trustworthy information is delivered throughout your enterprise.
* Customer master synchronization. Beyond the data that now resides in the cloud, your organization may still have financial data locked in Oracle applications and their customer master data in SAP. To break down these data silos and improve business processes, you need a single view of customer data. A cloud data integration solution can help create that single view, which can have positively impact on both customer satisfaction and your bottom line.
* CRM integration. Your sales organization wants a single view the customer—orders in line with Account and Opportunity information. What about Cases, Leads, Campaigns? With more organizations adopting Salesforce CRM, the demand for self-service cloud-based data integration that can be managed by nontechnical business users is also growing.
* Data migration. As your organization modernizes its IT infrastructure by moving off legacy applications on premise to new cloud-based applications, you need to have confidence that you can easily migrate data to and from the cloud. Similarly, if your company or department has merged with another, or you’ve acquired a new entity, you need to migrate and merge data quickly to start recognizing return on your investment.
* Data replication. Many companies are required to keep an on-premise copy of all cloud-based data for compliance, disaster recovery, or business intelligence reporting purposes.
* Business / IT alignment. Line of business is administering the SaaS applications and IT wants to avoid data silos and untrustworthy point solutions. The right approach to cloud data integration can play a key role in aligning business users with IT.
* Data Archiving.For regulatory compliance, organizations are required to retain data for a longer period, sometimes up to 10 years. Inactive data from enterprise applications, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, SAP, and other custom applications and databases can be archived to on-premise or cloud storage.
* Legacy application retirement. Many companies spend significant amount of their IT budget maintaining legacy applications which have depreciated in business value. The data in these legacy applications can be retired to on-premise or cloud storage, and yet remain easily accessible for reporting or compliance audit purposes.

To handle these use cases, Informatica offers Cloud Services:

* Informatica Cloud Data Loader Service imports data from on-premise applications or systems into Salesforce. In 2008 and 2009, salesforce.com recognized it as the AppExchange integration application of the year.
* Informatica Cloud Data Replication Service exports or replicates cloud-based data from Salesforce CRM, force.com and other SaaS applications for reporting, compliance, back-up, and archival purposes.
* Informatica Cloud Data Synchronization Service synchronizes cloud-to-cloud and cloud to on-premise for point-to-point application integration.
* Informatica Data Profiling Service monitors and evaluates the quality of your Salesforce CRM through graphical dashboards.
* Informatica Address Quality Cloud Services enable rapid point of entry address validation details through on-demand services.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)
The Informatica Cloud Platform allows IT developers to build and run custom source-to-target mappings or advanced functions and share their work in the cloud as custom data integration and data quality services. The Informatica Cloud Platform includes:

* A development collaboration framework allows IT and system integrators to create reusable data integration tasks, publish them as cloud services and run them within them in the Informatica Cloud.
* Administration services allow business users to schedule and automate integration tasks as well as manage users and track performance.
* Connector services include a secure agent that reaches across the firewall to deliver powerful cloud-to-on-premise data integration such as Salesforce to Oracle or Salesforce to SAP as well as cloud-to-cloud data integration.
* A multitenant repository ensures all upgrades are delivered seamlessly and customers benefit from frequent releases.
* A sandbox environment enables IT developers to test and develop integration tasks before running them in production.

Infrastructure as a Service Solutions

* Informatica PowerCenter Cloud Edition is their cloud data integration solution
* Informatica Data Quality Cloud Edition delivers a broad range of data quality services includes profiling, cleansing, matching and monitoring
* Informatica Data Archive Cloud Store Option offers a high performance, scalable, and secure cloud-based storage alternative to IT organizations for preserving and accessing archived data

Competitor Pervasive publishes a comparison of their offering with Informatica.