IMPACT BRIEF | 1 ©2012 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Enabling Big Data Integration:Informatica Releases Platform 9.5

AbstractIn May 2012, Informatica Corporation (Informatica) announced the release of Informatica Platform 9.5 – the latest of its comprehensive data integration platforms. This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) Impact Brief covers the announcement and identifies Informatica as a leader in Big Data integration.

EventOn May 15, 2012, Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA http://www.informatica.com) announced the latest release of the Informatica Platform, Informatica 9.5. Informatica 9.5 is designed to maximize customers’ investment in Big Data initiatives. Informatica 9.5 introduces major advances in raising the corporate value of data by making it more relevant, actionable, timely and secure. The release also reduces the cost of implementing Big Data via lowering time to implementation, operational labor costs and capital storage expenditures. Informatica 9.5 will be generally available (GA) in June 2012.

Informatica provides enterprise data integration software and services. The company offers PowerCenter, which integrates data from business systems in various formats and delivers that data throughout the enterprise; PowerExchange that enables information technology organizations to access the sources of enterprise data without having to develop custom data access programs; and Data Services for integrating data virtually across the enterprise. It also provides Data Quality to stakeholders, projects, and data domains; Master Data Management that offers consolidated business-critical data, and B2B Data Exchange software for multi-enterprise data integration. In addition, the company offers Application Information Lifecycle Management products to manage various phases of the data lifecycle; Data Replication, an enterprise software for real-time data movement and heterogeneous data integration; Complex Event Processing to detect, correlate, analyze, and respond to data-driven events; Ultra Messaging products, which enable ultralow latency messaging and systems that reduce hardware infrastructure costs; Cloud Data Integration and Cloud Services that deliver purpose-built data integration cloud applications.

The company was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Redwood City, California. Informatica serves: aerospace, automotive, energy and utilities, entertainment/media, financial services, healthcare/life sciences, high technology, insurance, manufacturing, public sector, retail, services, telecommunications, and travel/transportation industries through sales and support offices in North, Central and South America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and throughout the Asia Pacific region.

Key Observations• EnablesHighVolumeSources: Informatica 9.5, via MDM 9.5 and Ultra Messaging 9.5, enables

placement of high volume data (social and machine to machine data) sources into an organization’s Big Data environments.

• LinksBigDataSourcesandProcessing: Informatica 9.5 enables organizations to make the best choices for their Big Data processing requirements with links between Enterprise Data Earehouse (EDW); analytical platforms (ADBMS); and Hadoop and other NoSQL platforms.

IMPACT BRIEF | 2 ©2012 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

• Reduces Time to Implementation: Informatica 9.5 reduces time to implementation by encapsulating configuration and interaction with those Big Data supporting NoSQL platforms using standardized GUIs.

• Details: For more detailed information on the Informatica Platform announcement, go to: http://www.informatica.com/us/company/news-and-events-calendar/press-releases/05152012-informatica-95.aspx

EMA PerspectiveRecently, when asked what the “next big thing” was, Ann Winblad, renowned venture capital investor, responded:

“Data is the new oil.”

Big Data, much like vast untapped oilfields, represents a great opportunity for value. But to get value from crude oil or Big Data it must be processed into something consumable: petroleum into gasoline, jet fuel or heating oil; Big Data into operational knowledge into customer care, or point of sale, or actionable intelligence for customer churn, sentiment analysis or smart grid optimization. In each use case, a decision must to be made as to which aspect of a Big Data environment is used to facilitate operational or analytical action. EMA has defined this intersection of Big Data platforms as the Hybrid Data Ecosystem.1

The new set of data integration software releases from Informatica enables the implementation of the Hybrid Data Ecosystem. Informatica 9.5 makes it quicker and easier for an organization to master the art of Big Data, and exploit the functional and economic features of their Big Data initiatives.

To start, Informatica 9.5 effectively enables the inclusion of high volume data sources into Big Data environments. Two networking giants, Ericsson and Cisco, project a nearly exponential increase of Big Data sources in the near- and long-term future. The two areas with the highest growth are social interaction (i.e., person to person) and machine generated sensor and log (i.e., machine to machine) information. With these high volume data types, many organizations will be swamped in their attempts to simply capture and ingest this information. Informatica 9.5, via MDM 9.5, Data Replication 9.5, PowerExchange 9.5 and Ultra Messaging 9.5, enables capture of and integration into social and machine-to-machine data sources into an organization’s Big Data platforms. Informatica MDM 9.5 links social media platforms with customer data for Customer Data Integration (CDI) and social graph analysis. Data Replication 9.5, PowerExchange 9.5 and Ultra Messaging 9.5 provide the ability to process and manage operational messages in near real-time into persistent data stores or into event processing environments.

After these and other data sources are incorporated into one of the Big Data platforms, it is necessary to begin managing the “complex processing workload” aspects of the Hybrid Data Ecosystem. Informatica 9.5 enables organizations to make the best choices for their processing requirements with data integration and data quality links between EDW, ADBMS and NoSQL platforms to achieve a workable Hybrid Data Ecosystem. Using PowerCenter 9.5 and PowerExchange 9.5, Informatica makes it possible to process each use case in the best processing platform available. PowerCenter and PowerExchange link data connectivity between existing structured data sources like Salesforce, SAS, SAP, IBM DB2 and Netezza, and NoSQL elements like Hadoop HDFS, MapR and Hive.

1 Rogers, Shawn, “Embracing Hybrid Data Ecosystem” http://blogs.enterprisemanagement.com/shawnrogers/2012/04/16/embracing-hybrid-data-ecosystem/, April 17, 2012

Big Data, much like vast untapped oilfields, represents a great opportunity for value. But to get value from crude oil or

Big Data it must be processed into something consumable.

IMPACT BRIEF | 3 ©2012 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

One of the key aspects of making the Hybrid Data Ecosystem not only possible but probable is having staff members and data governance processes that can implement the proper data integration and do it effectively. Often times the risk(s) associated with getting the work done on the Big Data project is ignored in the face of the “keeping up with the Joneses” factor associated with the buzz of Big Data. The integrated user interface(s), which will be delivered in beta form in July 2012, makes it possible to leverage the existing skills of data integration professionals and the toolsets with which they are familiar to avoid the steep learning curves of Hadoop and other NoSQL environments. Also, this consistent user interface makes it possible to encapsulate the complexity of integration between structured environments such as EDW, ADBMS and operational systems as well. This allows organizations to not only speed their implementations, but lower the overall risk of failure and re-work in those implementations.

With these new changes to an already impressive list of platform features, Informatica 9.5 continues to be a leader in the Big Data integration space. In addition, Informatica is well positioned to help organizations to implement EMA’s vision for the Hybrid Data Ecosystem and making the most out of their initiatives, and to turn their Big Data “crude oil” into finished products.

About EMA Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or blogs.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter or Facebook. 2469.051012

Often times the risk(s) associated with getting the work done on the Big Data

project is ignored in the face of the “keeping up with the Joneses” factor associated with the buzz of Big Data.