The Power of the Platform - DLT Solutions · The Power of the Platform How a Data Integration Platform Can Help IT Organizations Lower Costs, Improve Effi ciency, and Deliver Greater

W H I T E P A P E R

The Power of the PlatformHow a Data Integration Platform Can Help IT Organizations Lower Costs,

Improve Effi ciency, and Deliver Greater Value to the Business

This document contains Confi dential, Proprietary, and Trade Secret Information (“Confi dential Information”) of Informatica Corporation and may not be copied, distributed, duplicated, or otherwise reproduced in any manner without the prior written consent of Informatica.

While every attempt has been made to ensure that the information in this document is accurate and complete, some typographical errors or technical inaccuracies may exist. Informatica does not accept responsibility for any kind of loss resulting from the use of information contained in this document. The information contained in this document is subject to change without notice.

The incorporation of the product attributes discussed in these materials into any release or upgrade of any Informatica software product—as well as the timing of any such release or upgrade—is at the sole discretion of Informatica.

Protected by one or more of the following U.S. Patents: 6,032,158; 5,794,246; 6,014,670; 6,339,775; 6,044,374; 6,208,990; 6,208,990; 6,850,947; 6,895,471; or by the following pending U.S. Patents: 09/644,280; 10/966,046; 10/727,700.

This edition published May 2009.

1The Power of the Platform

White Paper

Table of ContentsExecutive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

The IT Pressure Cooker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

The Old Ways Aren’t Working . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

The New Economic Reality Demands a New Approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Reduce Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Operate More Effi ciently . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Maximize the Value of Current Technology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

The Ideal Data Integration Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10

Comprehensive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Unifi ed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Open . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Economical. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

The Informatica Platform in Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16

Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18

2

Executive SummaryTo survive the current economic crisis and emerge stronger, companies must become data driven. They need to treat their enterprise data as an asset that they can leverage to support strategic and operational decisions. By being data driven, companies can operate more effi ciently, better manage risk, improve customer service, make smarter decisions faster, and keep costs down.

IT organizations play a critical role in this evolution. Companies are looking to their IT teams to provide complete, consistent, accurate, and current data when and where it’s needed. Data does more than fuel the key initiatives that “keep the lights on” during hard times. Data poises the company for future growth and success when conditions improve.

Yet IT confronts tough challenges in these tough times. How can your IT organization squeeze more value from available resources—both human and technological? How can you speed deployment in the face of increased budgetary scrutiny of every project? How can your team stay fl exible and responsive to changing business needs?

In short, how do you do more (more projects) with less (less money, fewer resources, in less time)?

To meet these challenges, your IT organization needs to do three things:

1. Reduce costs

2. Operate more effi ciently

3. Maximize the value of existing technology

And the way your IT organization can do them is with a comprehensive, unifi ed, open, and economical data integration platform.

This white paper explains how such a data integration platform can position your IT organization to support today’s business needs and to prepare for tomorrow’s.

White Paper


The IT Pressure CookerThe choices that companies make today will determine how well they weather the current economic storm. Executives in all kinds of companies are contemplating:

Going global• . How can my company diversify across different geographies to reduce dependence on any one economy?

Gaining market share• . How can my company grow through acquisitions to expand its footprint?

Staying lean and mean• . How can my company reduce expenses to outmaneuver the competition?

Putting the house in order• . How can my company comply with both current and upcoming industry and government regulations?

There are thousands of decisions to be made. But the success of each business imperative depends on one thing: timely, holistic, accurate data. And that’s where IT comes in. Companies look to their IT organizations to provide the data the business needs—when and how it needs it.

This task is easier said than done. Data is scattered all over the enterprise—in applications, in databases, and on desktops in PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents. It’s housed outside the corporate fi rewall, too—in applications “in the cloud” with software as a service (SaaS) and business process outsource (BPO) providers and with trading partners.

IT organizations are feeling the heat. As Figure 1 shows, each business imperative begets a new IT initiative. Each new IT initiative creates a new IT project. And each IT project demands data—access to data, movement and consolidation of data, as well as a fundamental understanding of the quality of data.

Figure 1. Each business imperative creates a new IT initiative, which, in turn, generates a new IT dataintegration project.

4

A new data integration challenge is born with every IT project:

When companies seek to improve their decision making and report on regulatory compliance, • IT organizations must pull information from a variety of disparate sources across the enterprise to build a data warehouse that can deliver business intelligence and regulatory reporting.

When companies focus on modernizing the business, IT organizations often have to retire • legacy applications and systems. This means safely archiving data within these apps and/or migrating data from the old system to the new.

Mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures demand massive IT support. General ledger data • needs to be consolidated to meet new regulatory reporting requirements. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and fi nancial systems may be retired, others need to kept alive, and some may be merged. Customer data must be consolidated into a single view to uphold service levels. Outsourced services may be retained or eliminated, and supply chains may be combined to drive effi ciencies of scale.

To attract and retain customers, companies need to focus on understanding their customers • better. Improving customer service, satisfaction, and cross- and up-sell rates requires a single view of the customer. To deliver this single view, IT organizations need to create a customer data hub, consolidating, synchronizing, and managing customer data from different applications and systems.

When companies outsource noncore functions to reduce costs and improve operational • effi ciency, IT organizations must synchronize data between on-premise and off-premise systems, such as internal order processing and fi nancial systems with a customer relationship management (CRM) system such as Salesforce.

When companies seek to maximize the value of their supply chains, IT organizations must • leverage relevant industry standards to move and integrate data seamlessly betweentrading partners.

“As the inventory of dissimilar data

integration projects piles up, the

enterprise is left with the cost of

maintaining those integrations for

all time, as data source defi nitions

and requirements change, with no

ability to leverage common tools,

data defi nitions, or techniques.”

— Carl Olofson,

IDC White Paper Sponsored by Informatica,

Maximizing Opportunity and Minimizing

Risk Th rough Integrated Data Management:

Strategies for Success in Uncertain Times,

Doc # 217393

April 2009

White Paper


The Old Ways Aren’t WorkingTraditional data integration approaches are inadequate. They don’t address the complexity of today’s IT environments, nor can they scale to handle the range of initiatives that IT must execute.

Disparate point solutions that connect hundreds (or thousands) of applications just splinter operational data and lock it up in departmental applications, such as ERP and CRM.

Application-centric approaches to data integration don’t take into account all enterprise data. For example, they can’t handle planning data, which is usually saved in Excel spreadsheets, not stored in departmental database applications. Nor can they address data that resides outside the enterprise with BPO or SaaS vendors, or data shared with trading partners.

Hand-coded data integration approaches don’t work either. Hand coding is time and labor intensive. It’s also prone to errors. As IT strives to manage larger data volumes and more data formats, hand coding often results in more complexity—not less, as Figure 2 illustrates. It drives maintenance costs up and drags IT’s effi ciency down.

And what about data quality? Traditional data integration approaches can’t ensure that all data—customer data, material and asset data, fi nancial data—is complete, consistent, accurate, and current, regardless of where it resides.

If your IT organization continues to take a traditional approach to data integration—in silos, by department, by application, or by database—you will spend more time and money managing the complexity and “keeping the lights on,” rather than tackling new business imperatives.

Figure 2. Hand-coded data integration approaches increase complexity, maintenance costs, and risk.

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The New Economic Reality Demands a New ApproachIT organizations need a robust, new approach to data integration—one that can:

Integrate all the on-premise data silos within the enterprise including unstructured data •

Integrate off-premise data in cloud computing applications and systems•

Exchange data seamlessly, business to business, with trading partners•

Ensure the quality of all data•

Cost-effectively manage the application life cycle•

But just when companies are asking their IT organizations to handle more data integration projects, they’re circling the wagons fi nancially. If they aren’t actively cutting IT budgets, they’re certainly scrutinizing them more closely. Companies are slowing IT purchasing cycles to complete additional due diligence. They’re extending time to deployment to assess total cost of ownership (TCO) and analyze potential return on investment (ROI). And they’re actively looking for ways to control costs and eliminate redundancies.

Caught between these two opposing forces, your IT organization needs to increase ROI while simultaneously reducing TCO. There are three ways you can do so:

1. By increasing operational effi ciency

2. By leveraging your existing technology investments

3. By reducing costs of development and deployment, as well as operations and maintenance

IT organizations can do all these things at once with a data integration platform. As Figure 3shows, a data integration platform is a comprehensive set of technologies for accessing, discovering, cleansing, integrating, and delivering data to the extended enterprise.

Figure 3. A data integration platform serves as the technology infrastructure to support any kind of data integration project with any type of data.

White Paper


A data integration platform supports all kinds of data integration projects, such as:

Data warehousing•

Data migration•

Test data management•

Data archiving•

Data consolidation•

Master data management•

Data synchronization•

B2B data exchange•

We’ll now examine how a data integration platform can help your IT organization:

Reduce costs•

Operate more effi ciently•

Leverage your current technology investments•

Reduce CostsToday’s heavily scrutinized IT budgets make cost a key concern. Individual integration approaches, such as hand coding or point solutions, may seem cost-effective at fi rst, but supporting them soon proves to be costly and time consuming. Changing a single application or system causes ripples across multiple integration points, creating unreliable results that necessitate extra cross-checks and manual cleansing.

By contrast, a data integration platform dramatically decreases the time and resources needed for development, maintenance, and administration. Easy-to-use role-based tools and reusable development assets increase productivity and cut time to deployment. Codifi ed methodologies eliminate variation for more accurate results. High scalability and ease of administration simplify maintenance and upgrades. It adds up to lower IT costs, both up front and over time.

“Organizations increasingly see

the uncoordinated and reactive

approaches they have used over the

years as impediments to progress in

addressing business pressures and

the widespread information-glut

that negatively impacts operational

effi ciency. Th e lack of integrated

tools inhibits organizations’ ability

to respond effi ciently to changing

business requirements.”

Gartner Inc.,

Gartner Predicts 2009:

Technology Changes Will Shape the Future of

Data Management and Integration,

Ed Th oo, et al, December 12, 2008

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MOVE FROM SIMPLY “KEEPING THE LIGHTS ON”TO BRINGING NEW PROJECTS TO LIGHT

A data integration platform can help your IT organization reduce costs suffi ciently to move from simply “keeping the lights on” to bringing new projects to light.

Let’s look at an example.

Say your IT shop has realized the cost savings of a data integration platform through its ease of use and administration, prebuilt connectivity, reusable logic and rules, scalability and performance, and seamless upgrades. At last you have the resources and budget toroll out that single critical application that you’ve been asked to complete for the pastsix months.

You face three fundamental issues:

1. How can you migrate the data you need from the old system to the new and ensure that you only migrate useful, correct, valid data that the business wants?

2. How can you test that the system is confi gured correctly and is working before you have a failed migration on your hands?

3. How can you ensure that your application doesn’t balloon over time, causing you to buy more primary storage, more database licenses, and more powerful processors to keep the system running effi ciently?

Your data integration platform is your magic bullet.

First, you need to correctly defi ne the data that is important to migrate and move it fromthe legacy application to the new application. With a data integration platform, you can identify the old and new data structures and quickly build mappings to the new system.You can use these mappings on an ongoing basis because you probably want to movedata into and out of the new system quickly.

Second, you need to test and confi gure the applications. With a data integration platform, you can select only the most relevant business data to quickly replicate and refresh the production data specifi c to your needs. Compared with creating a full system/database copy, this approach dramatically reduces the amount of time, effort, and disk spaceyou need.

Finally, once the application is fully up and running, you need to move inactive data from the new application into a secure archive, thereby maintaining the mission-critical application at a steady state in terms of storage, database licenses, and performance. With a data integration platform, you can easily identify and move inactive data to an on-line or off-line format for longer-term retention, and you can readily access archived data when you need it.

White Paper


Operate More Effi cientlyAs companies increasingly make data management a business issue rather than just an IT concern, minimizing the complexity of multiple tools, skill sets, and vendors becomes more critical for productivity. Many IT organizations need to learn this important lesson. They try to tackle multiple data integration projects, but they approach each one on an ad hoc basis. With different tools and methodologies for every project and no ability to leverage what has been developed or learned in past projects, the results all too often end up being costly, complicated, redundant, and unreliable.

A data integration platform helps IT organizations operate more effi ciently by increasing productivity. A platform keeps IT from having to reinvent the wheel for every project. Instead, IT can share methodology, technology, and assets, such as logic and metadata, across all projects.

When you standardize data integration practices on a platform and then create an Integration Competency Center (ICC) or Center of Excellence, you can realize signifi cant savings in integration application and data interface development time and costs and in maintenance costs.

Data integration also involves many different roles—from data stewards and business analysts to data architects and IT developers—each with different tasks to do and different skills to apply. IT and the business need to work together to respond more quickly and cost effectively to changing business needs.

A unifi ed data integration platform enables IT and the business to collaborate more effectively. A platform provides toolsets that share a common look and feel and are designed to work seamlessly with every other tool across multiple projects. These tools are tailored for each function, so each role can focus on their areas of expertise and develop their skills faster. Each person involved in data integration spends less time learning the platform and more time putting it to work.

Maximize the Value of Current TechnologyIn this economic environment, every single technology investment is under intense scrutiny. IT organizations need to make the most of the technology they have now. With a data integration platform, IT organizations can continue to use legacy systems and applications while avoiding the expense and risk of “rip and replace.”

In addition, a data integration platform enables IT teams to reuse assets from one project to the next, thus reducing TCO as well as the expense of training people and developing their skill sets. Applying the same processes and methodologies across multiple projects allows companies to start small—for example, with a single data warehousing project—and scale up easily as needed. To begin with, IT only needs to adopt the specifi c data integration tools necessary for the current project. Then, as new projects emerge, IT can quickly and cost-effectively accommodate them by taking advantage of the platform’s common engine, user interface, and metadata, as well as the ready availability of trained users.

“Th e best practice approach is to

establish standardized tools and

procedures defi ned and directed

by a coordinating group that in

some cases oversees and in other

cases implements data integration

projects while collecting the resulting

models and transformations into a

single metadata repository through

a core data integration tool. Such a

group is sometimes called a center of

excellence (COE) for data integration

and is also known as an integration

competency center (ICC).”

— Carl Olofson,

IDC White Paper Sponsored by Informatica,

Maximizing Opportunity and Minimizing Risk

Th rough Integrated Data Management: Strategies

for Success in Uncertain Times, Doc # 217393

April 2009

10

The Ideal Data Integration PlatformA data integration platform must solve the problem of data fragmentation across the enterprise to allow data-driven business decisions to be made more quickly and business operations to be run more effi ciently and effectively. It must serve as your company’s technology foundation, providing a managed approach to data integration.

To meet these requirements, a data integration platform must be four things: comprehensive, unifi ed, open, and economical.

ComprehensiveThe ideal data integration platform must feature a comprehensive set of capabilities that enable your IT organization to provide data that the business can trust, when it’s needed, and where it’s needed. With a set of comprehensive data integration capabilities at its disposal, your IT organization can be orders of magnitude more productive.

Supporting the Complete Data Integration Life Cycle

A data integration platform must support all fi ve key steps in the data integration life cycle: access, discover, cleanse, integrate, and deliver (see Figure 4).

Step 1: Access• . Most organizations have data in thousands of places, not just within the enterprise but also beyond corporate fi rewalls, residing with business partners or “in the cloud” with SaaS vendors. All data must be accessible, regardless of its source or structure. Data must be extracted from arcane mainframe systems, as well as from relational databases, applications, XML, messages, and even documents such as spreadsheets.

Step 2: Discover• . Data sources—in particular, poorly documented or unknown sources—must be profi led to understand their content and structure. Patterns and rules implicit in the data must be inferred. Potential data quality issues must be fl agged.

Step 3: Cleanse• . Data must be cleansed to ensure its quality, accuracy, and completeness. Errors or omissions must be addressed. Data standards must be enforced, and values must be validated. Duplicate data entries must be eliminated.

Figure 4. The Informatica Platform fully automates the fi ve steps of the data integration life cycle.

“Informatica is playing a key role

in increasing effi ciency. Whereas

it used to take up to one month to

process and present the reporting

information, we can now achieve

that in about four hours.”

— Chuck F. Shelton

Financial Services IT Program Manager,

Florida Turnpike Enterprise

White Paper


Step 4: Integrate• . To maintain a consistent view of data across all systems, data must be integrated and transformed to reconcile discrepancies in the way different systems defi ne and structure various data elements. For example, the marketing and fi nance systems may have completely different business defi nitions and data formats for “customer profi tability,” and these differences require resolution.

Step 5: Deliver• . The right data must be delivered in the right format, at the right time, to all the applications and users that need it. Delivering data can range from a single data element or record in support of a real-time business operation to millions of records for trend analysis and enterprise reporting. Data must be both highly available and secure in its delivery.

Furthermore, a data integration platform must also:

Audit, Manage, and Monitor• . Data stewards and IT administrators need to collaborate to audit, manage, and monitor data. Key metrics, such as data quality, are constantly measured with an eye toward steady improvement over time. The goal is to track progress on key data attributes and fl ag any new issues for resolution and continual improvement once data is fed back into the data integration life cycle.

Defi ne, Design, and Develop• . Business analysts, data architects, and IT developers need a powerful set of tools to help them collaborate on defi ning, designing, and developing data integration rules and processes. A data integration platform should include a common set of integrated tools to make sure all people are working together effectively.

Enabling Any Data integration Project

A data integration platform must be robust, fl exible, and scalable enough to handle any type of data integration project, including:

Data warehousing•

Data migration•

Test data management and archiving•

Data consolidation•

Master data management•

Data synchronization•

B2B data exchange•

Your IT organization may be conducting several types of data integration projects at once, from a single department data warehousing project to a global data migration project. Your team needs to be able to start small with one project type and then reuse the same skills and assets—enabled by shared metadata—for follow-on projects.

And a data integration platform needs to be able to handle both analytical data integration (reporting and analysis) as well as operational data integration (business processes related to operations execution).

“Th e Informatica data integration

platform enables GfK France to deal

with a constant fl ow of incoming

offi ce documents . . . [achieving] 75

percent higher productivity.”

— Fabrice Benaut

Head of Information Systems and Production

GfK Retail and Technology Services, France

12

Delivering Data at Any Latency

Depending on the application and use case, there is a wide spectrum of time frames and latency requirements for data integration. Some projects require data to be integrated monthly or weekly; others need integrated data available in seconds. And IT organizations need the fl exibility to change latency requirements without having to rearchitect the entire infrastructure.

As shown in Figure 5, the ideal data integration platform must furnish support across the entire latency spectrum, delivering trusted data whenever applications or users need it—whether in real time, batch, or changed data capture (CDC).

Unifi edA single, unifi ed data integration platform greatly simplifi es the lives of your IT resources. When you have all the data integration capabilities you need for the extended enterprise from a single vendor, you maximize productivity with role-based collaboration, shared metadata, and a single, unifi ed run-time engine.

Figure 5. The Informatica Platform delivers timely data to the business.

White Paper


Role-Based Collaboration

Data integration projects involve both IT and business people in multiple roles. They all have very different tasks to accomplish, and all bring different skills. Each role needs a different set of tools designed specifi cally for it. At the same time, project team members must work together, sharing artifacts and tasks, to increase cross-team productivity and ensure that IT and the business are aligned.

As Figure 6 shows, the ideal data integration platform provides role-specifi c tools, specifi cally designed for each person’s skills and tasks. These role-specifi c tools share consistent interfaces. They have a common look and feel and are integrated with each other. As a result, they are easy to learn and easy to use. Team members can get up and running quickly and stay productive by reusing assets across different data integration projects.

Shared Metadata

A data integration platform must provide shared metadata. Each tool within the platform must be able to access relevant metadata about where data is stored, as well as the business rules and logic associated with it. With shared metadata, everyone can be working on the same thing. An analyst and a developer can work with different types of metadata, or view the same metadata in different ways, and still collaborate effectively. The metadata stays consistent, and every user can easily see the impact of potential changes.

Unifi ed Run-Time Engine

The heart of a data integration platform is a single run-time engine. The individual products that make up the platform should all run on the same engine, which simplifi es implementation, administration, and maintenance. A single engine ensures easier upgrades over multiple releases.

The platform must be designed for enterprise-grade deployments, with proven scalability, availability, and security, so that you can bet your business on the platform.

Figure 6. The Informatica Platform maximizes productivity by providing a unifi ed yet role-specifi c set of data integration tools that are designed to maximize collaboration between IT and the business.

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OpenAn open, neutral data integration platform is designed to work with everything—your hardware, software, technology standards—in your current IT environment, as well as anything you may add in the future. An open platform can protect your company from the risk associated with vendor lock-in.

Accessing Data from Any Source

Most organizations store data in hundreds of different formats: enterprise applications, databases, fl at fi les, message queues, spreadsheets, and other documents. As shown in Figure 7, a data integration platform must handle any datatype or format, including structured and unstructured data, and all master datatypes (e.g., customer data, product data, fi nance data), from any source.

More and more, data is moving beyond corporate fi rewalls and “into the clouds.” Cloud computing has become more mainstream, with more companies relying on SaaS providers of human resources and CRM applications. A data integration platform must be able to access data residing outside the enterprise. This includes data that may come from multiple business entities and may be spread across many different geographies or countries.

Mitigating Risk

The IT landscape is changing. This causes uncertainty. IT organizations need a strategy to mitigate the risk of this change. You need a data integration platform that supports all current technology standards, from operating systems to databases. It must be open, ensuring that it works with everything you already have today or that you might have in the future. This includes all the different applications and data sources in your enterprise, as well as in the cloud or with your partners.

Figure 7. The Informatica Platform is open to all data—both on-premise and in the cloud.

“Informatica has helped us control

risk—the risk of losing customers,

the risk of runaway costs, the risk of

missing strategic advantage—all by

unlocking our valuable operational

data and making it available

throughout the enterprise.”

— Jeff McIntyre

Assistant Vice President of

Technology Services,

BNSF

White Paper


EconomicalAn economical data integration platform is one that delivers the lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO) and delivers the fastest and highest return on investment (ROI). These factors are particularly important in today’s tough economic climate where every single technology investment, current and future, is scrutinized for its ability to help the IT organization and the business:

Reduce costs•

Operate more effi ciently•

Deliver value quickly•

Lower TCO

A data integration platform must provide easy-to-use tools and proven scalability and performance to reduce up-front expenses, cut ongoing maintenance and administration costs, and deliver value rapidly. Companies can deploy the platform for a particular data integration project and then scale up to tackle additional projects without spending money on further tools or training. In short, a data integration platform enables your IT organization to do more with less.

Faster ROI

Achieving a quick return on your investment in a data integration platform depends on your ability to ramp up quickly and put it to use. You need to augment your IT resources.

Three times more developers know Informatica than any other data integration software on the market. As a result, it’s easier to fi nd skilled, affordable Informatica resources to help you deliver your projects. The Informatica Technical Network supports these developers with a collaborative on-line community that offers on-line discussion forums for interactive information exchanges, resource sharing, and open feedback between members and Informatica. It’s an active network, with more than 46,000 members worldwide.

Another way to speed ROI is to create an Integration Competency Center to support more integration initiatives across the enterprise. An ICC is a shared IT service designed to provide people, processes, and technology to support all types of integration initiatives across the organization.

1 Forrester Consulting, The Total Economic Impact of the Informatica Platform and Integration Competency Centers: Multicompany Analysis, Commissioned on behalf of Informatica, April 2009.

BUILDING THE BUSINESS CASE FOR INVESTING IN THE INFORMATICA DATA INTEGRATION PLATFORM

In “The Total Economic Impact™ of the Informatica Platform and Integration Competency Centers Multicompany Analysis”, a commissioned study conducted by on behalf of Informatica, April 2009,1 Forrester Consulting used its rigorous total economic impact methodology to interview seven companies that have standardized their data integration practices on the Informatica Platform and created an Integration Competency Center or Center of Excellence.

The study found that these seven Informatica customers:

Realized total cost benefi ts of • $5.5 million—$4.2 million in IT benefi ts and $1.3 million in line of business benefi ts—over a fi ve-year period

Increased developer productivity by • 30 to 50 percent by replacing hand coding and improving operational effi ciencies in the data integration environment

Project an • 88-percent ROI after three years, with a break-even point only 18 months after deployment

16

The Informatica Platform in ActionLet’s now examine how the Informatica Platform has helped four companies, across different industries and geographies, increase operational effi ciency, maximize their technology investments, and reduce costs.

T. Rowe Price, the global investment management fi rm, has more than $334 billion in assets in a wide array of mutual funds. As the fi nancial industry becomes more complex, more competitive, and more tightly regulated, the company has needed to manage more data more effectively.

To improve customer service, ensure a consistent IT environment, and comply with data governance regulations, T. Rowe Price decided to create an ICC supported by the Informatica Platform. The fi rm developed standards, security policies, and a release methodology, then created a data stewardship program to elicit participants from both business and IT. Starting with data warehousing, the fi rm gradually expanded the use of the Informatica Platform to other integration projects.

As a result, T. Rowe Price has achieved these results:

1. Greater staffi ng effi ciency. The IT team was able to take on 12 simultaneous data integration projects in the fi rst year. This grew to 60 projects at once in the fi fth year.

2. Maximized technology investment. Standardizing processes and procedures to facilitate reuse has led to cumulative benefi ts and cost savings more than twice the cost of the ICC team itself.

3. Lower costs. T. Rowe Price began to realize net benefi ts over costs in the second year of using the Informatica Platform, and it realized signifi cant benefi ts over fi ve years. Most savings came from reducing the costs of new development, ongoing code maintenance, and impact analysis.

Duke Energy merged with a competitor in 2006 to become one of the largest electric power holding companies in the United States, with more than 4 million customers across the Carolinas, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. In the wake of the merger, the utility company needed to consolidate multiple

far-fl ung and disparate sets of data. It also needed to ensure that it had the consistent, accurate, timely business information needed to run its operations at peak effi ciency.

Duke Energy turned to the Informatica Platform to create best practices, cut costs, and speed time to market. By eliminating point-to-point interfaces and creating an integrated data management architecture, the company completed the merger smoothly and paved the way for planned future acquisitions.

Relying on the Informatica Platform has enabled Duke Energy to:

1. Improve operational effi ciency. With a single data integration platform removing data management and reporting from the company’s transactional systems, Duke Energy can give managers a faster high-level view of many types of data. It also completes more projects: 31 reviewed and 8 implemented in the fi rst six months of deployment alone.

2. Maximize its technology investment. Because the Informatica Platform is designed to work with a broad array of source systems, Duke Energy can easily scale to incorporate data from future mergers, without disrupting business reporting.

3. Lower costs. Duke Energy will save $1.5 million annually from consolidation, centralization, and reduction of operational costs. It also expects to save another $3 million in operation and maintenance costs over the next two years and projects that it will complete its next merger acquisition at less than half the cost of the previous one.

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KPN is a $19.5 billion provider of phone, Internet, and television services in Western Europe, primarily in the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. The communications company wants to deliver outstanding service to its more than 35 million customers—but with customer data

of various kinds stored in more than 50 separate applications, sales and service representatives didn’t always know who they were talking to, never mind how to help them or what additional services to offer them.

To improve customer service and increase operational effi ciency, KPN decided to integrate all customer data across multiple business units and functionally separate systems. A longtime Informatica client, KPN chose to extend the Informatica Platform to cleanse, synchronize, and load all its master data into its new CRM solution.

With Informatica’s help, KPN’s employees now have a single, comprehensive, up-to-date view of every customer relationship. As a result, the company is reaching these goals:

1. Greater effi ciency. With fast access to accurate real-time data in the call center, customer service representatives spend 10 percent less time on each call, but can still cross-sell and up-sell more effectively, for a 5 percent increase in productivity, plus a 5 percent increase in average revenue per user.

2. Greater technology ROI. Because KPN was already using the Informatica Platform elsewhere in the organization, it simply extended the platform to this new project. KPN easily completed the CRM implementation on time and on budget for fast time to value.

3. Reduced costs. Real-time access to detailed customer data has allowed KPN to cut customer churn by 10 percent annually. In addition, improving and automating data quality has reduced IT maintenance costs.

18

ConclusionThe companies that successfully weather economic slowdowns are those that can sense and respond to change. They’re the companies that can act quickly and take advantage of opportunity as shifts occur in the competitive landscape, in the market, and in the economy.

They need data. The right data. At the right time. With unquestionable quality. According to Gartner, “Strategic use of information determines the ability of enterprises to compete and win.2

These companies will rely heavily on their IT organizations. IT has a critical role to play to help their companies become data driven. A comprehensive, unifi ed, open, economical data integration platform allows IT to rise to the occasion. It provides a fi rm foundation for more effi cient, effective, affordable access to data. It keeps the lifeblood of timely, trusted data fl owing. And that enables IT organizations to support the business through hard times as well as position the business as stronger, more agile, and more competitive when the economy improves.

The Informatica Platform can help your company become data driven by enabling your IT organization to:

Access, discover, cleanse, integrate, and deliver timely, trusted data to the extended enterprise—• any data, anywhere, at any time

Support all roles involved in the data integration process•

Handle all types of data integration and data quality projects •

Work with all systems and processes you have today, or may add in the future•

The Informatica Platform has been proven in thousands of real-world deployments to help IT organizations lower costs, improve effi ciency, and deliver greater value to the business.

2 Gartner Inc., Gartner Predicts 2009: Technology Changes Will Shape the Future of Data Management and Integration, Ed Thoo, et al, December 12, 2008.

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LEARN MORE

Learn more about the Informatica Platform. Visit us at www.informatica.com or call 800.653.3871.

ABOUT INFORMATICA

Informatica Corporation is the leading independent provider of enterprise data integration software and services. Using Informatica services and solutions, companies can access, discover, cleanse, integrate, and deliver data across enterprise systems to save costs, reduce complexity, ensure consistency, and empower the business. More than 3,600 companies worldwide rely on Informatica for their end-to-end enterprise data integration needs.

Worldwide Headquarters, 100 Cardinal Way, Redwood City, CA 94063, USAphone: 650.385.5000 fax: 650.385.5500 toll-free in the US: 1.800.653.3871 www.informatica.com

Informatica Offi ces Around The Globe: Australia • Belgium • Canada • China • France • Germany • Japan • Korea • the Netherlands • Singapore • Switzerland • United Kingdom • USA

© 2009 Informatica Corporation. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Informatica, the Informatica logo, and The Data Integration Company are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.

6959 (05/20/2009)

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The Power of the Platform - DLT Solutions · The Power of the Platform How a Data Integration Platform Can Help IT Organizations Lower Costs, Improve Effi ciency, and Deliver Greater