Data Integration: Steps To Tomorrow's Technologies

03.08.2009

There are a couple of areas where Informatica is investing presently. One of our most recent acquisitions is a company that specializes in archival of information. In many corporate systems, almost 80% of the information is inactive. For regulatory reasons you cannot just dispose of the data, it needs to be kept away somewhere. We have technology that allows us to identify the dormant data and move it to other storage. It's very high speed storage in the first tier and tier two or tier three storage will save on those costs. Our customers usually ask to remove terabytes of information to three-tier storage that allows them to save millions of dollars in software and hardware every year just getting inactive data out of their systems. And that's a very exciting area for us.

We have also made some recent investments in data quality. It is a very interesting technology that a lot of people are not really familiar with.

It is about deriving value from data especially in cases like frauds and deliberate withholding of identity, this application would be a huge help. Typically speaking, data mining can detect patterns but cannot successfully detect particular identities.

There are two dimensions of resource utilization, one is capital or supply chain optimization, and second is manpower utilization. If you look back at Informatica's roots, we were founded on data warehousing that was generally regarded operational efficiency and resource optimization problems. So, as far as employee resource optimization is concerned, it varies from many different connections and in the case of professional services, if you can provide professional information about all your employees, like their engagement history, educational background, previous work history, and centralize it in a single place so that employees with a particular kind of skills are assigned to a right kind of activities, that's a tremendous operational advantage for employee organization. We help customers optimize their material spend. So if you can collate that is spending across the organization you can negotiate well with your suppliers for materials.