Greetings From Informatica's Analyst Day

Informatica is hosting its analyst day in Silicon Valley, outlining its innovation plans for 2010.  I have covered the company from an Application Lifecycle Management perspective since they acquired Applimation last year so I am excited to learn more about the holistic Informatica 9 platform.  Some bullets from the event (so far..I will add more throughout the day).

• The company's positioning is very impressive - rather than using terms like "Application Archiving," "ETL," etc., they are talking about "Business Modernization" and "Customer Acquisition and Retention."  This is the equivalant of referring to my grandfather as a "retiree" rather than a "senior citizen" - the former resonates much more with him despite the discount.  The best part is Informatica is proving that it can actually execute on the promise providing concise examples, including some from financial services industry, where customers are actually "Modernizing" their businesses.
• I am a novice to the master data management market - but as I learn more, it is going to be a very big deal in 2010.  ESG research on IT Spending Trends in 2010 suggests that the next 12-18 months will include a tremendous amount of application upgrades and improvements - some of which will involve the "cloud" or SaaS-based delivery of the software.  And many of these application enhancements will center on business intelligence and knowledge management solutions which can benefit from MDM.
• The new "thing" at these Analyst Days is the introduction of a "Twitter" hash or something like that.  The end result is an Analyst chatroom as presentations are going on.  Most of these discussions are illegible as they include too many acronyms, keyboard symbols rather than words, and am I pretty sure no one in the real world can understand them.  I think I have a better chance of going to the Tech Baby's Infant Day Care and decoding the screams, grunts and hand gestures than I do of trying to make sense of the Tweeting pertaining to today's sessions.  (I would add a Tweet hash to this blog post, but it's far beyond my capabilities.)
• Informatica just announced its Data Integration Marketplace where buyers (companies with data integration challenges) and sellers (those that have created data integration mappings, connectors, etc) can connect.  From my perspective, this will get very interesting in the Application Lifecycle Management market where customers are starting to move test and development environments to the cloud.  The challenge is doing so while maintaining security and a valid copy of the primary application environment.  Being able to use others' mappings and data models to build a valid cloud-based test and development environment while masking confidential data may actually get people to accelerate their moves to the cloud.
• Informatica also announced its cloud storage (Iron Mountain, EMC Atmos, Amazon, etc) for its Informatica Data Archive (formerly known as Applimation) solution.  Now customers can retire applications or archive data for compliance purposes to a trusted provider.  Think about how much database information is lying around because of retention purposes or applications that exist because you need the data for reporting purposes.  You can now get rid of those applications while maintaining access AND shift the storage to a cloud provider paying per month rather than buying an on premise system.  Back to my first business - "Business Modernization at the right price."   And, before someone says there is no way that they can fit their database archives on the cloud, think about the 60X compression that Informatica Data Archive can achieve as it does the archive operation.  And, yes, they claim all of the data can be queried and remain accessible to those who have the permissions to do so.

Read Brian's other blog entries at IT BULLETins.