Extending Data Integration to the Cloud

Cloud computing has become the latest computing platform, offering substantial benefits to both business and IT. There are three main types of cloud computing technology:

   1. Software as a Service (SaaS) provides business users with cost-effective, multitenant solutions that are easy to provision, easy to manage, and easy to use.
   2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) allows developers and IT to build custom applications and run them in the cloud.
   3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides IT with an economical infrastructure that offers virtually unlimited server and storage resources that can be provisioned as and when required, on a "pay as you go" or standard licensing approach

The rapid adoption of these cloud solutions has resulted in more fragmented data and the need to integrate data “in the cloud” with data in on-premise applications and databases. Some common uses cases for cloud data integration include:

    * 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 gain full value from your enterprise data—whether it resides in the cloud or on premise—your organization must be able to access, integrate, and trust them. You need a comprehensive, unified, open, and economical cloud data integration solution.

SOURCE:http://www.informatica.com/solutions/on_demand/Pages/index.aspx

Build Your Business on a Scalable and Reliable Proven Data Aggregation Solution

As a data aggregator, data is your business—not a byproduct of your business. You buy data, transform it, scrub it, cleanse it, standardize it, match it, validate it, analyze it, statistically project it, and sell it. You need a rock-solid data aggregation solution as the foundation of your operations.
The ideal data aggregation solution should:

• Fully automate key steps of the data aggregation process so that your IT team can boost productivity, accelerate delivery times, and dramatically reduce costs. That automation lets your company focus on what it does best—your proprietary data sampling, data projecting, and data assembling core competencies that distinguish you from your competitors
• Transform any data, in any format, from any source so your company can create new products for new markets
• Detect data quality problems early so your company can synthesize high-quality marketing research, point-of-sale analysis, and other data products more quickly and at a lower cost

Informatica can help.
The Foundation for Data Aggregator Operations
With Informatica’s data aggregation solution, market research, market intelligence, advertising, and marketing services companies; credit rating and reporting agencies; and government organizations can rely on a single, scalable solution for their operations.
Unlike costly, resource-intensive, and error-prone hand coding or disparate point solutions, Informatica’s data aggregation solution provides all the tools necessary for data collection, validation, transformation, normalization, enrichment, mapping, and extraction in one powerful, easy-to-use environment.

What makes our solution indispensable to data aggregators is that its unique capabilities—universal data transformation, quality-assured data exchange, identity data resolution, data event management and monitoring, and partner and data source onboarding—are seamlessly integrated and available out of the box through a single, powerful environment that’s easy to use, maintain, and scale. No other solution on the market supplies a broader range of fully integrated data aggregation capabilities.
The Informatica solution has been proven in dozens of real-world deployments to help data aggregators:

• Deliver high-quality data products
• Boost productivity while dramatically reducing costs
• Accelerate time to market for new products and offerings
• Grow revenues by readily expanding into high-growth, emerging markets and adjacent segments

Based on the Industry-Leading Data Integration Platform
Informatica’s data aggregation solution is based on our industry-leading data integration platform. Highly scalable, reliable, and secure, the Informatica Platform enables you to access, discover, cleanse, integrate, and deliver timely, trusted data to the extended enterprise—any data, anywhere, at any time. It is designed to work with all systems and processes you have today or may add in the future.

New Features of PowerCenter 9.0.1

PowerCenter 9.0.1 delivers the full range of data integration capabilities to ensure that all data can be accessed, integrated, and delivered throughout the enterprise at any speed.
PowerCenter All Editions (Standard, Advanced, Real Time)

    * New upgrade wizard and installer
    * New unified administration console
    * Improvements to Mapping Analyst for Excel, including support for reusable rules and usability enhancements
    * Improvements to Mapping Architects for Visio, including support for PowerExchange data sources, transformation shortcuts and custom transformation editing
    * Enhanced support for lookup transformations including cache updates, database deadlock resilience, SQL overrides for uncached lookups and multiple rows return
    * Guaranteed exactly-once semantics extended to SQL transforms—if there is an interruption in processing a real-time message, PowerCenter guarantees once-only delivery and can recover without requiring the message to be sent again

PowerCenter Advanced Edition: Metadata Manager and Business Glossary

    * Improved impact analysis, with ability to view a list of the impacted objects
    * Approval workflow for business terms—create and edit draft business terms, propose the business terms for review by data stewards, and then publish the terms
    * Business terms change notifications to stakeholders—send emails to notify users to review draft business terms or new comments
    * Import/export business glossaries
    * Metadata audit trails for all user-definable metadata, with ability to view the history of changes to business glossary categories, business terms, and custom objects
    * Improvements to metadata bookmarks, including access to Metadata Manager and Business Glossary objects and features from external applications
    * Enhancements to metadata loading and linking processes, including automatic connection assignments, support for multiple PowerCenter parameter files, automated cross-resource linking, and resource connection testing
    * Support for Microsoft SSRS/SSAS metadata

PowerCenter Real Time Edition

    * Improved XML exception management—validate and route invalid XML to a separate output group
    * Dynamic lookup cache refresh—update the lookup cache based on the results of an expression
    * Session log file rotation—limit the size of session logs for real-time sessions by time or file size

9 Reasons to Upgrade to Informatica PowerCenter 9.0.1

   1. Support mission critical 24x7 operations
      Access, integrate and deliver your critical data whenever you need it with enhanced capabilities including high availability for PowerExchange and dynamic lookup cache for real-time data.

   2. Boost productivity with metadata management
      Handle changes more quickly and easily with Metadata Manager and Business Glossary’s optimized data lineage, impact analysis, approval workflow and change notifications.

   3. Reduce deployment and maintenance costs
      Simplify deployment and reduce management overhead with a new administration console, combining several existing consoles.

   4. Harden your real-time operations
      Take advantage of improvements to PowerCenter Real Time Edition including real-time change data capture enhancements, even greater Web services scalability, and guaranteed once-only message delivery.

   5. Minimize risk through data governance
      Implement data governance with Business Glossary, Metadata Manager, and integrated data quality support.

   6. Improve business and IT collaboration
      Empower developers, architects and analysts to collaborate more effectively and productively with role-based tools including Mapping Architect for Visio and Mapping Analyst for Excel to automatically generate mappings, and Reference Table Manager to simplify management of reference data.

   7. Improve mainframe access and performance
      Maximize your mainframe investments with access and performance enhancements including real-time change data capture, VSAM partitioning, and high availability.

   8. Bullet-proof your security
      Secure your data integration environment with centralized user and role administration, enhanced LDAP integration, and SSL remote access.

   9. Future-proof your deployment
      Rely on a secure, scalable, and stable product that will be supported for years to come.


SOURCE:http://www.informatica.com/products_services/powercenter/upgrade_center/Pages/index.aspx

Access, Integrate, and Deliver Data Quickly, Easily, and Cost-Effectively

Powerful market forces—globalization, new regulations, mergers and acquisitions, and business process outsourcing, for example—are pushing your company to operate more efficiently. Your business needs access to all its data faster than ever.
How does your IT organization respond? How does your IT organization access, integrate, and deliver critical data your business needs—when, where, and how it needs it—to help your company stay efficient, agile, and competitive?

Common Data Integration Challenges

    Rising complexity of data. Your IT organization is handling more data, in more formats, from more partners, and more systems than ever before. How do you provide a single, comprehensive view into your critical information assets? How do you handle the complexity of your enterprise data—its volume, its latency, its many formats and structures?

    Increasing business demands. Timely information fuels all your company’s competitive business initiatives, such as governance, risk, and compliance programs and mergers and acquisitions. How do you make data available when and how the business needs it—in batch, near real-time, and real-time modes—to increase operational efficiency?

    Shrinking IT budgets. Every business initiative spawns a new IT project. And each IT project requires data integration. How does your IT organization reuse data integration logic and skills across these projects to keep IT costs in check?
    Proliferating data quality issues. The business needs make decisions quickly, and it needs to base its decision making on reliable data. How does your IT organization proactively prevent questionable, inconsistent, or inaccurate data from proliferating throughout your business? How do you resolve and fix data quality issues at point of entry?



Informatica PowerCenter is highly scalable, highly available, high-performance software that lets IT organizations access and integrate data from virtually any business system, in any format, and deliver that data throughout the enterprise at any speed to improve operational efficiency. PowerCenter serves as the foundation for all data integration projects and enterprise integration initiatives, including:

    * B2B data exchange
    * Data governance
    * Data migration
    * Data synchronization and replication
    * Enterprise data warehousing
    * Integration Competency Centers (ICC)
    * Master data management (MDM)
    * Service-oriented architectures (SOA)

Business analysts, IT organizations, and global development teams all rely on PowerCenter to maximize the business value of enterprise data.

    Business Analysts. PowerCenter delivers trusted, timely data throughout the enterprise—in batch, in near real-time, and in real-time modes, or on demand—to meet the analytical and operational needs of the business. Comprehensive auditing and reporting capabilities enable business analysts to support governance, risk, and compliance initiatives.

    IT Management. PowerCenter delivers unparalleled performance, scalability, and high availability to support mission-critical, enterprise-wide data integration projects while reducing development time and costs.

    Developers/Global IT Teams. PowerCenter encourages collaboration between the business and IT and across global development teams. The platform allows teams to maintain, share, and reuse definitions and data mapping logic across platforms and projects. No recoding means higher productivity and faster time to results.