Call for Nominations: Informatica 2011 Innovation Awards

Here are the categories for the 12th annual Informatica innovation awards – the judges will select winners in Business and Technical Enablement categories, as well as the Overall Award: A Strategic Approach to Data Integration:

1. Deliver Analytical Insight
2. Increase Business Agility
3. Improve Business Processes
4. Delivering trusted information to drive data governance,compliance and reduce risk
5. Accelerating shareholder value in mergers, acquisitions and divestitures
6. Improve efficiency and reduce costs
7. Attract & retain customers
8. Increase partner network efficiency
9. Fortifying overall operations with data quality
10. Outsource non-core functions 
11. Enhancing the Marketplace

While I’m not sure why #10 isn’t simply called Cloud Computing or Cloud Data Integration, but the description is clear:

“Outsource non-core functions recognizes projects that utilize Informatica’s cloud-based data integration and data quality services to maximize the ROI on their cloud application investments. By integrating data from the cloud with existing enterprise data sources, nominated companies ensure that they have control of all of their data, regardless of where it resides.”

Last year’s winner in this category was Toshiba Americas Business Solutions. Here’s the case study and a picture of the award winner.

Be sure to submit your nomination no later than May 6th here.

Cloud Integration Jobs on the Rise

I was digging around Indeed.com and was impressed by the growth of cloud integration positions over the past two years:

 

cloud integration Job Trends

Cloud Integration jobs

Is it a coincidence that the first In(tegrate) the Clouds blog post was in 2009? Hmmm…

Did I mention that the Informatica Cloud team is hiring? Be sure to check out some of the available sales, marketing, and engineering positions that are now open in Redwood City, Boston, London, and Bangalore here.

Related Articles

• Informatica Bets Heavily on Need to Integrate Data in the Cloud (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)
• New Informatica Cloud Community – Join the Conversation! (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)
• Integration’s Role in Software Selection for Cloud/SaaS (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)

Cloud Integration: Accelerate Salesforce Adoption and ROI

It was a pleasure to moderate a great session at Dreamforce 2010 on the topic of Salesforce integration. It was a standing-room only session, with the focus on the benefits of CRM integration for sales. Featured sales operations speakers were from TransUnion, Life Time Fitness and Toshiba. I’ve also posted the slides here.

Related Articles

• Impression from Dreamforce 2010 (enterpriseirregulars.com)
• Dreamforce 2010 (enterpriseirregulars.com)
• Notes from Dreamforce – Collabor-8 (leveragepoint.com)
• Dreamforce 2010 Summary (customerthink.com)

Talking Cloud Integration with SIIA @ Dreamforce 2010

The good folks at SIIA stopped by the Informatica booth at Dreamforce 2010. Here’s a quick video of our conversation about Informatica Cloud.

Cloud Data Replication for Better Business Intelligence

I posted an interview on the Informatica Perspectives blog today that highlights the importance of  data replication as a service as part of a Salesforce analytics strategy. A few highlights:

“Once we realized how robust and easy to use Informatica Cloud could be, the following day we had a replication job moving data into a test data warehouse target – capturing incremental data changes and easily adaptable against an ever changing Salesforce data model. This would have taken weeks of development effort in a constantly changing SFA environment in the middle of a project that was still determining what fields and objects to create. Additionally, the ongoing maintenance would have caused major headaches and increased run-rate costs.”

“To populate hourly changes we use the data replication service to populate staging tables to populate our enterprise BI solution.”

“With the Informatica Cloud data replication service, new fields and changes to existing objects can occur without there being an impact on our analytics downstream. It allowed us to be able to report on every single piece of data in our sales system in our data warehouse on day one of the salesforce.com implementation.”

You can read the entire interview here.

Cloud Integration Customer Success

Another great Informatica Cloud case study was published today.

“Informatica Cloud Services has allowed us to streamline the entire sales-enablement process, from data integration development to information delivery. Sales no longer has to access multiple systems to try to find the information they need and IT no longer has to worry about the data integration part of development work. Informatica Cloud Services provide us with a very cost-effective and powerful way to get it done, fast.”

Here’s a summary of what cloud integration has delivered:

• Integrates product and account data from a number of sources into the salesforce.com Sales Cloud
• Drives timely pricing and margin analysis by replicating latest sales data in the cloud into the company’s on-premise business intelligence environment.
• Empowers line-of-business users to manage day-to-day data integration and replication tasks, freeing IT resources for other high value work.
• Eliminates hand coding:  what used to take up to a month of custom development is now accomplished in a few hours.
• Promotes data governance and business and IT collaboration with improved information access and visibility across multiple applications and data sources.

Be sure to read the entire press release here.

From Cloud Data Loading to Synchronization

The Informatica Cloud Data Loader Service was recognized by Salesforce.com in 2008 as the number one integration application on the AppExchange. In 2009 it has become the most popular *free* application (followed by Salesforce for Twitter) and the feedback has been truly amazing.

The Data Loader Service is designed to automate basic loading and extraction of data between Salesforce.com, flat files, and relational databases on a daily basis. But the Informatica Cloud Data Loader Service is just the first step towards secure, powerful, and complete data integration as a service.

The next step, you ask?

The Informatica Cloud Data Synchronization Service. The industry’s only true enterprise-class software as a service integration solution, the Data Synchronization Service is designed for non-technical users to set-up, manage, and monitor bi-directional integration tasks. Primary use cases for the Data Synchronization Service include:

• ERP Synchronization:  Opportunity-to-Order & Customer Master Synch (SAP, Oracle); Quoting Integration, etc.
• CRM Integration:  Cases, Leads, Campaigns; Territory Management; Price Book & Product; Custom Objects, etc.
• Business / IT Alignment: Business self-service to trusted information; IT avoids proliferation of point solutions.

This is a first in a series of posts that outline some of the key reasons that Salesforce customers continue to upgrade (in just a couple of clicks) from the Data Loader Service to the Informatica Cloud Data Synchronization Service. Here’s a brief demonstration of integrating secure FTP files with Salesforce using the Informatica Cloud:

DM Radio: Data as a Service

I’ll be participating in a DM Radio discussion today at 11:30am PST on the topic of data as a service. Here are the details:

With the recent surge in cloud computing, many service providers are starting to provide data on-demand, thus opening the world of high-powered analytics and other data-focused offerings to a host of organizations that previously couldn’t afford the cost of entry. Check out this episode of DM Radio to hear how savvy organizations are consuming data as a service.

Attendees will learn:

• How to handle integration and reconciliation challenges
• The pillars of Cloud Computing
• How the Cloud is evolving into a platform
• Various kinds of data being delivered as a service

 You can register here.

Cloud Data Integration Discussion

Check out this interview with Dr. Chris Boorman over on the BeyeNetwork. He very succinctly defines cloud computing as “computing that is beyond the firewall of an enterprise.” He goes on to break “the cloud” down into the following categories:

• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

As “the cloud” further fragments enterprise data, he stresses that “data is the DNA of a company“ so  it is important to be able to answer the following questions:

• How do you remain in control of your data?
• How do you ensure that the data and the apps you’re running beyond the firewall are synchronized with the applications you have within the firewall?
• How do you trust your data?

What should an enterprise look for in cloud data integration?

1.  An organization that:

• Understands cloud computing and is viable
• Offers choice to solve the problem from within the enterprise (inside-out), Or from outside the enterprise (outside-in)
• Has a track record of customer success in providing cloud data integration

2.  Technology solutions that:

• Provide simple self-service browser-based solutions for business users while providing IT with the overall visibility of who is doing what with the data
• Reside where the data exists – either alongside the SaaS application, or on the IaaS platform, or on-premise
• Share metadata across SaaS, IaaS and on-premise in order to remain in control of all distributed data assets wherever they reside

Listen to the entire interview here and learn more about cloud data integration here.

Cloud Integration – A Conversation with Informatica

If you have an hour, be sure to check out this wide-ranging discussion about cloud computing with executives from Informatica over on the BeyeNetwork. The video podcast focuses on:

1. The business drives for cloud computing
2. The technology and business requirements to build a cloud computing solution
3. Informatica On Demand

At about 12:25 Ron Papas discusses the purpose-built data integration services that the company has delivered in the cloud. These services focus on:

• Data loading
• Data synchronization
• Data quality assessment
• Data replication

You can watch the entire discussion here.