INFORMATICA DEBUTS MAJOR UPGRADE TO ITS MARKET-LEADING DATA INTEGRATION PLATFORM
PowerCenter 6 raises bar for enterprise data integration with powerful enhancements to workflow, scalability and metadata management
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., June 10, 2002 - Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), the leading provider of business analytics software, today introduced Informatica PowerCenter 6, the latest version of the company's flagship enterprise data integration platform for building, deploying and managing enterprise data warehouses. Capping an 18-month development effort, Informatica PowerCenter 6 (and its line-of-business counterpart Informatica PowerMart 6) incorporate an impressive array of new functionality designed to significantly improve enterprise data warehousing.
“Informatica has firmly established itself as the market leader in the data integration space, with more than 1,500 customers worldwide and four of today's top six enterprise applications vendors standardized upon its platform for their own customers,” said Sharon Ward, vice president at Hurwitz Group. “The significant deployment and productivity enhancements made to the core PowerCenter platform put Informatica even further in front, and offer companies a powerful solution for deploying comprehensive integration and analytic infrastructures.”
“Data warehousing practitioners have been Informatica's core user community since the company first introduced engine-based data integration technology in 1996,” said Diaz Nesamoney, president and COO of Informatica. “We continue to serve the requirements of these key constituents in our research and development efforts, today culminating in a powerful new upgrade release of our flagship data integration software platform.”
Next-Generation Data Warehousing
The challenge for data warehousing practitioners today is no longer how to build an enterprise-class data warehouse. Instead, data warehousing professionals face a new set of challenges, such as scaling to meet an ever-increasing data load and user community, simplifying data warehouse management and maintenance, and increasing ease-of-use for the business analysts who use the warehouse on a regular basis.
Informatica has tackled these challenges head on with the introduction of PowerCenter 6, delivering key innovations around three core product-development themes: integration workflow, scalability and metadata.
Integration Workflow --
Integration workflow is essential to accurately represent the complex flow of data across transactional systems, messaging software and data warehouses. PowerCenter provides a unique model for tracking the flow of data from source to target - and all the intermediate steps along the way. Features include:
- Workflow Manager. The Workflow Manager is used to build complex data flows from any source to any target, including all intermediate steps. The Workflow Manager has the following specific characteristics: a fully graphical, object-oriented environment to design data flows using a combination of reusable sessions and worklets; the ability to manage both scheduled and “always on” real-time integration flows; data and event-driven conditional execution of sessions within a workflow and real-time notifications of events to external applications.
- Workflow Monitor. The Workflow Monitor is a dedicated systems-management utility that graphically displays data integration workflow performance information at a granular level.
- Universal Monitoring. A fully functional workflow application programming interface (API) enables scheduling and monitoring of workflows from any enterprise management console, including SNMP managers.
“The new integration workflow feature in PowerCenter is very useful for AAA Carolinas, helping us manage complex sourcing and targeting via a graphical user interface,” Kevin Smith, manager of CRM strategies, AAA Carolinas. “As we are required to run our operations with a small staff, this powerful capability allows us to dramatically lower development and maintenance overhead.”
Performance and Scalability--
As data volumes and user requirements increase exponentially, and as enterprises succeed in integrating real-time data feeds with historical data warehouses, the requirements for performance and scalability not only grow - they change dramatically. Informatica PowerCenter 6 incorporates the following features to further improve performance and scalability:
- Built-in parallel sorter. Built-in, parallel sort transformation allows user control for sorting in integration workflows, thereby facilitating faster processing, requiring fewer system resources, and ultimately providing cost savings.
- Support for heterogeneous targets. PowerCenter 6 can access heterogeneous targets simultaneously, without the need for an intermediary staging area. This feature enables developers to immediately increase the usage of diverse data stores and reduce costs by avoiding the need to stage data for complicated integration workflows.
- Pipeline and “data smart” parallelism. Full user control over parallelism within the integration mapping. Performance statistics are captured to help users identify bottlenecks in the pipeline. Users can choose from a variety of partitioning schemes, including hash functions, key and range based, round robin, and pass-through, based on the source, target and data skew. The result is vast scalability and guaranteed optimal throughput of large data volumes in batch processing modes.
Active Metadata--
Active Metadata is a server-based architecture to enable cross-platform and cross-application analytics. Active metadata incorporates rigorous documentation, maintains lineage, allows for impact analysis and is broadly extensible for integration with other enterprise applications and systems. Key features include:
- Repository Server. The Repository Server is a dedicated middle-tier component through which all metadata is accessed and manipulated, and can be deployed on NT or Unix. The repository server scales linearly to support any number of users and client tools, and ensures safe, concurrent editing of metadata. Clients are actively notified when metadata changes. As a result, PowerCenter 6 delivers an overall low cost of administration by providing ease of administration and high performance local and remote access to metadata.
- Open and extensible metadata. Enables developers, end users and partners to extend any metadata object in the Informatica repository with custom metadata and includes built in support for CWM/XMI and APIs enabling access to third-party repositories. PowerCenter 6's flexible metadata architecture allows users and applications to use Informatica as a system of record for metadata integration.
- Integrated metadata. In PowerCenter 6, data lineage and dependencies are automatically maintained for the end-to-end integration process, allowing for impact analysis. Metadata is always up-to-date and there is no need for developers to synchronize or manually update metadata.
Pricing and Availability
Informatica PowerCenter 6 will be generally available in the third quarter of 2002. Pricing starts at $150,000.
Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA) is the leading provider of business analytics software that helps Global 2000 companies monitor and manage the performance of key business operations across the enterprise. Informatica's business analytics products span the entire “build to buy” spectrum, enabling customers to buy packaged analytic applications or build their own best-of-breed data warehousing solutions -- whichever approach best suits their requirements and resources. More than 1,500 customers worldwide are using Informatica's data integration software to build and manage data warehouses. And, more than 30 leading technology innovators, including Motorola, ConAgra, Brunswick, Brocade, Hewlett-Packard and GE, are using Informatica's packaged analytic applications to successfully monitor and optimize business performance. For more information, call 1.650.385.5000 (1.800.970.1179 in the U.S.), or visit the Informatica Web site
http://www.informatica.com/
