REDWOOD CITY, Calif., October 15, 2002 - Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), the leading provider of business analytics software, today launched Informatica PowerAnalyzer, a powerful business intelligence (BI) platform that has the potential to change the game in the BI marketplace. Now available as a standalone business intelligence solution, PowerAnalyzer extends Informatica's business analytics software family and delivers a full suite of BI functionality without the complexity, need for extensive training, or infrastructure burdens that have left many BI tools on the shelf.

“A large number of BI tools have been sold over the past decade, but many have ended up as shelfware,” said Nigel Pendse, author of The OLAP Report (http://www.olapreport.com/) “Unfortunately, many current BI tools are still too expensive, too hard to deploy, and not that popular with end users.”

Responding to the market's need for a new paradigm in business intelligence, Informatica has introduced the first BI platform with a fully Internet-based architecture designed for usability, scalability and extensibility. The solution is designed to serve the needs of a broad spectrum of users across the company - from information consumers (executives, managers) to information producers (IT, power users).

“Informatica's PowerAnalyzer solution addresses the traditional pitfalls of many BI tools and should provide a significant change to this market,” said Mark Smith, president of Full Circle Strategies. “Total cost of ownership and ease of use are significant obstacles in the broad deployment and usage of business intelligence across many organizations. With the introduction of PowerAnalyzer, Informatica is going to satisfy tough IT demands and requirements while bringing a new level of simplicity and sophistication for large user deployments.”

PowerAnalyzer Brings “Intelligence” to Business Intelligence

Over the past decade, neither the information consumers using them nor the IT organizations supporting them have realized the promise of traditional BI tools. Informatica PowerAnalyzer was specifically designed to overcome current challenges with the following differentiating features:

• Industry's lowest total cost of ownership. PowerAnalyzer offers a unified, single-server architecture versus the more complex, distributed approach of current BI tools. The product also provides instant value via a scalable, server-based pricing model. This is in stark contrast to BI tools that are often priced as high as thousands of dollars per user.
• Extreme usability. Unlike traditional BI tools which are considered by many to be too hard to use, Informatica offers an intuitive user interface - designed from the ground up to be easy to use, Internet based and dashboard driven. Real-time, interactive alerting capabilities are also unique to PowerAnalyzer. PowerAnalyzer raises the bar for the BI industry by providing guided and user-defined analysis with Analytic Workflows, a patent-pending concept that Informatica pioneered. For the power user, Web-based ad-hoc query-and-analysis capabilities are made possible using a powerful, server-based ROLAP engine.
• Low maintenance and administration. PowerAnalyzer brings to market the industry's first 100-percent Internet-based architecture, broad UNIX support and pure Web-based administration via an underlying Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) architecture. Other BI tools are built on proprietary server architectures, do not conform to Internet standards, have immense challenges running on UNIX, and have client/server installations that require many CD-ROMs worth of code on every desktop.
• Scalability for broad deployment across and beyond the enterprise. Surveys have shown that the typical BI deployment serves a mere 25 to 50 users, or at best five percent of an organization. This is a far cry from the goal of broadly deploying business analytics across the enterprise - a goal that PowerAnalyzer was built to achieve. PowerAnalyzer offers full-function access via the Web and from any mobile device.
• Rapid time to market. Informatica provides packaged analytic content in the form of PowerAnalyzer Insights - sets of dashboards, reports, indicators and alerts for specific business domains. PowerAnalyzer offers more out-of-the-box capabilities for building analytic solutions than traditional BI tools that contain limited business context.
• Full customization and extensibility. Included with the base license fee of PowerAnalyzer is a standards-based Software Developer Kit (SDK) and Portal Integration Kit. The SDK enables IT organizations to fully customize and extend their analytic solutions via Web Services, an XML API and a Java API.

Early Adoption by Customers

Informatica PowerAnalyzer was previously packaged with the Informatica Applications software family. Due to strong market demand for a business intelligence solution with PowerAnalyzer's capabilities, Informatica is now offering PowerAnalyzer as a standalone product. Companies that have recently selected PowerAnalyzer on a standalone basis include eBay, Bank of America, Waste Management, Wells Dairy, TCF Bank, Cendant, Salem Health Solutions and Aventis BioServices.

“eBay's award-winning data warehouse implementation was built upon Informatica's data integration platform, and we welcome the introduction of the PowerAnalyzer business intelligence solution,” said Jeff Drobick, director of information technology at eBay, Inc. “PowerAnalyzer is a key technology enabler in our metrics-driven performance management initiatives. The intuitive user interface and Java API require little training and enable us to rapidly implement balanced scorecard applications for executives, managers and ultimately the entire employee population.”

Said Jeff Vogt, vice president of sourcing at Brunswick, “We found Informatica to be better than other front-end tools, and are now using the Informatica PowerAnalyzer business intelligence platform because of its ease of use, dashboard-friendly interface, rules-based alerting, and analytic engine for query and reporting.”

“After evaluating several leading business intelligence vendors, we selected Informatica PowerAnalyzer for a number of reasons,” said Dave Hair, IS applications manager at Wells Dairy. “Most significantly, PowerAnalyzer has a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. Additionally, the product's Web-based administration and ease of use were very attractive to our user community and IT support staff. These benefits will save us a significant amount of money.”

“We selected Informatica as our business intelligence solution because it would allow us to most successfully leverage a very small IT team for a large number of users,” said Ted Ledman, director of information management at TCF Bank. “PowerAnalyzer is so user friendly that we expect users will be able to create 90 percent of the reports themselves. This will allow us to save significantly on the total cost of ownership and deploy the solution to many more users than we would have been able to with another BI solution.”

Strong Partner Support

“We have worked closely with Informatica over the past year to provide our portal customers with valuable analytic capabilities, and fully support their entrance into the business intelligence space,” said Scott Edgington, vice president and general manager of global software partners at BEA. “Informatica has created a business intelligence solution that integrates nicely with our customers' existing enterprise infrastructure to provide fast deployment and low total cost of ownership.”

“A need has long existed in the market for a business intelligence solution with PowerAnalyzer's unique capabilities,” said Dan Lindstedt, chief technology officer of Core Integration Partners. “With its unparalleled ease of use and low total cost of ownership, PowerAnalyzer is a very attractive solution for customers looking to broadly deploy business intelligence across the enterprise.”

“With Informatica PowerAnalyzer, Plumtree's portal customers will be able to quickly incorporate powerful analytics-dashboard capabilities into their portals,” said Hilary Jules, director of alliances at Plumtree. “Informatica's focus on creating a business intelligence solution that leverages a customer's existing infrastructure - including portals - will make PowerAnalyzer a compelling solution in today's market.”

“Informatica PowerAnalyzer running on Sun provides robust scalability for business intelligence deployments throughout the enterprise,” said Shahram Moradpour, senior director of market development, Sun Microsystems, Inc. “By being built upon a J2EE-compatible application server and allowing customers to leverage their existing Sun ONE application server investment, Informatica is providing a solution that will scale for thousands of users, while maintaining maximum availability for mission-critical business intelligence systems.”

Pricing and Availability

Informatica PowerAnalyzer is available now. Pricing starts at $50,000. The pricing model is CPU based, but is flexible to incorporate concurrent and named-user pricing as appropriate.

Note: Informatica and PowerAnalyzer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Java, J2EE are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.