REDWOOD CITY, Calif., October 15, 2002 - Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), the leading provider of business analytics software, today announced a new modular approach to buying and deploying business analytics centered around three key components: data integration, data warehousing and business intelligence. To complement its market-leading data integration platform (Informatica PowerCenter) and its award-winning family of analytic applications (Informatica Applications), Informatica has introduced two new innovations: the Informatica Warehouse and Informatica PowerAnalyzer. These products will allow companies to easily “mix and match” analytic components to quickly and easily build, expand or enhance their analytics implementations.

“Informatica's move to change the way companies buy and deploy business analytics is an important one,” said Joshua Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, Daly City, Calif. “By offering components or packages that can be implemented at the data integration, data warehousing and business intelligence level, Informatica can help companies significantly improve their analytics without requiring a wholesale restructuring of their existing environments.”

Added Greenbaum, “This practical approach is important for customers that require plug-and-play functionality to achieve improvements in analytical capacity that have to date eluded them. The ability to scale the implementation from a single, focused analytic application all the way to an enterprise-wide implementation makes Informatica's new offering truly unique.”

Informatica Warehouse: Speeds and Simplifies the Deployment of Business Analytics

The Informatica Warehouse enables fast and easy implementation of data warehousing solutions by combining the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform with pre-built warehouse components. The rich, pre-built functionality and modular architecture of the Informatica Warehouse offers customers a number of benefits over traditional custom-build approaches: accelerated deployment time, reduced project risk and lower total cost of ownership.

“Informatica's strategy for offering a plug-and-play approach to business analytics is in line with the needs of senior IT and line-of-business executives operating in today's economy,” said Jeff Vogt, vice president of sourcing at Brunswick. “Brunswick has successfully leveraged this approach and is implementing the Informatica Warehouse for Strategic Sourcing Analytics. This approach decreases costs, time and risk while increasing productivity versus having to build all the data warehouse components from scratch.”

The Informatica Warehouse has the following features:

• Subject-specific warehouses. Informatica has introduced four data warehouses with fourteen subject-specific modules: Customer Relationship Analytics (with modules for sales, marketing, service and Web channel), Financial Analytics (with modules for general ledger, receivables, payables and profitability), Human Resources Analytics (with modules for compensation and scorecard), and Supply Chain Analytics (with modules for planning, sourcing, inventory and quality). Each of the above-mentioned subject modules can be purchased separately or combined to create cross-functional solution sets. These cross-functional warehouses include Strategic Sourcing Analytics, Contact Center Analytics, and Bookings, Billings and Backlog. All warehouse modules are connected through underlying common conforming dimensions - such as customer, product, supplier, geography, organization, time and employee - which unify all modules to deliver an enterprise-wide view of business processes.
• The Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform. The entire Informatica Warehouse solution is built upon the market-leading enterprise data integration platform from Informatica.
• Informatica Business and Universal Adapters. Pioneered by Informatica, Business Adapters provide pre-packaged logic to reduce the time and effort needed to extract data from packaged software applications such as SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel, i2 and Ariba. Universal Adapters, a standard feature of the Warehouse, are used to extract data from legacy systems.
• Analytic bus. After extracting data using Business Adapters, the analytic bus - a patent-pending innovation from Informatica - leverages pre-packaged transformation logic to map business entities (e.g. purchase orders, customers and parts) into a common definition for the Warehouse data model, regardless of their originating source.
• Informatica Warehouse Loader. The Warehouse Loader then automates the loading of data into pre-defined data models. During the load process, several advanced techniques are employed, such as slowly changing dimensions and incremental loads.
• Advanced calculation engine. Once loaded into the data model, the calculation engine performs sophisticated query and data-manipulation techniques to compute the values for complex performance metrics, such as customer profitability.

“We are using the Informatica Warehouse for Customer Relationship, Financial and HR analytics at Brocade,” said Jim Cates, chief information officer at Brocade. “Because Informatica's architecture is modular and open, we're able to use a third-party BI tool, which gives us flexibility. A packaged warehouse also enables flexibility over building all components from scratch. Informatica's offering of subject-area 'data marts' in a granular, yet connected fashion, is also appealing to us.”

“As a leader in the data warehouse industry, Informatica recognizes that the hard work of any analytic solution is data integration and data warehousing. The Informatica Warehouse - in a packaged, yet modular and flexible fashion - is what appealed to Motorola. We are using the Informatica Warehouse for a variety of enterprise needs, including bookings, billings and backlog, finance, procurement and supply chain analytics,” said Chet Phillips, director of information technology, Motorola Global Telecom Solutions Sector. “We chose to roll out PowerAnalyzer as a business intelligence platform on top of the Informatica Warehouse because of its ease of deployment and use, and lower cost of ownership over other BI tools we currently use. The combination of the Informatica Warehouse and PowerAnalyzer helped save us time, cost and risk over building typical analytic components from scratch.”

In addition to growing adoption by customers, the Informatica Warehouse will be embedded by a number of large systems integrators, OEM partners and distribution partners as infrastructure within their own solutions.

Said Brian Queenin, vice president and practice leader for business intelligence at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, “In order to increase shareholder value in this economy, companies need an enterprise view of their spend. We chose the Informatica Warehouse to drive the analytics for our newly offered Chief Procurement Officer Solution Set because it offers a unique approach for ongoing visibility into spend - faster and with less risk than building an application from scratch. The Informatica Warehouse architecture is flexible and robust, which allows it to support this type of demanding analytic application.”

Informatica PowerAnalyzer Creates New Paradigm for Business Intelligence

Informatica today also 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 from Informatica, PowerAnalyzer delivers a full suite of BI functionality without the complexity, the need for extensive training or infrastructure burdens that have left many BI tools on the shelf. (See today's accompanying release for additional information.)

Pricing and Availability

The Informatica Warehouse is available now. Pricing starts at $75,000 for each subject-specific module and $250,000 for each data warehouse.

Note: Informatica, PowerCenter and PowerAnalyzer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.