Ahold Upgrades To Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition Version 8 For Enhanced Data Visibility

Leading Dutch retailing group optimises data resources to deliver substantial time and cost savings

Nieuwegein, July 25, 2007—Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq: INFA), a leading provider of data integration software, today announced that Dutch retail giant Ahold Nederland B.V. has upgraded to Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition version 8 to consolidate and track data across its wide-ranging retail operations. Ahold companies include Dutch brands Albert Heijn, Gall & Gall and Etos, many of which are benefiting from the country's largest and most successful retail data warehouse upgrade. By using Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition version 8, Ahold has accelerated critical business reporting cycles and gained a deeper understanding and control over existing data resources, thus driving new business effectiveness and lower administrative costs.

Winner of the first Dutch ICT Architecture Championship in 2004, Ahold Nederland's data warehouse -- Pallas -- is used to aggregate and analyse data for a large number of the group's operating units. Previous versions of Informatica PowerCenter have anchored the data warehouse since its inception in 2000. The move to Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition version 8 was spurred by the increasing volume and complexity of Ahold's data, and the resulting need for visibility into the entire data warehousing and business analytics chain, from data sources to management reporting tools, provided by Informatica Metadata Manager.

Egbert Dijkstra, Aholdīs Global Director of Business Intelligence says, "We first implemented Informatica PowerCenter at Ahold Nederland for the Albert Heijn chain in 2000 and this project was very successful. However, the need for information within our group continues to grow and the BI environment is becoming more extensive and complex, so it was a logical step to upgrade the existing toolset with Metadata Manager, an integral component of Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition version 8."

Informatica's Metadata Manager provides Ahold with a deeper understanding of its data warehouse structure, making it possible to realise the necessary changes more quickly. Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition version 8 analyses the heterogeneous metadata (data about data) from the various components of its data warehouse environment -- including tools for database management, business intelligence, data modelling and data integration -- and provides transparency into almost the entire data warehouse processing chain from source data to reporting layer. Both IT and business analysts are enabled to establish the source of the data, the transformations applied and how the information is being used.

As a result of upgrading to Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition version 8, Ahold's IT developers are able to penetrate and adapt the group's data warehouse more quickly to business change, while data warehouse administrators are able to resolve any data and data process errors more swiftly. Ahold's end users, meanwhile, receive the reports they need sooner and possess better insight into the origin of the reported information.

"Ahold Nederland exemplifies the growing number of large organisations striving to get more value from the existing data and metadata in their data, either in data warehouses or other data stores," says Erik Jan ten Bruggencate, Country Manager, Informatica Netherlands. "Ahold is in the vanguard of this movement, so we are proud that Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition version 8 was chosen to optimise the use of critical information. This underlines the pioneering role that Informatica continues to play in the enterprise data integration market."

Ahold Nederland B.V. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koninklijke Ahold N.V.

About Informatica
Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA - News) is a leading provider of enterprise data integration software and services. With Informatica, organizations can gain greater business value by integrating all their information assets from across the enterprise. More than 2,850 companies worldwide rely on Informatica to reduce the cost and expedite the time to address data integration needs of any complexity and scale. For more information, call 650-385-5000 (1-800-653-9871 in the U.S.), or visit http://www.informatica.com.

Note: Informatica, PowerCenter, PowerCenter Advanced Edition and Metadata Manager are 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.