Informatica Delivers Most Innovative Release In Its History With PowerCenter 8

Comprehensive new product release delivers near-universal data access, unparalleled boosts in performance and scalability, and breakthrough developer productivity

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., October 31, 2005—Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA) today introduced Informatica PowerCenter 8, the most innovative release in the company's history.  Enabling customers to cost-effectively deploy data integration across the enterprise, PowerCenter 8 offers near-universal access to all enterprise data, unparalleled advancements in enterprise scalability and performance, and breakthrough capabilities delivering greater developer productivity.

“With PowerCenter 8, Informatica sets the new standard for data integration with technology innovations that best address the requirements of our customers,” said Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO of Informatica. “The culmination of an unmatched, decade-long track record of technology leadership, PowerCenter 8 is by far our most innovative release—delivering unprecedented advances within a single, unified and open data integration platform.  Now, enterprises can dramatically reduce the costs and time to address even their most complex data integration challenges.”

These data integration challenges include building multi-terabyte data warehouses, migrating off legacy systems, synchronizing operational data stores, consolidating applications and gaining a holistic view of all relevant data. The result of extensive input from Informatica customers and partners, PowerCenter 8 sets the standard for enterprise data integration with advances in three key areas: enterprise data access, enterprise-wide deployment and developer productivity.

Providing near-universal access to enterprise data
To enable near-universal data access, PowerCenter 8 is the first data integration platform that allows customers to process unstructured, semi-structured and structured data in a single, unified environment.  It is estimated that unstructured data—including spreadsheets, email, Microsoft Word files, presentations and .PDF documents—represents up to 90 percent of the information within today’s enterprise.  With PowerCenter 8, customers can tap into the wealth of enterprise data that was previously accessible only through time-consuming and expensive custom programming.

Furthermore, PowerCenter 8 broadens the means by which customers can access their enterprise data.  Customers can now quickly access data “on the fly” from their operational systems, achieving a much more comprehensive view of their business.  By providing customers with data-federation capabilities, PowerCenter 8 is the first unified data integration platform that combines both traditional physical data movement and virtual-federation approaches to data integration.

“Informatica’s PowerCenter 8 release will provide us with a cohesive architecture for accessing and integrating all data types—both structured and unstructured—that reside across our enterprise,” said Herve Grangeret, data and reporting analyst at MCI France. “It also offers us the flexibility to access this wealth of data either ‘physically’ or ‘virtually.’ Combined with a range of other valuable new features, PowerCenter 8 is a powerful new release that can even further meet our integration needs across the enterprise.”

Delivering mission-critical capabilities for enterprise-wide deployment
In order to help customers successfully deploy data integration across the enterprise, Informatica has made unparalleled enhancements to PowerCenter 8 resulting in industry-leading performance, scalability and reliability.

To gain greater efficiencies and lower costs, many organizations worldwide are adopting a shared-services approach to data integration.  In fact, a recent survey showed that 63 percent of Informatica customers plan to implement this model—commonly called an “Integration Competency Center.”  This centralized model is further driving customers’ need for enterprise-grade scalability and availability in their data integration implementations.

For dramatic boosts in scalability and availability, PowerCenter 8 now includes comprehensive grid-computing capabilities—allowing PowerCenter to intelligently distribute workloads across heterogeneous computing resources, enabling unlimited and cost-effective scalability.

PowerCenter 8 also provides high availability, seamless failover and increased resiliency of all PowerCenter components, eliminating single points of failure in the PowerCenter environment. This can help minimize service interruption in the event of hardware or software outages, and reduce the costs associated with system downtime.

In addition, PowerCenter 8 now features pushdown optimization, which improves performance by enabling processing to be “pushed down” to a relational database, minimizing unnecessary data movement. This flexibility provides optimal performance for both data-intensive and process-intensive transformations.

“As a provider of financial electronic commerce services, we are impressed with how PowerCenter 8 successfully addresses many of the most pressing issues of high-volume data environments,” said Kevin McDearis, CIO, software division and vice president, information enablement at CheckFree Corporation. “The new grid and high-availability features support the kind of scalable performance and nonstop operations that are requisite to our customers’ business-critical, ‘always-on’ environments.”

Driving productivity enhancements for developers
PowerCenter 8 features breakthrough capabilities for increasing the productivity of developers and expediting time to results.

To support complex transformation logic and leverage the skill sets of the growing Java developer community, PowerCenter 8 features new support for Java transformations.  This will allow developers to build complex business rules while still benefiting from a robust metadata model.  It will also allow developers to leverage existing Java libraries.

PowerCenter 8 is also the first data integration product to support template creation and mapping generation from within Microsoft Excel and Visio. The use of mapping templates can result in enormous improvements in productivity and maintainability. Additionally, the support for popular design tools vastly improves collaboration between business analysts and IT developers.

“Informatica’s PowerCenter 8 release significantly broadens the definition of an enterprise data integration platform,” said Mark Cothron, data integration architect at Ace Hardware. “Helping to overcome the challenges of implementing data integration as an enterprise-wide function, PowerCenter 8 offers key new features that can deliver greater performance and scalability, and significantly increase developer productivity. Of the new feature sets we tested, for example, we believe the built-in Java-transformation support will have a very positive impact on functional uses of Informatica for all development teams across Ace.”

Availability and pricing
PowerCenter 8 is available in December 2005 on the following platforms: Windows 32-bit, Solaris 32-bit, Solaris 64-bit, AIX 32-bit, AIX 64-bit, HP/UX 32-bit, Redhat Linux 32-bit, Redhat Linux 64-bit, with general availability in Q2 2006.  Base pricing is $140,000.

About Informatica
Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA) is a leading provider of enterprise data integration software. Using Informatica products, companies can access, integrate, migrate and consolidate enterprise data across systems, processes and people to reduce complexity, ensure consistency and empower the business.  More than 2,300 companies worldwide rely on Informatica for their end-to-end enterprise data integration needs. For more information, call 650-385-5000 (800-970-1179 in the U.S.), or visit www.informatica.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements relating to the anticipated impact of Informatica’s planned release of PowerCenter 8.  Such statements involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from the results described in this press release.  The potential risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ include, among others, risks related to (1) the ability of PowerCenter 8 to interoperate with hardware and software technologies that are developed and maintained by third parties, (2) market confusion that could result from changes to the company’s product packaging and pricing as a result of the introduction of PowerCenter 8, (3) any delay in the completion, launch, delivery or availability of PowerCenter 8, and (4) any potential defects that Informatica could discover in PowerCenter 8 after it begins to market and sell the product to its customers, as well as those risks and uncertainties included under the caption “Risk Factors” in Informatica’s report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2005, which is on file with the SEC and is available on the company’s investor relations website at www.informatica.com.  All information provided in this release is as of October 31, 2005, and Informatica undertakes no duty to update this information.

Note: Informatica and PowerCenter are 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.  The development, release and timing of any Informatica product features described in this release remain at the sole discretion of Informatica and should not be relied upon in making a purchasing decision.