Data Integration Services

At the heart of the Informatica data integration platform are the data integration services that enable IT organizations to access, understand, transform, and manage their enterprise data assets. These services profile, cleanse, match, transform, move, federate, and monitor the quality of data, wherever and in whatever form it resides, to ensure that the enterprise receives data that is consistent, accurate, and timely.

Components and Benefits

Data Profiling. The Informatica platform can profile and assess the quality of enterprise data initially and on an ongoing basis. A simple, easy-to-use interface allows business analysts to define quality metrics and business rules to measure and monitor the quality of enterprise data against these metrics. Quality reports and charts help organizations monitor changes in data content, quality, structure, and values over time. The Informatica platform is unique in that powerful data profiling capabilities are embedded within the same environment used for developing data transformations and mappings. This allows organizations to quantify the long-term impact of data quality initiatives and address data quality as an ongoing process at the enterprise level.

Data Cleansing and Matching. The Informatica platform can cleanse, standardize, and enhance data through rich parsing and standardization for geographic name and address, product, or corporate data. The Informatica platform is unique in its ability to deliver comprehensive, up-to-date coverage of name and address data across a broad list of countries—critical for meeting the needs of today’s global economy. The data cleansing and matching services also allow organizations to de-duplicate and consolidate data to produce a final, clean data representation. This gives businesses greater confidence in the enterprise data used to make strategic business decisions with an accurate “single version of truth.”

Data Transformation. The Informatica platform features a high performance data transformation engine that is driven by metadata-based instructions outlined in the design environment. As data is integrated between various disparate applications and data sources, data semantics, relationships, and hierarchies between these systems need to be resolved. With support for set-based and other complex transformations, the Informatica platform is able to handle semantic-reconciliation across unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data, irrespective of where the data resides.

Data Federation. The Informatica platform provides virtual data federation or Enterprise Information Integration (EII) capabilities. Combining traditional physical and virtual data integration approaches in a single platform, the Informatica platform helps organization deliver holistic data quickly, easily, and cost-effectively. Organizations gain federated access to multiple, disparate data sources, allowing virtual data views to be created without having to physically move data. This capability helps IT accelerate data integration projects and adapt faster to changing business requirements.

Data Quality Monitoring. As data continues to proliferate, organizations need to be able to quickly determine when the structure, format, and quality of data deviates from the defined business rules, and when data inconsistencies cannot be resolved by automated quality processes. The Informatica platform monitors data quality on an ongoing basis, helping organizations maintain data quality and integrity over defined thresholds. Proactive monitoring of quality levels allows businesses to fix quality problems before they can lead to further downstream problems.

Product Literature

PowerCenter Brochure
Data Integration Brochure
Data Quality White Paper