PowerCenter Real Time Option

Delivering Operational Data to the Enterprise in Real Time

To remain agile and flexible in increasingly competitive environments, today’s companies are dealing with sophisticated operational scenarios, such as consolidation of customer data in real time to support a call center or delivery of precise forecasts for supply chain operation optimizations.

To support such highly demanding operational environments, data integration platforms must do more than serve analytical data needs. They must also support real-time, 24x7, mission-critical operations that involve live or current information available across the enterprise and beyond. They must access, cleanse, integrate and deliver data in real time to ensure up-to-the-second information availability. Also, data integration platforms must intelligently scale to meet both increasing data volumes and also increasing numbers of concurrent requests, typical in a shared services Integration Competency Center (ICC) environment. In addition, the data integration platforms must be extremely reliable, providing high availability to minimize outages and ensure seamless failover and recovery because every minute of downtime can lead to huge impacts on business operations.

The Real Time Option augments PowerCenter's powerful batch data processing capabilities with real-time data integration and data quality. The option enables dynamically scalable real-time data integration through real-time processing and delivery of messages and enablement of real-time Web services. With the Real Time Option, IT organizations can quickly and easily deploy real-time data integration and data quality solutions on the PowerCenter platform, leveraging a common interface and toolset for optimal reuse of skills.

Key Features

Dynamic Scalability and Performance for Real-Time Data Processing

• Supports reading from and writing to various messaging systems such as JMS, MSMQ, TIBCO, webMethods Broker, and webSphere MQ through respective Informatica PowerExchange® components
• Provides a zero-latency engine for processing continuous operational data feeds from messaging systems
• Enables horizontal scalability of message processing and delivery for massive real-time data volumes

Reliable Message Processing and Delivery of Message-Oriented Data

• Prevents data loss and data duplication by ensuring real-time data integrity even in system failure scenarios
• Supports exactly-once semantics for message delivery to database targets
• Maintains message order upon delivery for real-time data integrity
• Guarantees data validity by ensuring referential data integrity for real-time change data streams
• Maintains transactional consistency by committing data to the real-time target once all documents in a transaction group are loaded

Re-Entrant Data Services

• Supports automatic scaling of the number of concurrently executing Web service instances typical in a shared services ICC environment
• Provides for the deployment of Web services on multiple Web services hubs
• Optimally services multiple concurrent clients by a single running instance of a re-entrant data integration workflow
• Enables automatic invocation of Web service workflows based on load and concurrent workflow execution

Ease of Development, Testing, and Monitoring of Real-Time Data Integration

• Provides built-in tools for testing and debugging of real-time mappings
• Eliminates the need for authoring of test clients for Web services by providing built-in testing tools
• Exposes and reuses existing batch and real-time transformation logic as Web services with ease
• Delivers detailed reports, statistics, and graphical dashboards for real-time mappings and Web services performance metrics
• Enables wizard-based creation, reuse, and automated generation of Web service definitions

Benefits

click to view full-screen PowerCenter Real Time Option extends PowerCenter's core capabilities to transform and process operational data in real-time, enabling organizations to deliver real-time data to power business operations and accelerate decision making.

Drive Business Agility and Flexibility Through Reuse of Data Assets
Many business processes require zero-latency, real-time data to be effective. The Real Time Option enables bidirectional integration with a variety of real time data sources—including messaging systems, mainframes, relational databases, and applications. IT organizations can significantly shorten development cycles by promoting and promote reuse and sharing of existing data transformations and data integration logic between batch and real-time scenarios. The Real Time Option enables enterprises to quickly leverage existing data integration assets by providing real time support through Web services or messaging systems.

Improve Business Performance with Timelier Decision Making
Traditional extraction-transformation-loading products stage real-time data for batch processing, which increases the processing time and the risk of outdated information. The Real Time Option handles a continuous operational data feed from multiple heterogeneous real-time data sources. Once PowerCenter receives the real-time data, it is quickly processed and delivered to a downstream data consumer. Pairing the option with the continuous changed data capture capabilities of PowerExchange ensures that data changes are captured and processed in true real time, allowing the business to take advantage of the most timely information for operational and analytic data integration. This ability to process and deliver data in real time accelerates decision making and speeds operations with continuous real-time data.

Ensure Real-Time Data Reliability, Even in Failure Conditions
The Real Time Option ensures the integrity of real-time data. The option is fully transaction aware and supports source-based and user-defined commits, as well as constraint-based targeting, to ensure that data is delivered as intended. With the Real Time Option, PowerCenter maintains transactional consistency by committing data to the real-time target once all documents in a transaction group are loaded. With robust rollback and recovery/restart capabilities to avoid duplicate records when resolving partially completed processing, the option helps maintain overall data integrity and reduce risk of downtime. The Real Time Option also guarantees that messages are read, processed, and delivered only once in order, even in system failure scenarios.

Improves IT's Ability to Scale Effectively in Operational Scenarios
To support operational scenarios in enterprise ICC environments, IT organizations must scale effectively to support growing data volumes and workloads. The Real Time Option improves IT’s ability to intelligently scale to meet not only increasing data volumes, but also increasing numbers of concurrent requests. With the Real Time Option, PowerCenter automatically scales the number of concurrently executing Web service instances to use all computing resources on a grid, supporting the large number of concurrent users typical in an ICC environment. It improves IT efficiency through hands-off operation by enabling multiple concurrent clients to be serviced by a single running instance of a re-entrant data integration workflow, optimizing the use of limited computing capacity. The Real Time Option also minimizes maintenance by IT by reducing handcoding and increasing auditability throughout the enterprise.

"We are really excited about PowerCenter's real-time capabilities as a complement to its powerful batch-oriented data processing to address emerging complex data integration scenarios that need to integrate and provision operational data in real-time. Given the breadth of our applications and specialized needs of our information consumers, our Integration Competency Center needs to offer a choice of data integration to also enable real-time data integration for accelerated operational decision-making." - Christopher Eberly Head of Enterprise Information Management ING US Financial Services

Product Literature

Real Time Option Datasheet
PowerCenter Brochure