At InformaticaWorld last week, Informatica announced the general availability of the latest release of its master data management (MDM) product, Informatica 9 MDM.
Informatica 9 MDM is natively integrated with Informatica 9, a comprehensive, unified and open data integration platform, enabling customers to leverage their existing Informatica skilled resources and reuse the existing Informatica data integration and data quality assets with their MDM implementation.
The new capabilities in Informatica 9 MDM span three key areas, according to the company.
The first is MDM-aware business applications. With its new plug-and-play Data Controls, Informatica 9 MDM enables business users to directly access master data, hierarchies and relationships within their existing applications, including Siebel or salesforce.com, that they are trained in and familiar with.
Another key capability in Informatica 9 MDM is Integrated Workflow/Business Process Management (BPM). Through an open standards framework, Informatica 9 MDM provides out-of-the-box integration to leading BPM products supporting integrated workflows for enterprise-wide data governance.
"By leveraging a common framework, we can actually get consistency of rules and flows and positions across the entire enterprise whether it is your MDM system, data quality system, or in your data integration flows," Arvind Parthasarathi, general manager, MDM Informatica, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
The new release also places emphasis on continuous availability support for mission-critical business processes, enabling customers to operate with minimal interruption
due to either planned or unplanned outages spanning everything from product upgrades, data model changes, business process updates, to hardware failure.
Informatica has operated with a notion of system criticality to protect in case of system failure for some time, but customers have also expressed a desire to keep the hub up as they are doing planned downtime such as an upgrade over a weekend, explains Parthasarathi. This requirement underlines the fact that MDM is evolving to the point where even short amounts of downtime are no longer acceptable for global businesses, he emphasizes.
Informatica also announced that the number of customers using its technology for MDM projects by about 50% this year. Leading global companies have adopted Informatica MDM across a range of industries, including life sciences, retail, healthcare, aerospace and defense, agriculture, education, hospitality and public sector. These customers span the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America.
Informatica is currently hosting a 30-city global Customer Centricity road show to highlight the business value of Informatica MDM. Informatica World 2010 has a special MDM track with presentations by executives from Informatica MDM customers including AstraZeneca, Glaxo Smith Kline, Johnson & Johnson and Merrill Lynch.
"The notion of ‘customer centricity' is really important right now," says Parthasarathi, pointing out that market share gains in any industry historically happen in the first 18 months following a recession. According to Parthasarathi, this is a time when a lot of companies in all industries are asking: How do I take market share from my competitors and the answer is simple. It is customer centricity." For more information, go here.