Informatica Corporation has announced new customer support offerings and proactive support capabilities as part of the Informatica Global Customer Support program. The additional services will be bundled into existing programs to further accelerate customer time-to-value, reducing cost-of-ownership and helping ensure ongoing project success.
"Informatica is now a half-billion-dollar company. For a mid-size company, we are at a very great advantage to have a portfolio of products in eight different categories, including data integration, data quality, ILM, and complex event processing," Ansa Sekharan, senior vice president, Global Customer Support, Informatica, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "For us to become a billion-dollar company, my primary charter at Informatica is to ensure the success of our customers on these product lines," as well as to support customers' expanded use of product lines, he explains. Unlike most companies that are focused on a traditional break-fix model, in which support is looked at as more of an insurance policy, says Sekharan, at Informatica, the customer support focus is to ensure successful product adoption. "As the products are evolving, we have to ensure support is in lockstep to ensure customers get value from these products."
Over the years, there has been a primary shift where Informatica is now being deployed beyond data warehousing, and is being deployed in mission-critical data integration projects, in which companies make decisions based on the data being integrated, explains Sekharan. As a result, he says, "One of the primary offerings with the latest rev is an offering called Mission Critical Support." With it comes a dedicated team that works with Informatica's strategic customers. "Our aim is to be the trusted advisor. We are being more proactive in the services we deliver for them. We host regular meetings for them, we are aware of customer milestones, we have people on standby during upgrades during critical cutovers." The customer support team being proactive "goes a long way to ensure the success of our customers," Sekharan notes.
There are three tiers of customer support tailored to the full continuum of project requirements: Standard Support designed for single project environments where data latency is less important, such as batch data integration; Enterprise Support for more diverse, demanding, analytical, real-time and operational data integration environments; and Mission Critical Support for organizations with multiple operational integration projects, including real-time functionality. The Enterprise Support and Mission Critical Support tiers both incorporate a new set of support features geared to the growing number of more complex, lower latency and multi-project environments. They add a range of services including Extended Version Support, Continued Response Service Level Agreements, Simplified On-line Escalation and Free eLearning to the new revolutionary Informatica Support Console.