My colleague, Mark Smith, the EVP of Research, has already done a good job assessing the market and technology side of Informatica’s acquisition of Siperian (see” Informatica is a New Master in MDM with Siperian Acquisition”) After talking with one of Informatica European operations vice president Mark Seager, I’d like to add a slightly different perspective. There is no doubt in a tough economy Informatica’s performance in 2009 was very impressive, but what has driven that growth? My research and clients tell me this is not just IT but business driven demand for managing and optimizing customer relationships where the demand for customer related data and information is pressuring organizations to invest further.

Like me, Informatica has seen volumes of its clients and prospects becoming much more focused on customer retention rather than new customer sales, and in order to drive customer retention initiatives companies need to know more about their customers. As my research into customer information management and my personal point on mastering customer data (See: “Master Customer Data or Lose Them”) this is a major issue for companies as they have so many sources of customer data, in so many diverse formats that accessing it all to create a single view of the customer is highly complex. A major factor in Informatica’s success has therefore been greater demand for  their products that allow companies to gain access to structured and also unstructured data (content and text based) and data outside the company’s firewall (either in cloud-based applications or partner hubs).

In the same context, the acquisition of Siperian is a very logical step – Informatica and Siperian have been working together through deployments and use of their technology for many years, the Informatica products are key components for building a complete MDM solution, and Siperian has the software to build a MDM hub. When it is fully ready the combined products will provide a platform and tools to build a high quality, synchronised, single source of customer data that companies will be able to rely on the drive customer-centric decisions and actions. For Siperian customers in particular the question is always going to be “when” and what will be the impact on my existing Siperian-based solutions. Not surprisingly at this stage there were no answers coming forth as to “when” but given the past experiences of working together and assessment work already done, the integration task was described as “not massive” and a roadmap should be forth coming quite soon. Meanwhile Informatica will be supporting all existing customers but they will be encouraged to migrate to the new solutions as soon as practically possible.

One thing companies should not ignore as they embark on any initiative to improve the quality of their customer data and information is the political and process barriers that will get in the way; in fact if anything these can be greater than the technical issues. The combined professional services teams of Informatica, Siperian and their partners will therefore be a powerful source that companies can draw on to overcome these issues.

There is a lot of talk at the moment of companies needing to become more customer-centric and to focus more on customer retention than the mad dash of recent years to just acquire new customers. To drive these initiatives companies need a better view of their customers which needs to be based on what some call a “single, golden source of customer data”. The latest versions of the Informatica products, Version 9, as my colleague has analyzed (See: “Informatica Brings Business and IT Together for Your Data in Version 9“) and this acquisition will strengthen Informatica’s position to provide companies with the tools to achieve this objective and so it is certainly a vendor that companies should consider as they strive for what has up to now been an elusive single view of the customer.

Let me know your thoughts or come and collaborate with me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Regards,

Richard Snow – Global VP & Research Director