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Informatica used its Informatica World conference, May 1 through 3, to confirm its strong financial performance and to introduce new versions of its PowerCenter 8.5, Data Explorer and Data Quality products. These new versions further consolidate all the products onto a common platform with a common user interface, making them easier to use and maintain and more scalable. The new versions of Data Explorer and Data Quality contain functions that help companies automatically build definitions of key data items, assess and then enhance the quality of these items, and synchronize a master source of data across multiple sources. This helps companies ensure they have a single source of information about critical business issues such as what customers are buying what products. Informatica also announced that it will enter the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, offering a new version of its PowerExchange product that allows companies to obtain real-time data from external sources, such as customer data from salesforce.com.

Throughout the conference, the company demonstrated a commitment to its top-tier partners, which now deliver a significant portion of its license revenue sales. This is not surprising; Informatica positions its technology as an enabling platform that often is hidden behind other products, such as SAP, or that systems integration partners use to build broader-based solutions. However, Ventana Research believes this positioning and partnering approach could be holding the company back. Informatica’s products now provide a strong platform to support master data management (MDM). A combination of the PowerCenter, Explorer and Data Quality products contains key functionality such as data extraction, transformation, quality assessment and enhancement, and data synchronization, which are needed to create a single, high-quality source of master data, such as about customers and products. Ventana Research recommends that companies starting out with MDM look at what Informatica has to offer in direct support of these initiatives.