Informatica Targets Hybrid Cloud Integration

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Amazon Outage

“When enterprises are asked about their cloud concerns, their first concern is about security, and their second concern is about integration,” replied Soto. “We have strong solutions for integration but also security as well.”

“At no time does any customer data move through Informatica Cloud. Actually data integration takes place between the cloud environment and the on-premise system,” said Soto. “But enterprise concerns about the cloud are not just about security. Some countries for example have limits on what data can be moved to what country.”

“Whilst the outage at Amazon affected many users, you have to keep things in perspective if you consider typical companies using the cloud, the chances are that they cannot do the same level of service for that cost,” said Soto.

“Essentially the service level offered by the cloud is higher than they can provide to themselves. Also when the Amazon outage happened, you can be sure that Amazon had a team of many experts working hard on the problem. With some companies if the same happened to their on-premise solution, you could just have two people working on the problem. It is about keep things in perspective.”

Growing Cloud

And Informatica seems confident about the potential of the cloud for businesses, after witnessing strong uptake from its customer base.

“We are delighted about the growth in Informatica’s cloud service,” said Soto. “We were delighted for example to discover that the growth rate of Twitter last year, and the growth rate of the Informatica Cloud, grew at the same rate.”

“With the Informatica cloud we are processing over 60,000 jobs every day using our cloud service. On a monthly basis we are processing 14 billion rows of information, for example when Oracle customers update to their Salesforce.com system etc.”

“Companies are doing true integration jobs using our cloud services. With the early adoption of the Cloud now shifting to larger companies, they have different requirements as opposed to SMBs, for example an expectation around who should be allowed to use the service, i.e. what department can use a certain part of the Cloud service,” said Soto.

“We have introduced two factor authentication, and we have added fine grained access controls, so that the sales department for example can only access Salesforce.com, but the finance department can access the finance system,” said Soto. “We have also added APIs that allows a company to call Informatica’s cloud service and get it to respond to an organisation’s action, such as a sales order. If a customer updates an order from one device to two, you would like that information propagated to the back-end system, and these APIs can do this on-schedule, or programatically (i.e. when this event occurs, synchronising it back to the data kept in the CRM system).

“There are other new capabilities with Informatica Cloud Summer 2011, which customers will get instantly as soon as we turn on the switch, because this a Cloud service,” said Soto. “This update is all about the enterprise, but in other updates we will be offering more connectivity to other Cloud services as well as simplified use.”

Unified Integration

“A big part of our strategy is around unified cloud integration, and we want to make sure the customer can run integration anywhere they want,” said Soto. “We have also enhanced our offerings on the Informatica Market Place, which allows companies to post additional resources in the Informatica Cloud. There are roughly 40 blocks, such as prebuilt connectors to Ticketmaster, connectivity to Salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, LinkedIN etc.”

“The cloud has really made big steps in adoption inthe  past year,” concluded Soto. “Analyst sources and our own survey confirm that enterprises are not worrying about the Cloud, but now actively considering when they will integrate the Cloud into the rest of their IT systems. The need is real, it is accelerating and we are committed to helping enterprises get the most of it.”

Informatica Cloud Summer 2011 is now available for preview and will be generally available at the end of May 2011.