News

Informatica updates analysis system

• By Jack Vaughan
• March 17, 2003

Informatica Corp. today announced PowerAnalyzer 4 -- heretofore code-named "Wildfire" -- which supports Web services APIs, "persona-driven" interfaces and guided-analysis workflow process management. This deeply layered business intelligence (BI) software package is intended to help individuals and groups within organizations to better exploit corporate databases.

The software also seeks to better inform high-level executives, and to more ably enhance the efforts of corporate infrastructure builders intent on near-real-time operations. On tap in PowerAnalyzer 4 are intelligent caching and integrated performance management metrics, as well as Java Messaging Services (JMS) support and federated-querying capabilities.

Guided analysis begins with some workflow design steps "similar to Visio diagrams," said Sanjay Poonen, vice president of marketing at Informatica. The software seeks to achieve the goal of quickly uncovering root causes of trends buried in corporate data.

"If you give people a schema and a report," said Poonen, alluding to established means of BI, "you end up with endless adventures in drilling.

"That's the current state of the art in BI tools," he continued. With the new Informatica software, "end users can walk through the workflow," claimed Poonen.

To allow this 'walk through the workflow,' Informatica has created filtered sets, "Traffic Lighting" on workflow nodes, and role-based information sharing wizards to allow administrators, power users and line-of-business analysis software users to work quickly and successfully. Collaboration is supported via discussions and annotations, shared alerts, and exception and event handling. Together, these make for the "persona-driven" solution.

Performance management capabilities in the new system support Six Sigma, scorecarding and time-series methodologies.