News

Informatica Adds Virtual Data Integration

• By Linda L. Briggs
• April 5, 2005

Just a month after announcing a series of upgrades to its PowerCenter data integration product, Informatica Corp. has teamed up with an outside company to augment its platform.

Through a partnership with Composite Software, which makes enterprise information integration (EII) solutions, Informatica will offer a Composite Information Server to complement its Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform.

The Composite addition to the PowerCenter platform will allow customers to directly access data in near real-time from their transactional systems. Combined with historical data already residing in data warehouses, that will help provide users with a single view of business data.

Information integration technology enables on-the-fly federated views and real-time reporting of information spread across multiple data sources, without the need to first move the data into a central repository. According to Ted Friedman, a principal analyst with Gartner Research, the partnership with Composite fills in a missing piece of Informatica's product roadmap for a broad, multi-purpose data integration platform--virtual data federation.

Composite's ability to integrate data from multiple sources "on the fly," Friedman says, is a style of data integration that Information doesn't currently have.

Large organizations have come to realize that managing their data in an efficient and effective way is key to success with many strategic initiatives, Friedman says, such as business intelligence and compliance.

"The ability to seamlessly move and integrate data between and amongst disparate systems and databases is one key element of achieving this." Informatica also announced that it is conducting joint development activities with Composite, including shared intellectual property, code and engineering plans. The first phase of integration is scheduled for the "Zeus" release of PowerCenter this fall, accelerating earlier plans for the release.