So here are my Top 3 takeaways from event:
Informatica stays the course – It was good to see that Informatica keeps building on its Intelligent Data Platform – IDP – and had five key new functionalities shown in the Day #1 keynote. With an intelligent offering for IoT with Project Atlantic, that has the goal to make sense of machine data and connect it with business data, Informatica may well have a future champion for the IoT age. Improved BigData management is coming with Project Sonoma. MDM gets enriched with Social360, brining social data into the MDM process. And Secure@Source brings important security innovations to Hadoop. The most interesting of the overall 5 in my view is Rev, the end user oriented data presentation and data analysis tool originally code named SpringBok. Business user enablement is the risk that disrupts potentially all enterprise software vendors, so it’s good for Informatica to have a horse in the game, which may help disrupt the market. More in detail is my News Analysis (here), also check out my colleague Doug Henschen’s takeaways (here).
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| Breya opens the Day #2 Keynote |
Traction with Cloud Integration Products – We spoke to a number of customers and Informatica spokespeople on the Cloud Integration products, as part of our next generation Applications coverage. When enterprises and ISVs build a new enterprise software solution in 2015 it is very likely that they create an integration problem, as the new software does not run as an isolated solution. Informatica has been in the cloud integration market since almost 10 years, and is now seeing some benefits of an early mover: Over 3500 customers and 6B transactions are impressive statistics. The Informatica offering differentiates from many other products in the integration space by providing deep integration into endpoints, e.g. Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Workday etc. Informatica maintains these, not a trivial task, given the fast release cycles of cloud products. But by now Informatica has maintained a number of these endpoints over a few years, so initial customer concerns can now be countered with a proven track record.
It was interesting that Informatica is helping adoption of the product with crowdsourcing best practices. Enterprises seldom want to go first, and technologists like to reach out to colleagues that have done the same or something similar. So with Discovery IQ users can see, who else has done the same or similar integration, certainly a modern and very helpful approach to increase adoption, foster a support community and ease common early project concerns. Equally Informatica has an integration market place, where integrations can be monetized, if desired.
It was interesting that Informatica is helping adoption of the product with crowdsourcing best practices. Enterprises seldom want to go first, and technologists like to reach out to colleagues that have done the same or something similar. So with Discovery IQ users can see, who else has done the same or similar integration, certainly a modern and very helpful approach to increase adoption, foster a support community and ease common early project concerns. Equally Informatica has an integration market place, where integrations can be monetized, if desired.
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| Informatica Cloud Product Portfolio |
Informatica is traditionally doing a lot of business with ISVs, but it seems that the vendor is pushing even harder for these partnerships recently. At the same time Informatica is working closely with IaaS providers (most prominent are Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure) et al. Certainly a clever move to empower ISVs (and customers) to move their data to the cloud. No surprise the most common use cases are around BigData.
And lastly we also see the drive for the empowerment of the (business) end user. With Infomatica’s Cloud Data Wizard for Salesforce, which makes it easier for users to connect Salesforce with other applications (Box and NetSuite are mentioned in the press release here), the vendor has another chip at the table (sorry for are in Las Vegas).
Making life easier with DaaS – partnering with Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) – In a surprise move Informatica and Dun & Bradstreet announced a partnership already on Monday (see the press release here). In the past enterprise were confronted with a sizeable load of integration work to make a similar scope happen. Though most prominent CRM solutions have pre-built D&B interfaces (the teams of yours truly build these 3 times for 3 different vendors), implementing them was always tedious. Not only did they have to be setup, tested and validated, separate contracts had to be negotiated and signed with D&B. With the partnership of both vendors, Informatica customers can now enrich and procure their integration scenarios with D&B data in a single stop with Informatica. A significant simplification as anyone who has taken such an integration live can certainly attest.
It is also a start for Informatica into the DaaS market, which offers more opportunities to partner for the vendor as well as an additional revenue opportunity. It is early time for DaaS, but good to see the lead if Informatica amongst the enterprise integration players.
It also looks that Informatica – at least for the attendees I spoke to – has been able to dissolve potential concerns around being taken private by a Private Equity player recently. It was good for Abbasi to tackle the subject directly in the keynote, but Informatica still has to share where the investment going forward is going to be, using the usual argument of being able to transform the company without the quarterly reporting pressures. The smart money is on transfomation from a perpetual license to a subscription business, and a large R&D investment. From the announcements at Informatica World it looks more like the same course, extending existing products.
As for concerns we can only raise the general enterprise software risks of quality and execution. Informatica needs to deliver the new features with good quality. It is well positioned against the threat from being disrupted by departmental users, as it has some good offerings, too, but e.g. a new player like Workato (more here), could change the enterprise integration game.
But for now its full steam ahead for Informatica, we will be watching.
More on Informatica:
And lastly we also see the drive for the empowerment of the (business) end user. With Infomatica’s Cloud Data Wizard for Salesforce, which makes it easier for users to connect Salesforce with other applications (Box and NetSuite are mentioned in the press release here), the vendor has another chip at the table (sorry for are in Las Vegas).
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| Sample of pre-package integrations of Informatica Cloud |
Making life easier with DaaS – partnering with Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) – In a surprise move Informatica and Dun & Bradstreet announced a partnership already on Monday (see the press release here). In the past enterprise were confronted with a sizeable load of integration work to make a similar scope happen. Though most prominent CRM solutions have pre-built D&B interfaces (the teams of yours truly build these 3 times for 3 different vendors), implementing them was always tedious. Not only did they have to be setup, tested and validated, separate contracts had to be negotiated and signed with D&B. With the partnership of both vendors, Informatica customers can now enrich and procure their integration scenarios with D&B data in a single stop with Informatica. A significant simplification as anyone who has taken such an integration live can certainly attest.
It is also a start for Informatica into the DaaS market, which offers more opportunities to partner for the vendor as well as an additional revenue opportunity. It is early time for DaaS, but good to see the lead if Informatica amongst the enterprise integration players.
MyPOV
A good user conference for Informatica customers and the vendor. Good progress across all product lines and more value out of the integrated IDP offering. Reducing the time and cost to implement is certainly a value for users and Informatica delivers along those value propositions across its product portfolio. Informatica has replaced the complex pricing for cloud integration with a simpler, tiered endpoint pricing that should help sales and adoption.It also looks that Informatica – at least for the attendees I spoke to – has been able to dissolve potential concerns around being taken private by a Private Equity player recently. It was good for Abbasi to tackle the subject directly in the keynote, but Informatica still has to share where the investment going forward is going to be, using the usual argument of being able to transform the company without the quarterly reporting pressures. The smart money is on transfomation from a perpetual license to a subscription business, and a large R&D investment. From the announcements at Informatica World it looks more like the same course, extending existing products.
As for concerns we can only raise the general enterprise software risks of quality and execution. Informatica needs to deliver the new features with good quality. It is well positioned against the threat from being disrupted by departmental users, as it has some good offerings, too, but e.g. a new player like Workato (more here), could change the enterprise integration game.
But for now its full steam ahead for Informatica, we will be watching.
More on Informatica:
