Intelligent Enterprise

VentanaMonitor™

Informatica has formally announced its product vision and roadmap for delivering a Universal Data Services (UDS) architecture. Underscoring the infrastructure beneath its branded solutions (PowerExchange, PowerCenter, SuperGlue, and PowerAnalyzer), the announcement, made during the vendor's International User Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, also establishes a springboard for continuing evolution of its integration foundation. A number of innovations are bundled in with the UDS announcement, including a cost-based optimizer for data movement and enhanced multi-mode execution capabilities.

Ventana Research welcomes this announcement, as it promotes the enterprise view of integration management, a feature we see as a key component of enterprise performance improvement initiatives. Armed with the development roadmap, organizations can anticipate the next generation of integration management from Informatica. We advise organizations to benchmark that map against organizational plans and objectives.

Assessment

Informatica unveiled its development roadmap to next-generation Optimized Smart Services at its global analyst summit in February and now has more formally announced it to the market at the International User Conference on May 6, 2004. Under the unifying services backbone, dubbed "Universal Data Services" (UDS), the integration vendor clarified its plan for building upon an enabling Data Server architecture. The metadata-driven Data Server is analogous to the application server layer underlying enterprise applications. On this foundation, enabled through open shared web services, an organization can unify its enterprise data interaction. Informatica has targeted cost-effective rapid deployment of strategic data integration initiatives while helping customers address business risk by leveraging the value of existing mission-critical systems.

Several key innovations are bundled into the UDS announcement, all built upon existing capabilities. One such innovation is a cost-based optimizer, common to the world of databases for tuning SQL scripts and procedures, and now applied to data movement. This functionality leverages additional enhancements to security and authorization capabilities and an enterprise-wide distributed dictionary. Informatica has also enhanced multi-mode execution (bulk, batch, real-time, changed data capture) of once-defined procedures. Another featured innovation is a robust search engine applied to metadata and stored data. This last item is seen as a key extension enabling advanced data profiling requirements into the future.

Aimed at unleashing the IT organization from the shackles of one-off integration programming projects, the UDS architecture also recognizes the business value that trusted data services can provide an organization. Citing customer value driven by a consistent, unified, data-centric approach, Informatica touts UDS as the core enabler for bridging composite infrastructure and attendant source enterprise applications to address business-driven performance management requirements.

The development roadmap further articulates deliverables through this year and beyond. During 2004, expectations are now set for opening SuperGlue to address any metadata source, extending PowerCenter with native mainframe capabilities, leveraging PowerExchange (formerly Striva's Detail offering) for changed data capture at all levels, and enabling PowerAnalyzer with reporting services. New heterogeneous join capabilities reaching into all enterprise systems will bridge into the realm of EII, bolstered by likely partnership with one or more of the vendors active in this niche. Future development will target additional sharing of services throughout all products, a grid-aware Data Server and robust semantic integration. The ultimate goal is to deliver on a concept of "smart design" and "smart execution," bringing the notion of expert systems to strategic integration management design and deployment.