Intelligent Enterprise

Informatica has expanded its data-integration cloud services with collaboration features for developers and broader supporter for users of Salesforce.com and Amazon's EC2 platform for deploying and running services in the cloud.

Called Cloud 9, Informatica's collection of offerings comprises a multi-tenant, data-integration platform-as-a-service; software-as-a-service data integration and data quality applications forSalesForce.com; and new and expanded offerings via Amazon's EC2.

Cloud 9's platform-as-a-service component enables developers to collaborate within IT teams to create reusable data integration and data quality mappings in the cloud or on premise. In addition, business users can use self-service data integration tools to configure data rules or run mappings built by IT organizations.

The new data integration tools for SaaS applications offer users of Salesforce.com broader connectivity, more flexible scheduling capabilities, and better support for assignment rules when working with marketing leads.

In addition, a new sandbox feature allows data synchronization, replication and quality tasks to be copied for non-production work such as development and testing. Cloud 9 also offers verification and correction of postal address details for 240 countries.

Finally, the data quality component for Amazon EC2 offers a broad range of services that include profiling, cleansing, matching and monitoring. In addition, there's support for Amazon's relational database service as both source and target endpoints.

Informatica is selling the components of Cloud 9 separately. The platform-as-a-service offering is available in beta with production release scheduled for December. Pricing begins at $1,000 per month.

The data-quality services on Amazon EC2 is also available in beta. The production release is scheduled for the first quarter of next year. The beta version is offered with pay-as-you-go pricing starting at $30 per hour and traditional perpetual licensing pricing.