So take a look at my musings on the event here:
No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation:
Want to read on? Here you go:
Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:
Informatica is alive and well – When Informatica was taken private by Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in April of last year (see here), there were the usual concerns about a private equity investor cutting costs, stopping R&D investment and so on. A little more than a year later the largest Informatica World attendance speaks for itself. Contrary to concerns, R&D investment and marketing efforts have been strengthened to before. The final verdict is of course not out, as Informatica will have to hit certain (not disclosed) performance goals – but for now it looks like a good move for customers, as Informatica (see next takeaway) is re-architecting its offerings to run in the public cloud. And with 4500 iPaaS customers, 25k ‘citizen integrators’ and over 1M+ integration jobs processed per day, Informatica has a substantial market share in the integration game.
First cloud based products this summer - Informatica has supported ‘cloud’ for a long time, but that was always with Informatica’ s products running on premises. With more and more SaaS adoption, more enterprise automaton fragments move to the cloud, and equally enterprises get more comfortable with running (public) cloud based IT functions such as monitoring, and relevant for Informatica, integration. And the next generation application use cases and their inherent data gravity force integration vendors to move their integration services to the cloud. Neither provisioning, nor running the integration function on premises is economical, not to mention data transfer costs and latency. So it is good and key for Informatica moving its product portfolio to the public cloud, and with no surprise starting with AWS. In the closing keynote Informatica showed its PowerCenter product running on AWS, showed its BigData Management console on AWS and connected two SaaS properties, Workday and Xactly in under 2 minutes. That makes optimistic in regards of the release of the first cloud based products that is slated for June.
Deep SaaS integration show benefits – Informatica has typically gone the extra mile when it came to building connectors to various enterprise software assets. And that now benefits the speed to deployment of its cloud based integration. This is even more important as enterprises expect the connectors to be available for cloud based integration projects, especially as in some cases these cannot be built easily or at all as SaaS vendors only offer limited integration options and tools. So the early investment of Informatica pays off a second time, always something which is good and helps speed to market, which Informatica needs. The only concern for this approach is vendor based offerings and integrations, as we see e.g. between Salesforce and Workday, or NetSuite and Ultimate Software. But this does not mean that Informatica is at the losing end of the trend, as it often is the integration platform for the vendors to build their vendor based integration. And needless to say enterprises will find reasons to extend these interfaces, so having them based on a known and common toolset is a bonus.
On the concern side Informatica must be careful of not re-building the status quo of integration, which was manual and often project based. Going forward software will be able to do the job, especially with cheap compute available in the cloud. Humans should no longer match data elements, write slow joins with errors, or create no sense making visualizations, in a not too distant future. No need to look further than e.g. AWS Quicksight. Moreover, Informatica sits well at the center – between SaaS properties, database and storage vendors as well as visualization vendors, any of them doing a successful foray into integration will mean increased competition. But none of these players has been able to do so in the last 20 years one can argue, why should they in the next 10? No reason for Informatica to slow down.
Overall a good Informatica World for Informatica customers, the vendor is doing the necessary investment to remain a trusted enterprise integration player for next 10 years to come. Stay tuned.
Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify of tweets of my colleague Doug Henschen and me below.
More on Informatica:
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.
Informatica is alive and well – When Informatica was taken private by Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in April of last year (see here), there were the usual concerns about a private equity investor cutting costs, stopping R&D investment and so on. A little more than a year later the largest Informatica World attendance speaks for itself. Contrary to concerns, R&D investment and marketing efforts have been strengthened to before. The final verdict is of course not out, as Informatica will have to hit certain (not disclosed) performance goals – but for now it looks like a good move for customers, as Informatica (see next takeaway) is re-architecting its offerings to run in the public cloud. And with 4500 iPaaS customers, 25k ‘citizen integrators’ and over 1M+ integration jobs processed per day, Informatica has a substantial market share in the integration game.
First cloud based products this summer - Informatica has supported ‘cloud’ for a long time, but that was always with Informatica’ s products running on premises. With more and more SaaS adoption, more enterprise automaton fragments move to the cloud, and equally enterprises get more comfortable with running (public) cloud based IT functions such as monitoring, and relevant for Informatica, integration. And the next generation application use cases and their inherent data gravity force integration vendors to move their integration services to the cloud. Neither provisioning, nor running the integration function on premises is economical, not to mention data transfer costs and latency. So it is good and key for Informatica moving its product portfolio to the public cloud, and with no surprise starting with AWS. In the closing keynote Informatica showed its PowerCenter product running on AWS, showed its BigData Management console on AWS and connected two SaaS properties, Workday and Xactly in under 2 minutes. That makes optimistic in regards of the release of the first cloud based products that is slated for June.
Deep SaaS integration show benefits – Informatica has typically gone the extra mile when it came to building connectors to various enterprise software assets. And that now benefits the speed to deployment of its cloud based integration. This is even more important as enterprises expect the connectors to be available for cloud based integration projects, especially as in some cases these cannot be built easily or at all as SaaS vendors only offer limited integration options and tools. So the early investment of Informatica pays off a second time, always something which is good and helps speed to market, which Informatica needs. The only concern for this approach is vendor based offerings and integrations, as we see e.g. between Salesforce and Workday, or NetSuite and Ultimate Software. But this does not mean that Informatica is at the losing end of the trend, as it often is the integration platform for the vendors to build their vendor based integration. And needless to say enterprises will find reasons to extend these interfaces, so having them based on a known and common toolset is a bonus.
MyPOV
A good event for Informatica that has transitioned well into the private equity ownership. Conversations with customers and partners show an engaged and energized ecosystem. Practically every system integrator doing business on our planet was present and sponsoring the event at some level. And with more heterogeneity in the future of enterprise software, things look good for Informatica. It now needs to show it can out-innovate and out-execute the other 5 key players in the integration game (alphabetically Jitterbit, MuleSoft, Scribe, Software AG, Snaplogic).On the concern side Informatica must be careful of not re-building the status quo of integration, which was manual and often project based. Going forward software will be able to do the job, especially with cheap compute available in the cloud. Humans should no longer match data elements, write slow joins with errors, or create no sense making visualizations, in a not too distant future. No need to look further than e.g. AWS Quicksight. Moreover, Informatica sits well at the center – between SaaS properties, database and storage vendors as well as visualization vendors, any of them doing a successful foray into integration will mean increased competition. But none of these players has been able to do so in the last 20 years one can argue, why should they in the next 10? No reason for Informatica to slow down.
Overall a good Informatica World for Informatica customers, the vendor is doing the necessary investment to remain a trusted enterprise integration player for next 10 years to come. Stay tuned.
Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify of tweets of my colleague Doug Henschen and me below.
More on Informatica:
- News Analysis - Informatica announces new cloud capabilities - Keep up the Salesforce ecosystem play - read here
- Event Report - Informatica World 2015 - Product Progress and New Approaches - read here
- News Analysis - Informatica's Sohaib Abbasi showcases Innovations for the Age of Engagement - read here
- Future of Work - One spreadsheet at a time, Informatica Springbok - read here
- Informatica pushes the cloud integration stakes - read here.
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.