Informatica "Power of the Platform"

I was invited to Informatica sales and partners forum to participate to a panel with Enterprise architects. I was impressed by their new strategy and products offering.

Informatica is no more an ETL vendor, but position itself as the data integration company. The new platform is using a common foundation stack used to host and run all their products (it is what they claim, I did not validate this point yet).

So their B2B engine (previously ITEMField tool), their ETL engine and all their data quality and metadata Mgt tools are now integrated at the platform level. The "power of the platform".

They are also working on having a common and integrated GUI for all their tools. Should be available later this year.

Finally, and that was the more surprising part for me, is the "Informatica in the cloud" offer. The ideas behind this offer are twofold:

1. propose to companies off the shelf and in the cloud integration platform for some of the most used SaaS applications on the market (Salesforce, etc.).
2. propose to companies off the shelf and in the cloud integration services based on the "power of the platform".

So whatever your data integration needs, on premise or on demand (SaaS), Informatica will have a solution for you. Of course, this will lead to new opportunities for clients in term of pricing. I can not say more or they will kill me ;)

It is very rare to see integration vendor offering on premise and SaaS approach, instead of trying to sell licenses only (and maintenance).

Informatica is very near to their client needs. But, as usual, you need to test and see what's the best approach for your company.