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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News -
Platforms:
PowerCenter 7 Helps Companies With
Adaptive Data Integration
Informatica Corp, a leading provider of data integration and business
intelligence software, announced a significant advance in enterprise data
integration with the latest release of its PowerCenter data integration
platform. PowerCenter 7 is the first data integration platform to provide
adaptive capabilities in the face of today's increasing information
complexity, pressure to maximally leverage current IT investments, increased
demand for real-time decision making, and need for unified business views.
Considered the next wave of innovation in enterprise software, "adaptive"
software products intelligently adapt to changes in the IT environment and
optimize performance by efficiently leveraging IT resources -- all without
requiring manual coding. Adaptive data integration can help businesses lower
IT costs, accelerate return on investment from integration projects, and
ensure confidence in real-time information during an era of compliance and
governance.
"With the ebb and flow of today's economic cycles, business survival
depends
on an intelligent IT infrastructure that can adapt quickly to changing market
conditions," said Girish Pancha, executive vice president of products at
Informatica. "The adaptive data integration features of our new PowerCenter
release represent a major leap forward in building greater intelligence into
our products -- freeing organizations to focus on their strategic projects,
rather than on expensive and time-consuming maintenance of existing IT
systems. In doing so, we are bringing ground-breaking technology to the
industry to solve today's practical data integration needs."
"Informatica's strength has continued to be providing a unified
'Switzerland-type' solution for end-to-end data integration and business
intelligence, all in one well-architected software solution that helps a
customer turn integration into insight," said Steve McClure, a research vice
president in IDC's Software Research Group. "Informatica's new PowerCenter 7
includes what IDC sees as the required components of a data integration
platform -- data quality, data profiling, metadata management and integration
visibility -- as well as important innovations in security, on-demand
computing and data stewardship in the framework of a service-oriented
architecture."
To deliver adaptive data integration capabilities, PowerCenter 7 includes
innovations in five main areas: Web services support, on-demand computing and
data, data stewardship, team-based development and robust security across all
aspects of the integration process.
- Web services and complete standards support. By leveraging Web services
standards, companies can improve productivity, increase agility and reduce the
IT costs related to enabling interoperability between systems. PowerCenter 7
now provides pre-built Web services interfaces for all data integration
processes throughout its service-oriented architecture (SOA), already the
industry's most extensible platform with the most APIs in use by third-party
OEM partners and its developer community. PowerCenter can be invoked or can
itself invoke Web services processes from external customer, business partner
or third-party applications. With this release, Informatica also provides
support for standards like Lightweight Directory Authentication Protocol
(LDAP) and Common Warehouse Model (CWM).
- On-demand computing and data. PowerCenter 7's computing-on-demand feature
is based on unique server Grid technology that intelligently adapts to
available computing resources, distributing processing among hardware as
needed. With PowerCenter, data integration tasks can be dynamically routed to
available CPUs across a heterogeneous Grid -- including mainframes and UNIX,
Microsoft or Linux-based servers, as well as 64-bit hardware environments.
PowerCenter also adapts to changing information needs by providing data on
demand with access to real-time, batch and changed data in any application,
database or system -- be it a complex source like mainframe or ERP, a
traditional source like a database, or a more modern source like Web logs, XML
data or Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) data.
- Data stewardship. With today's increasing focus on regulatory compliance,
data stewardship is a top priority for enterprises -- requiring a holistic
approach to data profiling, data quality, metadata management and other
data-related technology challenges. PowerCenter 7 provides advanced data
profiling and quality capabilities within the overall data integration process
to speed development and increase confidence, while reducing both the real and
lost-opportunity costs associated with inaccurate and duplicate data.
PowerCenter is the only data integration platform with robust, embedded
profiling capabilities, providing built-in pattern recognition to help
customers visualize data entity relationships and analyze data-corruption
issues for an accurate and continual assessment of their data integrity.
- Team-based development for location transparency. PowerCenter 7 helps
enterprises adapt to large, geographically dispersed integration projects
through its unique three-tier architecture and sophisticated development
management features for location transparency. PowerCenter delivers the
industry's first secure version control for check in and check out, version
history and configuration management to help organizations comply with their
internal project-management mandates.
- Pervasive security. With security concerns top of mind for enterprises and
government agencies, PowerCenter 7 is the industry's only enterprise data
integration platform to leverage the highest security standards for end-to-end
user and data security. This includes partnerships with VeriSign for secure
Web services processing and RSA encryption for data transmission. In addition,
PowerCenter 7 is unique in providing log-in security through LDAP
authentication to help companies automatically keep current with changing user
environments, as well as sophisticated privacy management features for
individual users and processes.
"Informatica's release of PowerCenter 7 is a result of its ability to both
listen to customer requirements and raise the bar on technology standards --
as evidenced by the platform's new team-based development features, which
ultimately bring down total cost of ownership and enable companies to use a
single software platform for compliance with the Software Engineering
Institute's configuration management best practices," said Tom Kato, business
systems analyst and data warehouse architect at Motorola. "In addition,
PowerCenter 7's support for Grid computing is giving companies like ourselves
the ability to leverage existing hardware resources by maximizing the
performance and utilization of those investments."
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