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Informatica Announces Architecture For Universal Data Services

Informatica Corp, a leading provider of data integration software, announced its product vision and roadmap for delivering a Universal Data Services (UDS) architecture -- a new paradigm for accessing, integrating, visualizing and auditing enterprise information. Announced by Informatica president and CEO Gaurav Dhillon during his Informatica World 2004 keynote, Informatica's vision for UDS will underpin the company's strategic technologies, products and services going forward.

"UDS is evolutionary for Informatica, but revolutionary in its implications for delivering value to customers," said Dhillon. "Informatica has always advocated a unified platform approach to data access, integration and visualization. With our data server backbone, we deliver for data interaction what application servers provide for applications. By leveraging Informatica's UDS architecture, our customers can ensure success across all their integration-driven projects and solve IT's biggest cost burden -- managing data interaction points between a variety of applications, systems and people."

The UDS architecture is unique in that it enables shared data services for access, integration, visualization and auditing to come together on an as-needed basis to address existing and emerging business problems and opportunities. Many of these data services already exist in Informatica's family of software for advanced connectivity, data integration, visualization and metadata management. Informatica will evolve these services and develop new services over time.

The idea of sharing is becoming a common theme in the world of technology and is, in fact, the idea behind Grid computing. Companies looking to put the immense power of Grid computing to work for them can learn more by attending Gt'04, which will be held May 24-26 in Philadelphia. More information is online at www.gt04.com.

Designed to solve customers' complex data integration problems today and in the future, the UDS architecture provides a single data server that includes foundation services for data interaction such as enterprise-level performance, scalability, availability, metadata management, optimization, security, scheduling and workflow. Unified into one easily managed server, these core functions and services will never need to be rebuilt, can be cost-effectively maintained, and can be leveraged on demand by an indefinite number of shared data services.

"A shared data services model will help customers reduce cost and risk in their integration projects," said Andreas Bitterer, vice president at META Group. "Companies adopting a shared services architecture will increase visibility, consistency, accuracy and general understanding of corporate data, enabling the organization to better leverage the immense investments in business applications."

"Informatica's Universal Data Services architecture, anchored on a common data server, is designed to provide shared services for data access, integration, audit, and visualization," said Henry Morris, group vice president for Applications and Information Access at IDC Research. "These services are critical for a wide variety of integration solutions, whether built by corporate IT or by third party partners. This is especially important as end users recognize that providing an audit trail on how data is integrated is critical for meeting compliance requirements."

Informatica's UDS architecture also features an environment that includes a set of flexible, easily deployable, and "smart," shared data services. Companies embracing UDS can effectively eliminate silos of integration while achieving consistent views of information across the organization in a time of accelerated business change. They also will gain the ability to extend the utility of existing systems without changing them, and to substantially reduce costs and business risks across a broad range of high-value IT projects including data migration and synchronization, system consolidation, and Integration Competency Centers.

"It's very positive to see Informatica's 100-percent focus on solving the data integration challenge, as evidenced by its Universal Data Services approach," said Bill Carson, vice president of application solutions at 1-800-FLOWERS. "We expect this flexible architecture to help us accomplish significant reuse of integration logic from project to project. We are confident that it will meet our increasingly complex data integration needs as 1-800-FLOWERS.com continues to grow through acquisitions, and we focus on consolidating the resulting disparate IT systems."

"Informatica has proven its market leadership and innovation time and time again -- from introducing the data mart concept ten years ago, to today's vision of a Universal Data Services architecture," said Patrick Nolan, project manager at VeriSign and an end user of Informatica software since 1995. "The timing is right for a new approach to broad data integration, as companies large and small are focusing on an increasing number of data-related projects and looking to leverage a robust architecture to support them."

Due to the openness and extensibility of the UDS approach, third-party companies and customers will be able to create their own shared services to plug into the architecture and leverage Informatica's data server. Third parties will also be able to embed the data server in their offerings and create new products that meet specific customer needs by combining new and existing UDS-enabled shared services in innovative ways.

As part of Informatica's future product roadmap, the company intends to evolve its existing shared services into "smart" services that will propel design productivity, integration performance, and manageability of integration processes to new levels. Among planned smart services is a smart integration design service. Leveraging the Informatica data server's metadata-based knowledge of data content, location and relationships, the smart design service will find desired data and propose how best to deliver it in order to free designers of those tasks.

Another projected smart service is a universal cost-based optimizer that extends Informatica's cost-based optimization capabilities across the integration process, end-to-end -- making intelligent decisions on where, how and in what order to process the data. By reducing the human intervention presently required for many integration tasks, these and other smart services will make it easier for companies to start new integration projects, further liberate IT from manually running many integration processes, and free up resources for strategic initiatives.