Informatica Introduces Agile Data Integration for the Enterprise

So what’s the problem with Data Integration? A recent CIO article outlines a few concerns and issues those involved in the industry have. “Data integration projects take too long,” says Todd Goldman, vice president and general manager of Enterprise Data Integration & Data Quality at Informatica. “It’s a manual process rife with inefficiencies,” writes CIO. “The process is error prone and slow—with the business complaining that it does not get the data it asked for,” says Jared Hillam, EIM Practice Director with Intricity.

All in all it seems that the data integration process can be slow, clunky, inefficient and quite disconnected from start to finish. CIO points to the follow example. “That spreadsheet gets passed to developers who then do a great deal of work on the project before any validation gets done, Goldman says. It’s like the child’s game of Telephone. The spec gets passed on to someone who does a little work before it gets passed on to someone else who does more work and so on. Only at the very end do you check the output. It’s a manual process rife with inefficiencies.”

Informatica is attempting to address these inefficiencies with their news Informatica 9.6 platform. Looking to bring more “agile development processes” to data integration allowing organizations to accelerate data integration projects by a factor of five compared with traditional processes. “Instead of using Excel and waiting to validate after the developer does a whole bunch of work, we’re going to give the business the ability to do their own validation before it goes to the developer,” Goldman says. “They can turn their specification into a real, working prototype. Then the developer adds scalability, reliability and performance.”

In creating this proof of concept approach to the data integration process Informatica hope to streamline things for the end users while providing IT with the correct information they need to get the job done. A win-win for all involved. These new features are being rolled up into Informatica’s Vibe Virtual Data Machine architecture allowing for:

• Automatically connect virtualized data integration prototypes to the physical world
• Embed data quality directly into an application
• Deploy on Hadoop without knowing Hadoop
• Create reusable integration workflows that can be built on premise and deployed to the cloud, or vice versa

Click here to read more on the 9.6 release from Informatica and CIO