Informatica 9.1 Platform For Big Data

Informatica Corporation, an independent provider of data integration software, announced the Informatica 9.1 platform.

Informatica 9.1 is an unified data integration platform designed to unleash the full business potential of Big Data and empower the data-centric enterprise.

"Building on nearly two decades of innovation and leadership, Informatica 9.1 helps organizations realize the promise of Big Data," said Girish Pancha, general manager, Data Integration Business, Informatica. "Big Data is the confluence of three technology trends: Big Transaction Data, representing massive growth in transaction data volumes; Big Interaction Data, fueled by explosive growth in interaction data from social media and sensor technologies; and Big Data Processing, with highly scalable processing using Hadoop open source technology. With well-differentiated support for all three Big Data trends, Informatica 9.1 uniquely delivers a unified data integration platform to empower the data-centric enterprise."

Informatica 9.1 for Big Data empowers the data-centric enterprise by providing four critical capabilities:

• Big Data integration.
• Authoritative and trustworthy data.
• Self-service.
• Adaptive Data Services.

"Inquiries about Big Data from Gartner clients have risen sharply in 2011 as organizations tackle a rapid increase in data volumes within and beyond the enterprise systems caused by transaction volumes, and other data types including social networks, images and other data not exploited in the past," said Mark Beyer, Research Vice President, Gartner. "Data integration, data quality and master data management are among the requisite technology enablers for an organization to harness the full potential of Big Data."

Informatica 9.1 has support by customers and industry partners across the globe. More than 60 customers and partners voice support for Informatica 9.1 for Big Data.

Big Data Integration
Informatica 9.1 delivers an open data integration platform for Big Data initiatives with unparalleled interoperability including:

• Connectivity for Big Transaction Data – Informatica 9.1 delivers near-universal connectivity to big transaction data from traditional transaction databases, such as Oracle and IBM DB2, to the latest optimized for purpose analytic databases, such as EMC Greenplum, Teradata, Teradata Aster Data, HP Vertica and IBM Netezza.
• Connectivity to Big Interaction Data including Social Data – Informatica 9.1 supports connectivity to social networking services including: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. By enriching enterprise transaction data with social interaction data, enterprises benefit across business initiatives, such as customer programs designed to increase sales.
• Connectivity to Hadoop – Informatica 9.1 features connectivity to the Hadoop file system, HDFS. Using the connector, enterprises can leverage the scalable power of MapReduce by moving data into Hadoop for Big Data processing and moving the results to a target data store for consumption.

Authoritative and Trustworthy Data
Informatica 9.1 delivers trustworthy transaction data and authoritative master data with new innovations including:

• Multi-style and Multi-domain Master Data Management (MDM) – Informatica 9.1 provides a unified and versatile architecture for delivering both just-in-time and point-in-time master data known as Registry style and Hub style MDM respectively. Enterprises benefit from the timeliness of a system-of-reference with Registry style MDM and the scalable performance of a system-of-record with a Hub style MDM.
• Reusable Data Quality Policies for Data Governance – Informatica 9.1 facilitates extensive reuse of data quality policies across data profiling, data cleansing and MDM projects. With reusable data quality policies and rules, enterprises ensure consistency of results across projects and improve agility.
• Proactive Data Quality Assurance – Informatica 9.1 enables proactive alerting in support of data quality efforts employing complex event processing technology to identify data quality exceptions in a timely manner.

Self-Service
Informatica 9.1 delivers personalized-for-role self-service facilities to empower users including IT analysts, developers, data stewards, project owners and business users:

• Self-Service Data Integration for Data Analysts and Stewards – Informatica 9.1 empowers analysts and stewards with self-service facilities to access, integrate, cleanse and deliver relevant data.
• Point-of-Use Data for Business Users – Informatica 9.1 enables business users to enrich their business applications with timely, relevant and trustworthy data. Examples include embedding MDM data controls into applications such as salesforce.com and calling data quality services from tools such as Microsoft Excel.
• Application-Aware Accelerators for Project Owners – Informatica 9.1 empowers project owners to reuse packaged application meta-data to shorten project delivery times for data integration projects.
• Self-Service Proactive Monitoring – Informatica 9.1 empowers business users to specify alerting rules for timely notification of business-critical events, and for operational intelligence.

Adaptive Data Services
Informatica 9.1 provisions high-quality data governed by centrally managed policies including:

• Multi-Protocol Data Provisioning for Data Virtualization – Powered by common logical data object and policy definitions, Informatica 9.1 provisions data using multiple protocols to improve developer productivity and accelerate project time-to-delivery.
• Integrated Data Quality for Data Governance – By profiling, standardizing, matching, merging and de-duplicating data on the fly, Informatica 9.1 ensures trustworthy data for both batch and real-time provisioned data.
• Policy-Driven Enforcement for Data Governance – Governed by central policies, Informatica 9.1 facilitates conformance to regulations and Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics for access control, freshness, quality, retention and privacy of data.

Availability
Informatica 9.1 is available. The social media and Hadoop connectors are targeted for availability in June 2011.