At its annual customer confab this week, Informatica Corp. announced an ambitious foray into software-as-a-service (SaaS) data integration, touting a "strategic partnership" with salesforce.com, upcoming connectivity into salesforce.com CRM applications, and by early next year, a full-fledged SaaS version of its data integration platform.

"The overall strategy that we're going to employ is to put more and more of our Informatica data services and data integration capabilities on demand, to be available as services," Brian Gentile, Informatica's chief marketing officer comments. "In the last six to eight years, we've seen a huge rise in data outside the corporation, payroll [BPO players] like ADP, HR like Hewitt, CRM systems like Salesforce.com-lots of data now exists that is owned by the enterprise but exists outside the enterprise." Enter Informatica On Demand, the company's still-gestating SaaS offering. "Our goal is to treat all of this data exactly the same, so customers can perform all of the sophisticated projects and processes on this external data" as they can with their on-premises data, Gentile says.

Informatica plans to roll out its On Demand entry in a phased approach. The first deliverable-PowerCenter Connect for salesforce.com, "After that, [we plan to] develop connectors for other major SaaS providers. In each case, the idea is [users] can integrate through the workings of the familiar PowerCenter interface itself," Gentile indicates. Informatica also expects to embed select PowerCenter capabilities (such as data cleansing) as tabs in the salesforce.com user interface, via salesforce.com's AppConnect APIs. That's Phase 2. Informatica's Phase 3 deliverable is its most ambitious. It's a full-fledged "On Demand"-that is, SaaS-integration platform, says Chong, which will offer multi-tenant, hosted data integration services for a "wide variety" of (still mostly unnamed) SaaS and BPO vendors. The idea, says Ivan Chong, vice-president of business development , is that users can subscribe to Informatica's SaaS offering to integrate data across multiple outsourcing service providers and on-premises applications-without (of course) installing any software. Phase 3 general availability is slated for Q1 of 2007, Chong says. "This is designed as a general purpose platform that will be customizable, multi-tenanted; it will be available through our partners as an on demand integration platform powered by Informatica," he explains

Phase One-Connectivity to Leading SaaS Vendors
Phase Two-on-demand Data Integration Solutions
Phase Three-On-Demand Data Integration Platform

Sources: 1, 2

Prashanth Rai