Notes from the 2013 Informatica Analysts Conference
On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, I attended the 2013 Informatica Analysts Conference in Menlo Park, CA. It was a beautiful venue, and very well conducted and organized. On top of that, I learned a lot about Informatica’s product lineup and strategy for 2013.
Last year – 2012 – was an exciting year for Informatica’s MDM business. Most customers are now mastering multiple domains. Informatica won more than 75% of deals against its Tier 1 competitors. And, customers are now leveraging the Informatica Virtual Data Machine in a majority of MDM deals.
Informatica doubled its customer reference base and established the Informatica MDM Customer Success team.
There were a lot of impressive customer wins – ranging from very large companies to medium-sized companies. Many new industries – telecommunications, construction, and entertainment – were represented. And Informatica focused on delivering more value to existing accounts.
One positive outcome was a global MDM product advisory council held at a French customer, which highlighted how to treat a company’s best customers better through master data management. For example, this makes it possible to drive special offers by customer segment. The French customer showed its people running a custom Apple iPad app that connects to the Informatica MDM “back end”. And customers were helping each other and sharing their experiences at the product advisory council.
Informatica acquired a company called DataScout, which is now called Informatica Cloud MDM. Informatica now has truly hybrid customers using Cloud MDM with Informatica Multidomain MDM (referring to the combination as Universal MDM).
Informatica also announced its intent to acquire Heiler, a prominent product information management (PIM) vendor. Heiler is a German public company, so the acquisition takes 6-9 months and won’t be done until late 2013. Heiler grew most rapidly after the acquisition was announced. Heiler is most prominent in the retail, distribution and manufacturing industries.
Informatica had a noteworthy win at a major consumer electronics company. It was a highly competitive situation, dealing with a very large record count (1.5 billion records, including 300 million D&B records). The client ultimately selected INFA for three reasons. The company successfully completed a stringent proof-of-concept process, with 13 of 13 use cases in 1-2 weeks. Secondly, MDM is a big part of the customer’s overall strategic IT transformation, with only a 3-month implementation period. Lastly, Informatica provided connectivity to salesforce.com in the cloud.
Informatica launched MDM 9.5.1 late last year, with social media support, mobile client support, big data matching, effective date support, unified data stewardship, and other new features.
The company also introduced Informatica Cloud MDM “Winter 2013”, with multi-dimensional hierarchy support, drag and drop hierarchy management, and enhanced matching. This is built on the Force.com platform, so it runs natively on the cloud. The product sets itself up automatically within Salesforce.com. There aren’t a lot of other choices in the Salesforce.com AppExchange for MDM (besides Informatica Cloud MDM).
Here are some trends Informatica highlighted in the market place:
- More than half of the Informatica MDM “go lives” were multiple domains in 2012
- There was a significant increase in high volume, real time, transactional MDM use cases
- Rapid time-to-value and adaptability are key requirements
- Cloud applications like Salesforce.com, WorkDay and NetSuite, plus mobile apps, are leading to application migrations and hybrid application landscapes
- Customers are looking to vendors to provide technology, solutions and expertise
- Universal MDM, as Informatica calls it, is able to cover both business and IT needs.
As MDM is becoming more pervasively used in the enterprise, customers are asking Informatica to plug into all of their various MDM solutions and make sense of them, while co-existing with them. Informatica calls this “Universal MDM”.
Informatica now has the former Siperian MDM hub, plus soon the Heiler Product Information Management system, and the Data Scout “Cloud MDM” system. Because of the Informatica Multidomain MDM hub, you can bring those other domains in and create relationships across domains.
Informatica and Heiler are still operating as two separate companies, but they are partnering well. With its acquisition of Active Endpoints, Informatica can add process automation to its MDM applications – it will be selling more MDM applications this year.
There is a lot of product innovation coming from Informatica, driven by themes such as the Cloud, Social, Mobile, Big Data, core MDM and solutions. Based on what I saw at Informatica Analyst Conference 2013, I expect strong growth, competitive strength and customer success in 2013 and beyond.
Hub Designs Magazine published an article in Nov ’12 on INFA MDM Release 9.5, to read this article by Julie Hunt, please click here.)
Hub Designs Magazine 