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Informatica World 2007 – On-Demand BI
Posted by Todd Funasaki in: Informatica On Demand > Integration
Informatica's annual user conference was held in Orlando, Florida last week. Several sessions highlighted our on-demand strategy. Sohaib Abbasi, Informatica's CEO, demonstrated the Informatica On Demand hosted data integration service during his keynote session. He also talked about our on-going strategy for on-demand data integration.
Girish Pancha, Informatica's EVP of Products discussed the company's long-term product roadmap. He showed the roadmap for our on-demand products and services and highlighted that fact that the on-demand delivery model allows us to deliver products in shorter release cycles.
James Markarian, Informatica's CTO, gave a very compelling keynote presentation about how macro-economic and societal trends affect the market for technology solutions. He gave a preview of how Informatica's products will leverage the innovation developed in on-demand services, including the ease of use aspects of the browser interface.
I moderated a panel discussion about on-demand business intelligence. The audience, consisting of implementation partners and Informatica users responsible for delivering enterprise data integration and data warehousing projects, came to catch a glimpse of their likely future and determine for themselves if the state of on-demand analytics is based more on BI or BS.
The panelists included Mike MacDonald, CEO of Visual Mining, David Weld, CEO of Seatab and Paul Doscher, CEO of Jaspersoft. The session included a lively discussion about how these CEO’s are using the SaaS model to deliver business intelligence solutions to their customers. Here are a couple of highlights:
1. On-Demand vs. On-premise: Complimentary, not Competitive
All three of the companies offer on-premise and on-demand versions of their platform. They also provide business intelligence solutions that allow their customers to analyze data that is created and managed in both on-premise and on-demand applications. Their customers are realizing the benefits of the on-demand model and they are responding with innovative solutions.
2. Business Intelligence Requires A Solid Data Integration Foundation
I started off the session by describing Informatica’s On Demand vision of delivering data integration services as a service. Mike Macdonald made the point (see diagram below) that VisualMining’s service needs a data integration platform like Informatica On Demand to deliver the data from the source systems to their platform.
