The adoption of SaaS as a solution’s approach and a business model has been driven by one of these waves of disruption. While the wave took hold first in the small business market and then fairly quickly moved to the mid-market we’re seeing a definite acceptance by the ‘fast followers’ in many leading large business Enterprises.

Which brings us to the topic of Data Integration. What made mainframes and, for the most part, minicomputers work was the fact that the applications and their data were generally all centralized. Workgroup computing broke that model, as evidenced by the proliferation of emailing of Gigabytes of MS Excel file attachments and various other shared documents. With the groundswell move to SaaS and the success of companies like salesforce.com, RightNow and Taleo we’re seeing data returning to a centralized repository again. However, since not all business applications are hosted and not all of those that are reside in the same data center, SaaS applications have the annoying habit of creating a significant Data Integration challenge for IT managers – that being how to integrate data outside the firewall with the rest of the business applications. That’s one of many key SaaS Data Integration challenges that we’ll be writing about over the next few weeks. We hope you find this forum useful and the content meaningful and helpful. Let us know what you think.

Also, be sure to stop by the Informatica booth (#814) for more live On Demand demos and your chance to win a Nintendo Wii!

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.

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It's clear that IT departments are increasingly under pressure to reduce costs. A large percentage of IT budget goes to operations and maintenance of hardware, software, and infrastructure. As the cost of supporting infrastructure increases faster than the overall IT budget there is less money to spend on new applications and features.

I agree with the statement in the article about businesses wanting access to applications wherever they are located. Enlightened IT departments will embrace SaaS because it allows them to spend less time and money on IT infrastructure support and more time and money on value-add business services. They will also welcome data and business process integration, allowing their companies to gain a strategic advantage from their data, regardless of whether it resides inside or outside their firewall.

By adopting SaaS, customers are finding new challenges to making the most of their data. It’s up to the software vendors to understand those challenges and make the solutions attractive, affordable, and credible.

In my presentation I made some recommendations about how SaaS providers can provide superior integration capabilities that will accelerate the adoption of SaaS.

• Expose workflow and events in their API's that allow customers to link business processes across multiple applications and platforms
• Provide the ability for users to access data that is created and managed in other applications, in both batch and real-time modes
• Publish events and provide call-outs to support data quality extensions
• Provide robust and complete API's that can be used for data migration, real-time workflow and process integration, and on-going synchronization
• Solve the "firewall problem"

I ended my presentation with a brief discussion about Informatica's strategy for on-demand data integration, including a brief discussion about how we have solved the "firewall problem" with the Informatica Secure Agent. It's clear that companies want to use a combination of on-premise and on-demand applications. Secure data integration through the firewall will be an important enabler for the continued growth of SaaS.

Last fall we released the PowerCenter Connect for Salesforce.com. This allows large enterprises that have complex requirements to use PowerCenter, our data integration platform, to integrate Salesforce.com with their systems that run inside their firewall. For me, having spent four years in the on-demand space seeking the ideal enterprise integration tool, it's great to see so many large companies using our first product.

We also announced our Service Provider Partner Program, SP3. Service providers, including on-demand and business process outsourcers, now have the ability to use PowerCenter to provide data integration services to their customers.

Mid-market companies are perhaps the most active users of on-demand services. They have business challenges that require enterprise-class software applications. But they don't have the wherewithal to manage complex IT projects. Informatica On Demand, our on-demand data integration service, is our newest offering for mid-market companies.

Our first service, the Informatica On Demand Data Replicator, allows Salesforce.com customers to replicate their data from Salesforce.com to a database that runs inside their firewall. This service showcases our integration as a service philosophy:

• Customers can sign up for a free trial using a browser and be up and running in less than an hour.
• The service runs in our secure, multi-tenant facility.


• Informatica manages the infrastructure. Customers don't need to worry about upgrades or complex hardware and software installations.


• The Informatica Secure Agent provides secure, encrypted data transport through firewalls.

We look forward to hearing your feedback about Informatica On Demand.

April 17-18, 2007

Santa Clara Convention Center

Santa Clara, California