At its world customer and partner event held in Las Vegas, information asset management specialist Informatica has launched a new software platform for data integration, intended to allow businesses to outsource business processes easier.
“Informatica 8.6 allows organisations to not only trade data faster but ensure the data remains of the highest quality,” said Ashutosh Kulkarni, Informatica product and marketing director.
Informatica said a new version of B2B Data Exchange will ease the process of ensuring data consistency. Informatica’s B2B Exchange is a family of products aimed at optimising business relationships with trading partners. It will now contain support for all programme formats, both for unstructured data, such as Microsoft Excel and Word, as well as semi-structured industry specific standards like SWIFT for financial services and HIPAA for healthcare.
Upgrades to Informatica’s data integration software foundation platform were also announced. PowerCenter 8.6 will contain new real time capabilities which allow information to be derived from data as soon as it becomes available. “Users need to think about how they can keep their data synchronised; they need to be able to integrate their data in batches or in real time,” explained Kulkarni. “Although we used to sell this as an option, the new edition of PowerCenter is now a single package for all your operational and analytical needs,” he told conference attendees.
Users will also be able to monitor capture changes in data sources as they happen for processing with a feature called Streaming Changed Data Capture. “It will improve business performance by enabling more timely business decisions,” Kulkarni added.
Another option - PowerCenter Data Masking - which allows users to set e ncryption options to protect sensitive information. While enhanced orchestration and human workflow facilities will allows users more control over data integration processes. “Users can access a friendly graphical environment in order to define a process and assign human activity tasks to ensure events wait for human action to kick off a set of alternatives,” said Kulkarni.
Additionally, an enhanced PowerCenter Pushdown Optimisation option will allow users to increase system performance, and added security functions will “ensure easier management of privileges across all PowerCenter tools through one single frame-work, so users know exactly which group is running a particular workflow,” Kulkarni explained.
New tools were also announced for the PowerCenter Standard Edition. Of most significance was the Mapping Architect for Excel, which simplifies the mapping process for business analysts by allowing them to use standard Excel templates to define specifications for IT developers.
“Currently business analysts have to put mapping rules into a spreadsheet and hand it to their developer team, who often do not understand the intention of most of the rules, to code,” began Kulkarni, explaining this leads to a lot of wasted time and budget. “The new Excel based tool allows an analyst to enter rules and automatically generate mappings,” he added.
Informatica 8.6 will also contain a new version of its Data Quality product, enhanced with identity resolution capabilities from its recently acquired Identity Systems. The capabilities allow customers to cleanse and standardize customer data in real time.
Informatica’s Data Quality software is targeted at users such as business analysts and data stewards who need to analyse and monitor customer data.
“Data Quality 8.6 will allow users to generate a single view of a customer very simply. Users will no longer have to match different customer details, such as their addresses or birth dates, to find out which customers have had been duplicated,” said Ivan Chong, manager of Informatica’s Data Integration Business Unit. The Identity Resolution technology can perform cross-language searching and matching capabilities for more than 60 languages.
In addition, users will be given more knowledge on what data quality rules have been applied to the cleansing of certain data because Informatica Data Quality will now run on the PowerCenter engine.
