Informatica 9 enables an organisation to become a data-driven enterprise through the delivery of relevant, trustworthy and timely data. Informatica 9 is designed to be deployed on-premise or in the internet cloud.

"Building on our track record of relentless innovation and new breakthrough advances to overcome three formidable challenges, Informatica 9 enables organisations to gain the most business value from their information assets," said Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO, Informatica. "With unique capabilities for Business-IT collaboration, pervasive data quality and SOA-based data services, Informatica 9 helps deliver the most relevant, trustworthy and timely data."

Relevant Data through Business-IT Collaboration

Despite increasing investments in information technology, a significant number of IT projects fail to deliver business value by not providing the most relevant data. Informatica 9 facilitates better alignment between business departments and IT by empowering business users to be directly involved in the IT development process. New capabilities include:
• Browser-based analyst tools - Using a familiar browser-based user interface, analysts can directly specify their business requirements.
• Auto-generation of implementation details - With automatic generation of implementation details from business specifications, Informatica 9 helps ensure that little is lost in the translation from requirements to actual implementation.
• Common metadata repository - Leveraging a common metadata repository of all specification and implementation artifacts, business analysts and IT developers can communicate and share their work with each other.

"At Boston Scientific, we help clinicians improve patients' lives by delivering innovative medical technologies that lead the world in quality, reliability and efficacy," said Kristopher Anderson, Senior Software Developer, Boston Scientific. "We are excited about bout the capabilities of Informatica 9 as it enables IT and the business to share the responsibility for data quality and data governance, and increase confidence and trust in enterprise data."

Trustworthy Data through Pervasive Data Quality

Traditionally, IT has been solely responsible for all data quality initiatives. With Informatica 9, every stakeholder is empowered to ensure data quality for their own business purposes. Advances include:
• Support for nearly all data for all purposes - Data quality rules can be specified for nearly all data including customer, product, financial and asset data. These data quality rules are specified once and can be reused repeatedly, ensuring consistency across applications.
• Unified role-based tools - With role-based tools, all stakeholders can take ownership of their own data quality requirements that only they know best. Data quality scorecards, simple analyst tools and productive developer tools empower business users, business analysts, data stewards and IT developers to be directly involved in measuring and improving data quality.

"Informatica 9 allows our joint customers to implement data quality more pervasively in upstream operational systems, thus ensuring optimised, trusted data is available from Teradata to our customers broad scale Business Intelligence community," said Stephen Brobst, CTO, Teradata.

Timely Data through Open SOA-based Services

Within most enterprises, data is fragmented across multiple applications, each having its own structure and format. Growing adoption of cloud computing is further fragmenting data beyond the enterprise. With Informatica 9, business users are now assured that they will have timely data in the appropriate format while IT benefits from reduced system administration costs. New innovations include:
• Rich information catalog services - Informatica 9 enables users to rapidly discover relevant data, on-premise or in the internet cloud, using rich information catalog services that record the semantics and relationships between data elements.
• Logical data objects - Data discovery is further expedited with logical data objects that dramatically simplify the complexity of actual data representation.
• Multi-modal data provisioning services - With innovative multi-modal data provisioning services, data can be delivered in a variety of formats and using various protocols such as web services and SQL, without requiring any additional IT development work.
• Policy-based data services governance - Informatica 9 policy-based data services governance dramatically reduces the system administration costs as all these data rules are managed once centrally.

"Informatica 9's unique approach to SOA-based data services will enable a new set of data-driven solutions for our clients," said Srini Pallia, Senior VP & Global Head, Business Technology Services, Wipro Technologies. "This new product will help implement the necessary controls and deliver the long-desired value of an SOA architecture, maximising our customers ability to compete successfully based on data driven decisions."

Industry's Only Comprehensive, Unified and Open Data Integration Platform

More than a set of new products, Informatica 9 is the latest advance of the industry's first comprehensive, unified and open data integration platform.
• Only Informatica 9 combines advances in six technology categories: enterprise data integration, data quality, B2B data exchange, application information lifecycle management, complex event processing and cloud data integration. The comprehensive Informatica 9 platform uniquely automates every step in the data integration lifecycle.
• Informatica 9 is uniquely architected from the ground up for unification, with common shared services including an integrated profiler, common metadata, a universal catalog and data transformation services. The unified Informatica 9 platform reduces IT costs and improves productivity.
• Informatica 9 is open for customers to leverage nearly all data, on-premise or in the internet cloud.

"Effective enterprise information management is the key to surviving, even thriving, in this economy," said Carl Olofson, research vice president at IDC. "Combining data quality and data integration into a single platform and the delivery of multi-modal data provisioning, all with a single-user interface ensures that customers will be able to reduce risk and minimise costs, ultimately improving their business agility. That's the message of Informatica 9, and it is setting the course that the industry must follow."