Informatica World 2014 Conference Notes
My conference notes and takeaways on an exciting week at Informatica World 2014
Last week, Informatica hosted Informatica World 2014 (#INFA14) in Las Vegas at the Cosmopolitan. Below are my key takeaways and general observations from the sessions I attended over the course of the conference.
While it was not explicitly stated in the keynotes, Informatica appears to be positioning itself as a real-time data intelligence company. This direction was reflected in the introduction of SpringBok and Vibe Data Stream.
Across the keynotes and breakout sessions, there was significant emphasis on enabling end users through self-service capabilities. This theme was reinforced during a special demonstration of SpringBok in the Day 2 keynote. A recurring sentiment throughout the conference was that IT is often perceived as too slow to meet business needs.
Several data points highlighted the cost of weak data strategy: a $157 per record privacy penalty, with the potential for those penalties to increase over time; approximately 50% of merger and acquisition synergies are IT-related, including data migration, systems of record, and data modeling; M&A data is critical for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, making master data a major use case; and companies now generate more unstructured data than ever before, while employees spend only about 12 minutes per day working in structured data applications.
I participated in a hands-on session for Vibe Data Stream (VDS). The live demo was not fully functional, so the product was discussed conceptually instead. VDS is designed for real-time streaming analytics and aims to reduce latency so business users can make decisions closer to real time. It reads unstructured data and streams it into RulePoint, another Informatica product used for visualization and alerts.
I also had the opportunity to have lunch with Eric Johnson, CIO of Informatica, and Kristin Kokie Deng, VP of Enterprise Strategic Services. We discussed IT challenges, the services each of us uses, and our respective experiences. We also discussed Informatica’s internal MDM implementation. Both Eric and Kristin were candid about the challenges they encountered, which I appreciated. They strongly emphasized the importance of people alignment before technology, including business alignment, data definitions, governance, and business process change.
I attended a Data Architecture session that focused heavily on self-service analytics and data aggregation. The session was well attended and included many experienced data professionals, but it also felt as though there was limited innovative thinking from the audience. Many attendees raised concerns about waterfall delivery models and the perception that IT was too slow to deliver. There were also repeated comments about the need to engage the business more directly and bring business stakeholders to the table earlier.
I also participated in a hands-on session for Data Integration Hub. This product had been acquired roughly a year earlier and is used to help Informatica customers reduce reliance on point-to-point ETL integrations. It operates somewhat like a JMS queue or topic, but persists data in a structured database rather than memory. According to the product manager, it is not the right choice for organizations seeking a real-time vision, as it was designed primarily to support large batch jobs from PowerCenter ETL.
Throughout the conference, I spoke with many Informatica customers, product managers, and partners. Informatica clearly has a highly committed customer base, but many of those customers continue to struggle with point-to-point integrations. One customer I spoke with over lunch described an environment with hundreds of point-to-point ETL integrations and a team of more than 30 people, including contractors and full-time employees, just to manage them. Many customers also expressed a desire to move toward real-time integration, but were uncertain how to do so, particularly given their significant investment in Informatica.
When I shared my company’s vision of an API self-service model, people were highly engaged and enthusiastic. Many expressed interest in adopting a similar approach within their own organizations. However, there was little discussion in the keynotes or breakout sessions about enterprise APIs. The overall focus appeared to be on real-time streaming analytics.
I also attended several MDM sessions where every panel expert reinforced the same core message: focus on people first and technology second. Business process socialization and governance were recurring themes. The speakers recommended identifying critical KPI metrics before implementation begins so that ROI can be measured effectively for business stakeholders. They also advised looking first at the business object layer to define terms such as “Ticket” or “Purchase Order,” rather than getting bogged down too early in field-level definitions. Above all, they stressed the importance of starting small and avoiding the temptation to solve everything at once.
Overall, it was an excellent conference with a highly engaged group of Informatica customers, partners, and employees. As the market continues to shift toward the Internet of Things (IoT), Informatica appears to be repositioning itself as a leader in real-time data intelligence. Given the breadth of its software portfolio and the loyalty of its customer base, the company is well-positioned to capitalize on that opportunity.