Informatica Gets SaaS-y With Salesforce.com - Software Development Times On The Web

Informatica Gets SaaS-y With Salesforce.com
Company’s road map for integration shows on-ramp toward software-as-a-service
By Alex Handy

June 15, 2006 — Informatica is banking on a future built around the integration of external software-as-a-service offerings and internal enterprise systems. At its Informatica World conference in San Francisco in late May, the company unveiled its road map that began with the integration of Salesforce.com with its Informatica PowerCenter integration platform.

Ashutosh Kulkarni, principal product manager at Informatica, said that the integration will save companies a great deal of time uploading, replicating and backing up the information contained within their Salesforce.com accounts, and that Informatica’s new software will allow these actions to be performed automatically.

Kulkarni described how future updates to the PowerCenter platform will change this server-based, packaged solution into software as a service (SaaS). In phase two of PowerCenter’s evolution, enterprise integration with other SaaS offerings, akin to Salesforce.com’s, will be available without the need of internally installed software, he said.

“Phase three takes that technology and, using technology-like template-based generation, [will] target a broader range of partners,” said Kulkarni. “ADP and HP want to be able to provide these integration services to their end users.” That portion of PowerCenter’s evolution, will come about in 2007, he said.

HOW IT’S DIFFERENT
Kulkarni differentiated his company’s integration service from that of its competitor, Grand Central Communications. “Grand Central has a slightly different model. They provide a hosted service that end users access directly. You subscribe to a Grand Central service to do traditional B-to-B integration.” Informatica’s integration service will be available through the SaaS providers, and not independently, said Kulkarni.

“What we are really offering is data integration, which we believe makes more sense when delivered in the context of a larger application. We started on this path because we heard the first thing you need to do when you go to Salesforce.com is to migrate all your data to Salesforce.com, then you need to back it up, then you need to synchronize it. We are working very closely with partners,, and we go to market through these partners,” he said.

Kulkarni said that the move toward offering PowerCenter as a service is the logical next step. He pointed out how Salesforce.com and other services like it have proven that the SaaS model offers benefits and opportunities, such as limiting the need for regression tests and on-site backups, that cannot be matched by boxed software.

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