Informatica Launches Marketplace for Integration, Cloud Professionals 
Informatica is taking a page from the SalesForce.com’s AppExchange and Apple’s iPhone app store with an online marketplace for data and cloud integration professionals. Informatica Marketplace provides a one-stop venue for information, videos, data maps, testing tools and downloadable software products from dozens of data integration, data quality and cloud-related providers.
Informatica Marketplace is taking a page from the SalesForce.com’s AppExchange and Apple’s iPhone app store. The site looks to provide customers a one-stop venue to review information, videos, data mapping and testing tools from dozens of third-party providers of data integration, data quality and cloud-based offerings. Visitors can also read customer comments and reviews of software packages, and purchase them.
The Informatica Marketplace, launched this summer, is the latest site aiming to provide allow users looking for data integration and cloud offerings a quick and fact-filled way to research, assess and even purchase those software and services.
Visit the Informatica Marketplace
“Customers want an easier way to locate and evaluate data integration solutions,” Tony Young Informatica CIO and co-creator of the Informatica Marketplace told Integration Developer News. “What makes the iPhone store or [SalesForce.com’s] AppExchange so compelling to users are the apps,” Young said. “We feel it’s now time for an app store for data integration and cloud professionals, moderated to make sure customers get what they’re looking for in a 1-stop destination.”
Young also said the Informatica Marketplace will “strengthen a broader ecosystems of partners” across many integration and cloud solution areas.
The Informatica Marketplace currently includes some 80 software and services offerings for data integration, data quality, mapping, EDI, MDM, complex event processing, cloud-based integration and other categories of interest to IT architects, as well as data and integration professionals.
“What makes the iPhone store or [SalesForce.com’s] AppExchange so compelling to users are the apps. We feel it’s now time for an app store for data integration and cloud professionals.”
Tony Young
CIO
Informatica
On the site, resources are called ‘blocks,’ and these can refer to any type of integration-focus asset (free or paid), including data mapping services and templates, cloud plug-ins, connectors, testing tools and even screenshots, educational whitepapers and videos.
Notably, Young said the Informatica Marketplace will be open to all solution providers, not just Informatica partners. “Our goal is to make this an open marketplace for our 100,000 customers to assess any solution they might find useful, even if from companies not currently our partner – or even competitors,” he said
By “moderated,” Young noted that products simply don’t get posted to the marketplace just to add to the list of offerings. “All listed [blocks] on Informatica Marketplace go through a 7-step review process,” Young said, where each candidate product is validated as high-quality and valuable to customers based on seven different criteria. Community members can also add their own comments and rating on all listed products, he added.
“Combining access to top products with comments and ratings from the community that verify these solutions work is a powerful tool for both our customers and partners,” Young added.
Early metrics are encouraging:
- In the first 90 days of launch, Informatica Marketplace reported 100,000+ unique visitors
- Visitors came from 109 different countries, with 60% coming from outside the US
- Most encouraging to project managers, 60% of the visitors return at least once per day, and 85% return at least once per week
Informatica Marketplace will leverage the company’s INFORM global partner program, which helps systems integrators, VARs and managed service providers in the cloud ecosystem engage around, implement and promote solutions that leverage Informatica Cloud. More than 30% Informatica's OEM partners in 2009 offered cloud-related solutions, according to the company.
