Informatica Simplifies Real-Time MDM for IT, Business Users 
Informatica Corp. is taking cost and complexity out of MDM-driven solutions with the launch of Business Data Components Library. The integrated master data management suite is designed to let business users create, consume, and manage master data for real-time views from within SalesForce.com, SAP, Oracle and other business applications they already use.
Informatica Corp. is taking cost and complexity out of MDM-driven solutions with the launch of Business Data Components Library. The integrated master data management suite offering allows business users to create, consume, and manage master data from within business applications they already use, such as SalesForce.com, SAP, Oracle and others.
Informatica’s Business Data Components Library lets business users access master data directly
from business apps, including SalesForce.com, SAP and Oracle
Informatica’s Business Data Components Library does not require business users to learn new applications. While within Salesforce.com, for example, Informatica Business Data Components Library lets users see related customer data from multiple systems, Ravi Shankar, Informatica’s Senior Director of Product Marketing told Integration Developer News.
“The conversation is changing,” Shankar said. “What customers really want is a focus on how to keep bad data out of their systems, and access that data more easily. They don’t want another tool just to clean it up once it’s in there,” Shankar told IDN. “In the past, adoption of MDM often included a lot of other stand-alone products required to get up-to-date reports, remove duplicate or dirty data, and to integrate data from different sources to get a more accurate view.”
Sometimes the complexity of MDM projects got in the way of providing business users quick results, he said. “With MDM, you often need data integration from host applications, and for data quality you’ll need data services out of the MDM hub back to the application,” Shankar said. Those types of solutions can be hard to integrate and implement properly, he added. Customers are asking for a suite approach that takes care of a lot of these technical integration issues, he added.
Informatica is removing much of the need for skilled IT and data. “We are going to market with a solutions-oriented approach, eliminating the cost and complexity many might associate with MDM projects,” Shankar said.
Informatica’s multi-domain system architecture looks at multiple data types, as well as data quality, and data integration for a single view of data, which can be provided quickly and simply – without the need for a lot of IT, MDM and data integration expertise. Before, this kind of single view and data integration would require MDM, data and data integration operations. “Now we can readily leverage the MDM directly from the end user application, and still proactively catch many dirty data issues,” he said.
Informatica’s Focus on Simplified, Pre-Integrated MDM
This change in the way customers think about MDM was a key driver for Informatica’s work on Business Data Components Library.
The pre-integrated solution, designed to bring together many critical elements for MDM success, includes master data stores, data quality and integration technologies. The suite approach reduces backend complexity, and also provides an MDM platform that can be easily integrated with existing business applications, which speeds launch and cuts learning curves for users, Shankar said. Informatica’s Business Data Components Library also leverages technology from Siperian, a leading MDM company Informatica acquired early in 2010, he added.
Customer demand for richer and easier MDM follows as companies are putting more value on their ability to access accurate and real-time views of their data across multiple systems, Shankar explained. “This is now critical to company operations, not simply for internal employees, but for dealing with partners and customers,” he said.
To illustrate the point, Shankar told IDN about a large wealth management firm that is using Informatica Business Data Components Library to support the ability of 16,000 financial advisors to access account data for more than 30 million clients. “Here MDM is core to what these advisors do every day, obtaining accurate and up-to-date customer information across many departments, and this illustrates the mission-critical nature of this access,” he said.
“What customers really want is a focus on how to keep bad data out of their systems, and access that data more easily.”
Ravi Shankar
Senior Director of
Product Marketing
Informatica Corp.
To achieve this, Informatica’s Business Data Components Library consistently coordinates data and records from multiple backend systems, eliminating duplicate data and updating the core record.
This means sales reps or customer reps can view detailed customer data views from directly within their CRM and SFA applications, without the need to launch a query from a separate data screen. “And all this is automatic. So, from within an application, such as SalesForce.com, we are able to render a hierarchical view of the customer and show all the details within the view of the SalesForce.com. The sales person does not even know the data is coming from the MDM system,” Shankar added.
With a related cloud-based offering, Informatica can also reduce the complexity of getting data into an MDM system. Business users can upload customer records or lead generation files, for example, using the Informatica Cloud services. Once loaded, Informatica’s MDM capabilities will catch duplicate or potentially duplicate records.
