Informatica Debuts Cloud Computing Integration Tools
For Informatica's channel partners and systems integration allies, the new Cloud 9 toolset offers a means of building customized data integration software for customers and assembling data integration links that can be reused in multiple deployments, said Darren Cunningham, senior marketing director for Informatica's on-demand products.
As more businesses adopt Software-as-a-Service applications and other cloud computing technologies, they find themselves wrestling with the problem of how to link those applications with their existing IT systems. Informatica, a longtime player in the data integration arena, is a natural to fill that role, company executives argue. A number of younger companies are also jumping into the on-demand data integration space, including Boomi and Cast Iron.
Informatica Cloud 9 includes a multitenant, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) data integration system that developers and systems integrator partners can use to build and reuse custom data integration services and run them in the cloud, according to the company. Business users can configure data rules or run data mappings built by IT using Informatica Cloud Services for data integration.
Cloud 9 incorporates Informatica's Cloud Services Winter '09 release of purpose-built Software-as-a-Service data integration applications for nontechnical users. It also provides Address Quality Cloud services based on technology Informatica acquired when it bought AddressDoctor in June. A new sandbox feature includes data synchronization and replication capabilities for software development and testing projects.
The package also includes new and expanded offerings through Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service. The new Informatica Data Quality Cloud Edition, which runs on Amazon EC2, offers data quality services such as profiling, cleansing and matching. Informatica Cloud 9 also supports the recently released Amazon Relational Database Service.
Earlier this month Informatica unveiled Informatica 9, a new release of its core data integration software that's the foundation for the new cloud computing offering.
The Informatica Cloud Platform is currently available as a beta with the final release scheduled for December priced at $1,000 per month. The Data Quality Cloud Edition is available on Amazon EC2 as a beta with the production release set for next year's first quarter. The Informatica Address Quality Cloud services are available today with pricing based on transaction volumes.