If you define yourself as "the data integration company," as Informatica has, you'd better be prepared to morph along with the category and customer expectations. With Informatica 9, a major new release announced recently, the vendor is stating that it's staying ahead of the technology curve with new collaboration, data quality and services-oriented architecture (SOA) capabilities. But for a release described as "the most important in the company's history," Informatica 9 doesn't press all the hot buttons in the data management market, demonstrating once again the company's habit of holding its cards close to the vest. 
 
To better support business-IT collaboration, Informatica 9 introduces new browser-based analyst tools, auto-specification capabilities and a common metadata repository that lets analyst and developers share specifications and implementation assets. The idea is to eliminate the delays and miscommunications inherent in data integration projects when business and IT project leaders attempt to communicate though e-mail messages, spreadsheets and meetings.
 
"Informatica 9 helps business managers, analysts and IT to work together more effectively through shared metadata," says Judy Ko, Informatica's VP of product marketing. "The tools are designed and purpose-built for each type of user, but they share common data rules and data profiles, so there's no loss of information as they work together on integration projects."
 
To make data quality a "pervasive" endeavor, Informatica 9 taps the new collaboration capabilities to deliver browser-based tools that empower people outside of IT to play a role in data quality assurance. Here again, business managers, businesses analysts and IT types get their own, role-based data quality scorecards and tools that let them measure and proactively manage data quality.
 
Informatica is not alone in developing data stewardship, data quality and data profiling tools for people outside of IT, but most vendors have a long way to go to make data quality a core business competency, says Forrester data integration analyst Rob Karel.

"What all of these vendors are missing is that data governance is not a technology problem," Karel says, pointing to the need for supporting business processes. "Informatica has done a good job with this release, but if they truly want to create a collaborative workflow across business and IT, they'll have to go beyond sharing views and add approval workflows, escalation and other process capabilities."

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The goal with Informatica 9's new data services capabilities is to support timely delivery of trusted data, filling a gap that SOA middleware players have left wide open, according to Informatica.
 
"A lot of the existing SOA approaches have not paid enough attention to the data," says Ko. "The capabilities we're delivering in Informatica 9 are squarely focused on data services capabilities that have been a missing link and a cause of failure in a lot of SOA projects."
 
The new SOA tools include catalog services that support rapid discovery of data sources, be they on-premise or in the cloud. New Multi-modal data provisioning services provide a data abstraction layer that eliminates custom coding by providing out-of-the-box data delivery formats and protocol options—from SQL to Web services. Policy-based services governance lets you declare and centrally manage data rules, assuring compliance with reduced system administration cost.
 
Aspects of these service discovery, delivery and governance capabilities would seem to duplicate SOA middleware. But Karel agrees that the SOA world in general has not paid enough attention to data.
 
"It's not just the SOA vendors, but architects and practitioners that are building out SOA projects aren't really accepting responsibility for the data management infrastructure to make sure data services are delivering trusted information," he says. "If SOA is to deliver on its promise, it needs to have more effective integration with the data management layer."
 
Despite the advances in Informatica 9, the vendor appears to be holding back in the area of Master Data Management (MDM), where many observers have long expected an acquisition of a specialized MDM partner, such as Siperian or Initiate Systems. It may be that the vendor is wary of provoking Oracle, which licenses Informatica data quality technology as part of its MDM offerings. But rumor has it that Oracle will end its supply agreement with Informatica.

"If Oracle were to drop the OEM relationship, it's very likely that Informatica would then feel very comfortable making an MDM acquisition and competing directly with Oracle," Karel says.
 
As the largest independent vendor remaining in the information integration arena, it has served Informatica well to be cautious, as its continued growth and financial success suggests. But on at least one front, that of MDM, the guarded approach has given customers reason to consider options available from rivals as well as partners. Even upstart open-source vendors like Talend are now pursuing MDM, so the time for caution may have passed.