Informatica 8.5 - Product review from Bloor Research

In this industry viewpoint article by Philip Howard of Bloor Research, he explores Informatica 8.5 and takes a brief look under the bonnet.

Informatica has released version 8.5 of its software.

Note that I am being deliberately vague here and not referring specifically to, say, PowerCenter because all the different parts of Informatica’s product suite now have aligned versions so this also applies to PowerExchange (through which all connectivity is now branded), Informatica Data Quality (previously Similarity/Evoke) and the Complex Data Option (previously Itemfield).

For a point release there is a lot in 8.5 (more than 200 user requests have been implemented) so I can only highlight some of the main points here. 

Let me start with data quality. The first thing to note is that this can now leverage the Informatica parallel engine, with automated partitioning, so you should get much better performance and scalability when performing data quality tasks (and there have also been scalability enhancements to PowerCenter itself).

Secondly on the data quality front, there is now a specialised solution offered for SAP point of entry. The idea here is that you take data quality back to the point of data entry rather than treat it reactively at a later date. At present this has only been certified for names and addresses but the software is extensible to other master data types. It is also likely that Informatica will extend this to support Oracle environments in the future.

Two other major enhancements on the data quality front include an improved data quality dashboard for web based reporting and a new capability called the Data Quality Assistant. This is intended to enable an exception handling process and allow bad records to be reconciled from within the data quality environment whereas previously they had to be handled outside the system (for example, in a spreadsheet). Note that the interface for this has been built using AJAX and is completely browser based.

Next, Data Governance. More broadly there are a number of notable new features. The first is that if you use real-time change data capture then the software now supports guaranteed message delivery features.

Secondly, there is a new feature called masking. The problem that this has been designed to resolve is that you are not allowed to use real customer data for testing or for working with outsourcers, for example, because this would contravene data protection laws. What masking does is to provide multiple methods whereby the real data can be obscured or fake names can be used, or whatever, while preserving referential integrity and maintaining realistic looking data. Security capabilities in general have been enhanced in this release.

Also on the data governance side, Informatica has introduced extended data lineage capabilities in this release. Again, these are viewed via an AJAX based browser and there are built-in search capabilities with support for annotations and links and the ability to bring in information from other environments (such as a glossary).

While on the subject of glossaries, Informatica has started to introduce capabilities specifically for business analysts in this release (more can be expected in future releases) through the Informatica Metadata Manager, which provides cross-functional impact analysis back to source systems such as SAP.

Moreover, the data can be automatically profiled at the same time so that this profiling (which is specific to business analysts and therefore not as detailed as it would be for data quality purposes) can be displayed alongside the impact analysis. As with the data lineage capabilities there are annotation and search capabilities provided to enable collaboration.

And finally, Data Migration. There is a new package that has been introduced by Informatica in this release, specifically for data migration. Primarily this consists of the existing Informatica product suite plus its Velocity migration methodology but it does also include a specially designed interface to support business users in managing reference data such as valid values and cross references.

So, a brief look at some of the highlights of this release: for a point release this is impressive and I am particularly pleased to see the various new interfaces that have been provided, which extend the ease of use of the software, as well as the extended data governance features.

© Copyright Bloor Research, 2007
Author: Philip Howard
Published:21st November 2007