Informatica Transforms Middleware Role

With the new release, Informatica is transforming the middleware category by creating an enterprise data integration platform that comes with data quality tools, a data exchange capability, information lifecycle management tools, support for complex event processing and programming interfaces that can be used to integrate Informatica 9 with cloud computing services.

With this release, Informatica is trying to step up in terms of its ability to compete with IBM, Oracle and others by allowing customers to substantially cut middleware costs using a platform that not only consolidates various tools, but can now also dynamically process SQL requests in transit between applications using a set of Informatica data services that have been built into the platform using a service oriented architecture (SOA). In so doing, this approach allows IT organizations to essentially treat applications as containers of data, rather than places where software needs to process requests.

Here's a look at the interface:

This latter capability will prove critical, Informatica officials said, as companies discover an increased need for performance as business requirements for faster processing of more complex data integration tasks continue to increase. This capability will be especially important as businesses come to see middleware as set of tools for driving business processes across multiple stacks of applications, as opposed to a low-level transport for shipping data between applications, which then in turn process that data.

To facilitate that process, Informatica officials said it’s especially important to have a middleware platform that does not treat the data quality process as an event, but rather as an ongoing process by correlating various references to the same data that can be used to highlight anomalies and relationships in various sets of data.

Taken together, Informatica is positioning this latest release as the first in a new generation of middleware platforms designed specifically to automate the process of sharing information across business processes.