‘ Data is your best asset. Make it work faster, better… and cheaper’

 If you are in the Infotech business, would you rather concentrate on your core competence – or spend large chunks of your time and money, merely ‘ keeping the lights on’ -- maintaining status quo rather than surging ahead? IT is time to untangle the knot , and that means making your storehouse of data – your most valuable asset -- work, faster, better, at lower cost, says James Markarian, Senior Vice President, and head of the Data Integration Business Unit at Redwood City (CA)US- based Informatica.

Founded in 1993 by two Indians Gaurav Dhillon and  Diaz Nezamoney, ( they moved on, since) Informatica was quickly hailed as the ‘ next darling’ of Silicon Valley, by head honchos’ favourite bedside magazine, Forbes. This was because of Informatica’s canny offerings in an area it virtually carved out: Data Integration: accessing, integrating, and delivering data from any source, to any source. Using Informatica’s flagship PowerCenter platform, organizations were able to address a wide variety of integration projects through a “build once and deploy everywhere” approach.

In India on a brief visit this week, Markarian, spoke to IndiaTechOnline on Informaticas’s renewed India ‘connection’. He wears another hat as Informatica’s Chief Technology Officer and works closely with Sanjeev Kumar, Bangalore-based Vice President and Managing Director (R&D) of its India entity, Informatica Business Solutions, to put together the company’s next gen tools and solutions. That’s because, the Bangalore centre, they explained, is Informatica’s biggest brains trust outside of the US – and has contributed to virtually every offering, from PowerCenter, PowerExchange, Data Explorer and Data Transformation… to more recent Identity Resolution solutions that flowed into the company’s suite of offerings after the acquisition of Address Doctor.

And with Cloud Computing looming large in the growth map of many enterprises, Informatica has been telling them: We’ll help you straddle both, cloud and ground, in a manner that will insulate your customers from where a chunk of data or information lies. Informatica is unsurprisingly, the no. 1 data integration product for Salesforce.com, one of the the first among cloud computing players.

While major but un-named government and telecom players are numbered among Informatica’s Indian customers, ICICI is their biggest user in the banking and financial sector. Almost 60 percent of the company’s business comes from solution specialist partners – and who are the biggies amongst these? Well the Usual Suspects, TCS, Wipro, Infosys, we learnt.

For white papers on data integration and other educational collateral: www.informatica.com/knowledge_center/Pages/index.aspx