Upping the ante for data platforms?

The new 9.6 platform, with fully integrated agile development, delivers business value up to five times more quickly than competing or traditional approaches.

“With data volumes and complexity soaring, and bad data costing hundreds of billions of dollars annually, enterprises need as comprehensive an integration platform as possible for effective data management,” said Anil Chakravarthy, executive vice president and chief product officer, Informatica.” Today, Informatica delivers ‘great data’ for individuals and organizations. This great data is a true differentiator because customers can gain a competitive advantage when they can find, clean and transform data to fit their business needs. The most complete platform available, only Informatica 9.6 delivers data at any scale – from departmental to enterprise and from transactional to big data – while accelerating many data integration projects by a factor of five.”

New Packages Eliminate Data Accidents Through Profiling and Monitoring
The Informatica Platform navigates data projects, ranging from modest departmental projects to the largest of multi-node cluster Hadoop projects. It delivers great data by bringing together people, technology and process. Informatica 9.6 offers three new platform packages – including new versions of PowerCenter Standard and PowerCenter Advanced, and a new PowerCenter Premium Edition – plus a new, free trial of the Informatica PowerCenter Big Data Edition. These are the industry’s first to feature:
· Built-in business-IT collaboration functionality that ensures design fidelity.
· Built-in profiling and rapid prototyping that provides the ability to develop quickly and deploy anywhere.
· Advanced scaling, metadata management and monitoring capabilities that gives operational confidence.
· State-of-the-art data stewardship, data validation and proactive monitoring that produces safe data.

· The Vibe Virtual Data Machine architecture that makes risk-free big data integration experimentation possible. Design now. Scale as you grow.
“Clean, safe and connected data is neither a large data nor a large enterprise luxury,” Chakravarthy said. “It is an every-enterprise imperative. We’ve built rapid prototyping and basic profiling into our platform. In today’s data world, these capabilities are not a luxury, they’re a necessity.”

Clean, Safe and Connected Data in Hybrid IT Environments
The Informatica Platform harnesses both the power and the simplicity of the cloud. Today, about 2,000 companies, representing more than two billion records per day, run their business on Informatica Cloud. New Informatica Cloud capabilities include:
· Informatica Cloud Designer, which marries the simplicity of wizard-based mappings with the flexibility of advanced mapping capabilities.
· Informatica Cloud Test Data Management that gives application administrators the ability to create secure test data subsets for development activities.

Built On or Built In. Easy-to-Consume, Fast-to-Develop.
The new set of toolkits and trial editions take the Informatica Platform throughout the development community. New offerings include:
· Informatica Software Developer Toolkit simplifying the development of custom data integration connectors using Eclipse-based authoring, configuration and publishing to the Informatica Marketplace.
· Informatica Vibe Starter Kit to jumpstart a hybrid data landscape, including:
o Easy-to-use software services for synching, replicating, masking, sub-setting and validating data.
o Vibe framework for developing and managing configurable integration patterns.
o Online training for two employees and a one-day optimization workshop.