Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Sybase Tag-Teams with Informatica

"Sybase, Inc. (NASDAQ: SYBS) and Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA) announced a worldwide OEM agreement in which Sybase will resell Informatica PowerMart� data-integration software with Sybase Industry Warehouse Studio�, an integrated set of analytic applications, data models and tools for building and managing enterprise business intelligence solutions, and Adaptive Server IQ� with Multiplex, a high-performance database for business intelligence.

As part of the agreement, Sybase also gains the right to globally resell other products from Informatica's family of data-integration software products. The agreement is designed to provide Sybase customers with a comprehensive analytic solution to meet their enterprise business intelligence needs.

Sybase Industry Warehouse Studio is a comprehensive business intelligence solution composed of industry-leading architectural products in five areas: data modeling, administration, management, integration, and visualization/analysis. Sybase will embed Informatica PowerMart as the data-integration component of its Industry Warehouse Studio solutions. Sybase will also resell Informatica PowerMart as the preferred data-integration solution for Adaptive Server IQ with Multiplex.

"Sybase has chosen to OEM Informatica's data-integration technology because of its proven ability to consolidate data from across the enterprise, including sources such as the Web, ERP systems, RDBMS and mainframes. Informatica's proven scalability and rapid time to implementation were also key factors in our selection," said Eric Miles, vice president and general manager, Sybase Business Intelligence Division. "By making Informatica available as part of Sybase Business Intelligence solutions, our customers can benefit from even stronger, more robust solutions for achieving business intelligence."

"By bringing together the leading technology providers and system integrators to create a comprehensive business intelligence offering, Sybase is helping large organizations take a major step toward transforming themselves into intelligent enterprises," said Diaz Nesamoney, president of Informatica. "We're pleased to enter into this alliance with Sybase, which is an important validation of Informatica's technology and the proven success of our customer base."

Informatica PowerMart is an integrated software suite for deploying and managing line-of-business data marts. PowerMart delivers an open, scalable solution that is able to source large volumes of fast-changing data from multiple platforms, handle complex transformations, and support high-speed data loads. The integrated Sybase and Informatica products will be available from Sybase in the second quarter of 2000."

Sybase is continuing its quest to improve its market position by imbedding PowerMart into its application solutions. In recent years, Sybase has failed to regain its previously strong position in the database server market, so it has attempted to reposition itself in vertical applications. Informatica has a strong presence in data integration, and should provide Sybase with an improved market positioning, however, the integration between the two products will have to be seamless, or this will result in nothing more than a marketing alliance.

Customers evaluating business intelligence solutions should include Sybase/Informatica on a long list of candidates. If Sybase is successful in completely integrating the five product areas they discuss, comprised of data modeling, data administration, data management, data integration, and visualization & analysis of that data, this product suite could provide close to an end-to-end solution.

One additional component that should be discussed with Sybase is integrated data cleansing, which would help to round out the solution.

Another issue that is not discussed in the vendor's press release is the level of metadata integration, which needs to be extremely tight in order to allow for bi-directional replication. Informatica's MX2 application programming interface (API) strategy, which provides "plug-in" capabilities to other products, will likely be used to satisfy this part of the solution.

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