Tony Young, Chief Information Officer of Informatica recently visited Middle East. In this exclusive interview with Faiz Askari, Head Online & Features, Network Magazine Middle East, he talks about enterprise data management needs.
How do you see the financial slow down affecting the market, how are you looking at this situation? Is it affecting your business at all?
The financial crisis is, no doubt, becoming a big problem for many financial organizations in the west and it has started showing its effect in other geographies as well. But, we as a technology vendor, are looking at this from the customer’s perspective – a need to do more with less.
So we see a big opportunity in providing solutions that can deliver optimized results for customers. In this way, we are helping customers in enhancing their profitability.
What are the critical elements that one should always look at, while opting for data management strategy?
While integrating various enterprise applications, it becomes very critical to consider the interface management.
Let’s say an IT organization has been charged with creating and maintaining an enterprise-wide system of record for customer data, product data, supplier/vendor data, or a combination. An IT head is looking to implement a master data management (MDM) application. Whether you’re implementing an off-the-shelf MDM application from a vendor or building one of your own, you face the same challenge—the data itself.
According to you how is the market dynamics changing in the context of data management?
These days, market trend has shifted towards data. Customers are now more inclined towards data quality. There is more emphasis on data than on applications, which was the case in the past. This has led to more customers looking at the data sensitivity from the business perspective. This has given birth to higher investments on data governance, data integration, data quality and data cleansing.
What approach does Informatica take to manage enterprise data?
The Informatica platform provides the technology foundation for MDM projects. Our single enterprise data integration platform helps your IT organization access, discover, cleanse, and integrate master data from a large variety of systems and deliver that information to your MDM applications.
Business systems may have complex interfaces. Accessing, extracting, and loading master data from these systems can be prone to errors and time consuming.
The Informatica platform supplies unparalleled access to a variety of enterprise systems, including packaged applications, mainframes, enterprise application integration tools, and databases. These capabilities enable your MDM application to integrate easily with the rest of the enterprise.
What does data cleansing offers to an enterprise data management console?
It’s a generic perception that master data is often of questionable or poor quality, it needs to be corrected and cleansed before it’s integrated with enterprise MDM’s application.
The Informatica platform provides data cleansing and matching capabilities that help the IT manager to deliver high-quality data to his MDM application. With this, the data administrator can also reuse and extend the data quality rules that he establish in the initial MDM implementation to improve master data quality on an ongoing basis. Most importantly, he can measure and monitor data quality, ensuring that master data meets quality thresholds and aligns with the needs of the business.
