Informatica’s Master Data Management Strategy

I recently spent a couple of days with the management of Informatica at the Rosewood Hotel in Palo Alto. The company sees a lot of potential in the notionally rather mature area of data integration, with hand-coding still the norm in many companies, especially in less developed markets such as China, Russia and Mexico.

I recently spent a couple of days with the management of Informatica at the Rosewood Hotel in Palo Alto. The company sees a lot of potential in the notionally rather mature area of data integration, with hand-coding still the norm in many companies, especially in less developed markets such as China, Russia and Mexico. In 2012 one third of the revenue was part of a broader deal, with the company claiming a doubling of customer logos. Informatica’s MDM offering is based on two acquisitions, Siperian and now Heiler. Siperian was also noted for its good scalability for customer data, and a recent customer win at HP illustrates that, the application dealing with 1.5 billion customer records, and handling 37,000 users.

The Heiler acquisition is still technically not complete (German securities rules in such things moves slowly) but it was evident that the Heiler staff were already working in concert with Informatica. Heiler itself grew 29% in 2012, showing a growth spurt in Q4 after the acquisition was announced. Informatica had for some time claimed that their MDM offering was multi-domain, but in reality most customer examples were based on customer data, and heavily skewed towards North America. The purchase of European PIM vendor Heiler gives more balance to this picture, and in time one would expect to see the separate MDM hubs sharing metadata etc. Informatica actually has a quite good story around managing multiple MDM hubs, but this is one that it has been quiet about, perhaps not perceiving much demand, yet its capabilities e.g. in data masking, are useful in such contexts and should enable it to do a better job than many in a federated environment. For multi-national companies managing a federation of MDM hubs will be the reality, but the MDM market has been in denial about this. To me there is an opportunity here for any vendor that can clearly articulate a federated vision.

Informatica has clearly embraced MDM as a core technology, and indeed this make sense given the higher growth rates in the MDM market than in its traditional integration market.