I recently implemented an Informatica Lifecycle Management (ILM) project at a national auto financing company and I would like to share some details about what I learned about ILM and the benefits my client received.  ILM is a mature and robust data archiving tool used by many organizations to manage and archive large sets of data. ILM helps in the retirement and archiving of enterprise critical data in development, test, and production environments.

Every new application that organizations deploy not only increases the growth of enterprise data, but also leaves behind one or more legacy applications and related data. Without a comprehensive strategy, the costs associated with managing the data for large application portfolios and required infrastructure will burden IT budgets.

ILM puts organizations in complete control of their enterprise application data by defining performance and retention policies across your portfolio of mission-critical and legacy applications.

With Informatica Lifecycle Management organizations can:

• Reduce support costs to manage inactive data stored in application environments
• Achieve higher application performance with existing hardware
• Enforce data compliance by managing the entire lifecycle of data, from end to end
• Modernize and consolidate data centers by retiring legacy applications
• Implement archiving best practices across ERP, CRM, data warehouses, cloud and custom applications

ILM is a single data growth management product from Informatica, which enables organizations to archive structured data from enterprise applications, data warehouses, and big data environments into a tiered infrastructure. And it does so safely, securely, and easily—all while maintaining appropriate levels of business access.

Last week, Informatica hosted their annual world conference in Las Vegas, NV.  The title of the conference was “All Things Data”.  There were over 2,500 attendees at the conference, which included Informatica employees, partners, and clients.  There were four days of business and technical breakout sessions with a variety of topics from Big Data, Cloud, MDM, and client project use cases and best practices.  There were also many hands-on sessions about existing Informatica products and tools.  At the keynote general session CEO Sohaib Abbasi spoke of several new, exciting, and leading edge releases Informatica is introducing this coming year and their commitment to continue to be a leader in the data integration space.

Listed below are 5 releases mentioned at the conference:

• Powercenter – Dynamically updated mappings when a source changes
• Rev – Auto map business requirements to Informatica mappings
• MDM – Available on Hadoop
• Live Data Map – An enterprise metadata catalog
• Secure@source – Auto identify sensitive data

From the list above we can see that Informatica continues to make improvements in their core toolset like Powercenter, MDM, Big data, as well as adding new tools like Secure@source, Live Data Map, and the new data prep tool called Rev to help their clients in all types of data integration efforts.

During the conference Informatica also hosted 3 days of sales sessions where they gave their partners an opportunity to setup booths and market their offerings to existing Informatica customers.  The Perficient Informatica team talked with many existing and potential clients at the conference and during the sales sessions.  We talked about our current Informatica offerings and how we are partnering with Informatica in many different industries like Healthcare, Financial Services, and Retail.

We see real momentum happening between Perficient and Informatica and we look forward to a great year ahead.

Perficient’s Health Analytics Gateway with Informatica is a comprehensive solution that reduces the data integration process using Informatica PowerCenter, and automates the loading of transformed source data into the IBM Healthcare Data Model, which helps healthcare organizations more rapidly generate intelligent and actionable analytics. This innovative solution was developed to compress the long lead time to populate data into IBM’s Healthcare Data Model. This tool helps Healthcare organizations leverage the power of industry standard tools from IBM and Informatica to more rapidly build data warehouses and data marts that facilitate the creation of reliable information reporting and analytics. Easily accessible information helps healthcare organizations make better decisions for their patients and providers, improve financial performance, and reduce operational costs.

Benefits of the Perficient Health Analytics Gateway using Informatica:

– Reduces data integration time by more than 50%
– By leveraging pre-built target based mappings
– By leveraging pre-built Informatica PowerCenter components
– By engaging tool-based trained practitioners from Perficient
– Populates key subject areas in the IBM Healthcare Data Model like:
– Patient
– Practitioner
– Organization
– Location
– Enables a rich set of data for reporting and analytics
– By leveraging a dimensional based model
– By accessing clean and consistent data

Informatica, a leading data integration tool vendor, has empowered hundreds of healthcare organizations to better manage their data processing needs with tool functionality that includes:

• Data Profiling
• Data Quality Improvement
• Data Integration
• Master Data Management
• Data Governance

Perficient’s Health analytics Gateway is a robust and powerful package that brings together advanced data integration tools in an easy-to-use framework that can help healthcare organizations generate immediate results. Accelerating the integration of data from many different source systems allows healthcare organizations to extract, transform, load, and analyze data more rapidly and efficiently, and helps them achieve the goal of making better decisions faster.