Endeca and Informatica join forces in Informatica 9

Informatica, a data integration vendor, introduced their latest version, Informatica 9 this week, just on the heels of an announced partnership with enterprise search vendor Endeca. This partnership brings together business intelligence on the back end and Endeca search technology on the front end.

Hadley Reynolds, an IDC analyst, says this is a powerful combination for enterprise customers."Endeca is providing the front end--painting the glass and tailoring the user experience--for a search-driven application, as well as an internal architecture to bring together data and infrastructure required to populate the application. Informatica offers back end data integration and transformations."

Reynolds believes that these technologies--search and BI--coming together is a key development. "The most important trend in the search and BI markets today is the accelerating pace of their convergence," Reynolds said. "Business decision makers increasingly appreciate the advantages of being able to “see” structured transactional data and related unstructured content at the same time, on the same screen. This is the only way for them to get a grounded perspective on a decision – one based on being able to review all available information about a trend or problem or issue."

Reynolds likes Informatica's ability to get at data across the enterprise and, by combining with Endeca, it makes it even more powerful. "Informatica offers industry-leading capabilities in accessing data from across many transactional systems," Reynolds said. SAP’s Xcelsius visualization software (another recent partnership announcement by Endeca) offers industry-leading visualizations for dashboarding and decision portals. Integrating these two toolsets for accessing and presenting data tightly into the Endeca application development environment helps Endeca customers to leapfrog two of the most expensive and time-consuming hurdles they face in developing integrated search/BI (i.e. search-driven) applications.

Business Intelligence is not a subject we discuss here as much as we probably should, but it provides a way to get at structured data and display it in a fashion that makes it usable. Content Management, search and BI all play a role in managing and accessing content. Combining two of these technologies should make it easier to access this data in the enterprise.

For more information:
- see the Informatica press release

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