Informatica brings data integration to cloud via Amazon EC2

Informatica one of the last of the standalone data integration software vendors, is bringing its on-premise enterprise software to Amazon.com's hosted service EC2.

PowerCenter Cloud Edition will have all of the features of version 8.6 of its standard flagship PowerCenter suite, said Girish Pancha, executive vice president and general manager of data integration.

Users will be able to buy the service, now in beta and due for release in September, via a standard license or via an hourly price of $24.95 an hour.

The service is aimed at data integration developers who are increasingly hosting data on Amazon.com's S3 data storage service, Pancha said. It may also help Informatica, which tends to sell to enterprises with large data integration needs, win smaller customers.

“We are not worried about cannibalization,” he said.

Informatica fills a hole in the enterprise software lineup available on EC2, which is loaded with databases and data processing apps such as Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server, and Hadoop, and application servers such as IBM WebSphere, JBoss and Oracle's WebLogic, but lacked any data integration or ETL (extract, transfer and load) tools.

“We believe that we are the first to offer data integration in the cloud,” Pancha said. “This is green field for us. Over time, others will follow us. Ultimately, it will be our traditional competitors.”

Informatica already had a SaaS offering called Informatica-on-Demand. This is aimed at business users rather than developers, Pancha said, and was mostly used to integrate cloud-based data back into an on-premises data repository.

Informatica announced the cloud service last Thursday, the same day that Oracle said it would buy data integration vendor, GoldenGate Software.

Informatica, which has been the subject of Oracle takeover rumors before, relies heavily on customers using both its apps and Oracle's, acknowledged Informatica CEO Sohaib Abbasi during a conference call with Wall Street analysts last Thursday.

Abbasi said Oracle's full-fledged entry into the data integration market via GoldenGate won't hurt Informatica's business, and that the two companies will continue to “partner very strongly.”

“In the past five years, we have not competed against GoldenGate. And the reason for it is that we provide distinctly different technologies. The best way to characterize GoldenGate technology would be for data movement applications and that's why they are used primarily for high availability,” Abbasi said. “The competitive landscape has not changed much over the years. I expect that we will continue to enjoy as strong a partnership with Oracle as we do with HP and SAP and Microsoft.”

Abbasi also said that the upcoming version 9 of PowerCenter will offer more features to attract business users, rather than IT users such as data integration developers.