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Information management is important to every line of business that seeks to improve its business processes and decision-making. In response to pressure from those departments, CIOs and IT organizations must examine whether they have focused enough on the I for information and not just the T for technology, and if they have not, 
commit to taking this responsibility more seriously than in the past. Informatica is one vendor that realizes the potential of its information beyond just data integration, and this is reflected in its expanded product portfolio and position in the market over the last several years. Our firm has taken note of companies gaining value from using Informatica; we awarded our 2013 CIO Leadership Award to George Brenckle of UMass Memorial Health Care for his work to maximize the value of information assets through managing data innovatively. Informatica itself has enhanced its position by introducing its new brand and a new CMO and demonstrating commitment to change from its executive leadership team at the company’s recent 2013 user conference. The focus of the brand now is on helping business and IT find the full value of their information.
The Informatica name is well-known in the corridors of IT, associated with addressing the need to make data accessible and integrated anywhere. The vendor has been advancing steadily for some time. We rated it Hot in our 2012 Value Index for Data Integration, and I recently assessed its efforts at our 2013 analyst summit. Established in data integration, Informatica is now focusing on the efficient management of information assets. This is not easy for most organizations, which have data spread across applications and systems; for two-thirds of organizations, according to our research as shown in the chart, this is a barrier to managing information.
The first step for the newly positioned company was to incorporate its technology into a virtual data machine (VDM) called Vibe that will make it easier to operate on any platform at any time. This approach unifies Informatica’s transformation library, optimizer, executor and connectors, which will help Informatica deploy any type of data and integration techniques on just about any platform a customer uses. Virtualizing the operations of its technology to isolate them from the platform on which it runs is a design Informatica has used before, but now the techniques and the execution of virtualization are fully realized. Opting to build integrations and deploy to any platform without the need to know the particulars of a system or technology is a wise decision for Informatica. When using Vibe it becomes simpler for organizations to run Informatica’s tools on-premises or in the cloud as they have to change nothing to run in either environment.
In addition the company has introduced a slimmer version of PowerCenter called PowerCenter Express, an entry-level product targeted for customers with smaller projects and providing a path to manage more sophisticated ones with the enterprise version. The PowerCenter Express Personal and Professional versions are available today for individual or departmental use, respectively. The Personal edition limits the number of rows used per day, which will prevent it from serious individual use in midsize and larger organizations, but it could be useful in small or lower-end midsize businesses. Informatica will need to invest to make sure prospects know it can help with smaller projects or companies with limited resources; the company is generally perceived as selling enterprise-class technology, and has limited its selection for data integration projects below the enterprise level. PowerCenter Express can support more than SQL-based sources and integrate with social media and other data integration technologies like those from Kapow Software that I have separately assessed. The Express edition will be available in July; Informatica has stated they are offering the single-user Personal Edition free of charge, and the Professional Edition for five users will be priced at $8,000 per user per year.
Informatica also announced availability of its Data Integration Hub, which I think can be as important as virtualization of the technology for many enterprises. Many want to centralize integration tasks to and from applications in a publish and subscribe method; that may be easier for managing the current and changing needs of applications and projects for some that see a centralized point-to-point movement as cumbersome. This approach, once referred to as enterprise application integration (EAI), was validated a decade ago and can remove latency in not just data transfer but in IT’s processes to get access to what is needed. Since its beginning Informatica and its products have been involved in an industry debate on the best way to pipe data across the enterprise and the company had been a staunch supporter of its approach over the hub-based approach. Now Informatica gives the customer the choice instead of championing one architectural approach over another. This is a step toward maturity in realizing that it has to adapt further to be a leader of information technology for CIOs moving forward. Data Integration Hub has been in early release and is expected to be generally available in the third quarter of 2013.
In the realm of master data management for IT organizations, Informatica
has released MDM 9.6 to help organizations that want to use this critical mastering technique in both on-premises and on-demand cloud environments and where it must be accessed within applications. The new release has advanced data masking to support more sophisticated security and compliance, easier administration and a simpler application interface for business users and analysts. The focus on data security is significant, especially in cloud computing: In our research 63 percent of organizations said that is their largest concern about moving to the cloud, as the chart shows, and in our governance, risk and compliance research 38 percent of organizations said cloud computing is risky enough that they do not use it or limit it significantly. Informatica thus has an opportunity to help them with managing and securing data assets. Coupled with connectivity to the new Informatica Data Integration Hub, master data can be deployed more simply and consistently and operated across cloud computing environments where the interchange of data across many applications is not as easy as it may sound. In a related area Informatica enhances data governance with its MDM Data Director, which monitors the stewardship of data and facilitates action upon it; as well the company made it accessible from Apple smartphones and tablet interfaces earlier this year.
Continuing a longstanding effort, Informatica has assembled industry-specific solutions such as for healthcare and insurance. Advances in the Cloud MDM release help consolidate multiple instances of salesforce.com into one in which management of accounts is simpler; this should appeal to organizations looking to enforce consistency of data across marketing, sales and customer service. For those looking to enrich their information with external data, Informatica helps bring the data types together in a common account and customer record. A realistic approach to MDM that interoperates in both the cloud and on-premises is essential for organizations as the technology architectures of information and applications diversify and are not always confined to the data center of IT.
Informatica also pays attention to the importance of business-centric product information management through its nearly completed acquisition of Heiler Software, which I assessed when it was announced. After satisfying the legal requirements of acquiring a German software company, Informatica has accelerated its efforts to use the recent Heiler Enterprise PIM 7 release across the enterprise and to suppliers. This release improves data integration for self-service access to product information and methods to apply data quality and mapping to data across the enterprise. It also helps provides better data mastering from searches and classifications and improves how it manages digital assets related to the product information. It is critical for product information management to support multiple channels, from print and commerce to procurement and data exchange. Integrated with Informatica Data Quality, PIM 7 can provide efficient processing and support of natural-language processing, which can help organizations improve data quality; 45 percent of 
organizations said that is a reason for changing PIM, according to our research. Heiler has had global success with its products, and we recently awarded the 2013 Ventana Research Leadership Award in Information Management to Sportscheck, which uses Heiler for PIM across its retail channels. We also rated Heiler a Hot vendor in the 2012 Ventana Research Product Information Management Value Index. The battle for gaining value through PIM is something I pontificated about: Some observers see this as an MDM and IT agenda, but it is not. Informatica is gaining important capabilities through its acquisition of Heiler Software.
Informatica has been slower to improve its support for big data technologies. It has been advancing in integration of Hadoop, but in other systems including appliances and in-memory computing Informatica will need to step up its efforts to be a market leader. At the Informatica World conference the company demonstrated simple methods for integration and profiling and reintegration of data across Hadoop clusters, which is part of the larger big data integration 
challenges that I have written about. At the conference it also announced expansion of support for MongoDB through 10gen; that will help in integration of NoSQL databases to support documents and other information that is typically not placed into rows and columns. This partnership is important for Informatica’s efforts to be an information platform provider that brings together all types of content to support business. Also in the big data realm, Informatica has worked to apply its data matching technology to support the variety and volume of data, including international data sets like those from India and China. It has done a nice job to abstract the complexities of the underlying big data technology through its common user interface, which will help organizations streamline their data needs without requiring more staffing; our research found insufficient staffing to be an obstacle to effective information management for two-thirds of organizations, as the chart illustrates.
As Informatica turns the corner from some marketing and sales challenges in 2012, it has come into 2013 with a strong focus on new products to address gaps in its product portfolio, namely virtualization, a data hub, the cloud, big data and efficiency of product information management. Each of these is a substantial achievement, but pushing all of this news to the public at once can impede getting recognition for them individually. It is a marketing challenge to pace and streamline the release of technology announcements in order to maximize credit for its contributions to helping business and IT. Informatica is not the first to virtualize its technology or to support information management in the cloud or to integrate with product information management, but it is a sizable technology company and has to understand timing and readiness of the market, and when customers are ready to make investments.
We describe Informatica’s approach as information optimization, which goes beyond just the management of information to extract full value from these investments. I articulated an example of this with big data, and information optimization is a formal research priority in our agenda for 2013. We see a new generation of information applications for businesses and then consumers and suppliers that will be realized over the coming years and can be facilitated with Information. They have made a strong move to reposition itself as capable of unleashing the information potential of organizations. Now it must demonstrate its ability to accelerate growth and become a top software provider for technology that maximizes the value of information assets.
Regards,
Mark Smith
CEO & Chief Research Officer
Anaplan’s software is designed to help organizations across finance, sales and operations improve accuracy, timeliness and collaboration in their business analytics and planning. I recently attended the company’s first user conference, Hub 2013, in San Francisco, which featured customer success stories and latest on product information. Anaplan has built its business on the subtleties of modeling and planning that are shared between sales, operations and finance departments, and it enables them to apply analytics to projections in revenue, sales, forecasting, territory planning, commissions, quotas and profitability – areas that are intertwined through many business processes. Anaplan’s team has more than decades of experience in the analytics and planning software markets that has led to its devised cloud-based, in-memory computing software.
At the conference Anaplan customer companies discussing
their deployments included Diageo, McAfee and Pandora. Anaplan also announced that both HP and Salesforce have chosen its product; these global technology companies are not easy wins, being both demanding and skeptical about using other companies’ software. My conversations with many of its customers suggested that they chose Anaplan because it is easy to use and to engage with the cloud deployment, which offers a secure method to do business planning across the enterprise. Pandora gave a compelling presentation on its use of the product. It is both one of Anaplan’s earliest customers and the winner of our 2013 Ventana Research Leadership Award for the benefits it has derived in planning and collaborating across the business. Pandora models and analyzes its business needs in Anaplan.
Also at the conference, finance, operations, sales and IT people from McAfee had a frank discussion of the latency and lack of efficiency in its planning process before adopting Anaplan. A member of the audience asked the McAfee speakers about the security of data from planning in the cloud. McAfee of course is in the business of security and virus software and said that this approach is safer than the company’s prior practice of sending spreadsheets via email. McAfee, which won a 2012 Ventana Research Leadership Award, provided one of the most informative panel discussions that I have heard; it was probably the first time I have seen an entire team from across business lines on stage; usually you get one person to talk about a company’s use of a vendor’s products. By the way, we did a webinar on getting smart with planning with McAfee, and the replay is available.
Since my analysis of Anaplan last year, it has made great strides in simplifying the participation of contributors to the planning process and gaining input across the organization. Its new advances include more powerful presentation of embedded microcharts and maps, and more single-screen unified user interfaces, which should attract a range of business users who are not analysts but need to do interactive planning. Anaplan’s product is now more reliable in performance and scalability for both data and users, and its patented 
in-memory HyperBlock architecture provides robust processing of analytic computations on models with a range of dependencies and interrelationships. At the same time Anaplan is making it easier to change model and business unit assignments, and creating new members of a model and recalculating values based on the changes is dynamic and interactive. This dynamic what-if modeling is essential for scenario planning and simulations to determine how changes could impact performance and is very efficient and saves significant time compared to other approaches that would require changes to data model or scripts to modify how calculations are performed. Our research into long range planning finds that those organizations that can perform what-if and scenario planning dynamically and to any level of iteration make better decisions in 84 percent of organizations compared to those that can only perform limited number of them. The ability to create and maintain models dynamically is the top capability requested as very useful or useful in 81 percent of organizations. Using Anaplan there is no need for complex spreadsheet approaches, which according to our spreadsheet research, could require up to 18 hours per month for spreadsheet maintenance; that’s a waste of critical resources, especially when you could directly update and interact with the model and the plan and it will reduce the risk of manual errors within spreadsheets. Our research into long range planning found that when teams of 20 or more people are involved that spreadsheets are a problem in 67 percent of organizations. The product also now enables dynamic filtering using the business levels of a hierarchy to automatically show information without interruptions from intermediary screens or dialogues; this ultimately saves time and helps analysts work more efficiently.
Anaplan has a significant opportunity to change how business analysts model and plan and also how they access the tools in the cloud, where they are easily rented and configured for use by anyone in business. Many organizations still use legacy technology installed long ago, in outdated versions of products like Oracle Essbase, 
IBM TM1 and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Anaplan’s main challenge is to convince such prospects of the value of making the transformation to modeling and planning that can be used across the enterprise. It should emphasize the enhanced efficiency of business processes, the time saved from more effective modeling and planning, and the faster response to conditions and actions that can be taken and decisions made. Our research into integrated business planning found that the most important reasons to change planning processes with technology are increased accuracy (for 47% of participants), better insight into performance (41%) and a shorter process (40%). Anaplan is addressing these aspects and was validated by its customers at the recent user conference. Anaplan is growing rapidly in terms of new customers. Recently secured private financing will enable the company to invest more in marketing and sales to strengthen its market position and also to support other necessary technology advancements, for example, access through tablets and smartphones, which play an increasing role in the business environment. Anaplan enables a new class of business optimization through its modeling and planning software. It not only gives analysts more power than spreadsheets but enables them to collaborate and interact across departments to synchronize planning and improve performance. In my opinion moving beyond spreadsheets for business processes like this one is a sign of maturity and reflects an organization’s readiness to compete and be as profitable as possible in its chosen markets. Those in business aiming to dramatically improve its analytics and planning through dynamic modeling operated and managed by analysts should evaluate what Anaplan offers.
Regards,
Mark Smith
CEO & Chief Research Officer
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