Informatica Touts Updated MDM Offering

November 30, 2010 Alex Woodie

Informatica recently issued a new release of its master data management (MDM) tool, which it acquired seven months ago from Siperian. The company has also stepped up its public relations activities around the product by conducting a 30-city road show for Informatica MDM, as the product is called, and touting a recent good showing in a leading analyst firm’s magic four-sided polygon.

Informatica jumped into the MDM discipline this February with the $130-million acquisition of Siperian, a fellow Northern California company that tackled the problem of how organizations can identify duplicate or inconsistent data residing across different applications or businesses.

With the launch of Informatica MDM 9, Informatica thinks it has improved on a product that already was in the “leader’s” section of Gartner‘s Magic Quadrant for Customer MDM. For starters, MDM 9 is integrated into Informatica’s flagship data integration suite, called Informatica 9, which spans many sub-disciplines, including ETL, data quality, B2B exchange, data masking, and more.

Customers will also be able to access MDM 9 functions from their line of business applications, such as Oracle‘s Siebel or Salesforce.com, through a new Data Controls function. Informatica also made changes to ensure MDM stays available during disruptions due to disasters or planned outages. Lastly, MDM 9 offers new integration points that allow it to work with business process management (BPM) products, which allows the software to be part of integrated workflows in support of enterprise-wide data governance, the company says.

MDM is also represented on Informatica’s 30-city road show, called Informatica World 2010. In addition to a special MDM track, the show features presentations by MDM customers, including AstraZeneca, Glaxo Smith Kline, Johnson & Johnson, and Merrill Lynch.

Informatica says it has grown its MDM base by 50 percent since acquiring Siperian earlier this year. At the time of the deal, Siperian had about 60 customers, including Pfizer, Bank of America, and Lexis Nexis.