These two companies have only one product to take to market—how does this change their view, their offering and the way they do business?
Laurie Newman, Regional manager, Informatica
Ross Allardyce, CEO, Beethoven
Allardyce
What role do you think data integration has to play with the increasing trend towards outsourcing in Australia?
Newman
As more and more companies outsource key functions of their business, the issue facing enterprises becomes about how to access data now held by third parties in systems and platforms that are very different from their own. This is a new and growing market that is probably going to evolve as the number one trend driving the adoption of data integration.
The PowerCenter platform (Informatica’s single data integration product) has been designed to seamlessly integrate disparate data from across an enterprise, which increasingly becomes a “virtual” enterprise—the enterprise plus its outsourcing partners—and the challenge for management is to develop a holistic view of all critical data. This is exactly where Informatica provides a single view of the business
Newman
How is Beethoven, with only one product to focus on, plan to grow its business and revenue in 2006?
Allardyce
With a single product we can focus our entire sales, education, training and marketing resources on being the “category killer” solution for case management and customer care in our target marketplace.
Allardyce
To what extend do customers and prospects influence the design and evolution of your product?
Newman
Customers and prospects most certainly design and evolutionise Informatica’s products. They are, after all, the users—they can provide us with positive feedback on the products within the environment it is supposed to be used.
Informatica operates a customer advisory board where represented customers provide product, strategy and operational feedback. Additionally, Informatica holds user meetings and regular information exchange events with the leading industry researchers and analysts. Over the past 13 years we have forged strong partnerships with many of the world’s famous technology and services providers and we have jointly developed Informatica-based customer solutions.
We also have a very active developer network, DevNet. There are more than 33,000 developers and other technical people connected and many new product features and benefits have been created purely from this.
With R&D centres around the world, Informatica is continuously working and updating its products in light of new technological advances and security threats. So even with one broad product range, Informatica is continually being updated in light of customer feedback and demands. The latest version, launched in February, is Powercenter 8.
Do we actively engage them? Yes. Informatica is committed to sharing as much as possible with customers. This is crucial, as in turn it encourages customers to provide accurate and relevant input to our product strategy and direction.
Write to the Editor at Technology and Business
* All fields are mandatory.