"It's exciting times for Informatica," declares Joel G. Momberger, managing director SEA Pte Ltd, divisional headquarters for Asia Pacific, Informatica Corporation. The company has made a strong commitment to the multi-enablement of their product suite which can be seen with the release of PowerCenter 8.5, PowerExchange 8.5 and Informatica Data Quality 8.5 in October this year (collectively known as Release 8.5).

"Release 8.5 extends Informatica's leadership in near universal data access, real-time integration and proactive data quality to deliver a platform geared to the needs of the real time enterprise integration competency centers (ICCs)," elaborates Momberger.

At the same time, the company also announced four new Global Customer Support services made available to Informatica customers in addition to existing Informatica support programs. This is in line with the company's philosophy of going beyond traditional support services. The new services have been designed to enhance customer value and augment Informatica's current support offerings to provide proactive delivery of support services, accelerate time-to-value for Informatica implementations, and enable faster return on customer investments.

The value-added support offerings include the market's first Helpdesk Enablement service for passing knowledge to a customer's key internal support center personnel, and a Configuration Support Manager service for proactively tracking, managing and supporting a customer's Informatica environment. There is also Milestone Support service to provide focused support during a critical activity or project milestone, and a Remote Installation/Upgrade service for help in implementing product upgrades and patches.

In Asia especially ASEAN, Informatica has a robust partner network that Momberger says is "structured uniquely". He adds that the company's channel strategy has not changed recently (or at least for about 3-5 years) but the tactics have over the last 1 year.

This strategy is focused on having a small direct sales force that is tied to a larger partner network.

Elaborating on this, he notes that the company works closely with large SIs (especially those in the government, pharmaceutical and financial services industries) and OEMs such as Hyperion, Cognos, SAP, Teradata and Oracle. A crucial key to their success in this region is "our strong links with local partners, with whom we ensure there is a lot of flexibility," says Momberger. In fact, according to him, because of their company's latitude and flexibility, they can well address the diversity of the markets in the Asia Pacific. "Our approach and style makes it easier for us to structure and manage our partner network," he explains.

Partners have to ensure their willingness to commit to develop their infrastructure to sell and support Data Integration (DI). They have to invest and be dedicated to investing in training and certification. Most Informatica partners provide professional services, so another criterion which the company emphasizes is skills in these service areas.

What makes Informatica so attractive, notes Momberger is the company's platform independence.

Informatica's vision is singular and straight-forward: to be the definitive vendor focusing singularly on the Data space. And to achieve this, the company has its modus operandi all mapped out:

• The fact that they want to remain independent of any platform on data formatting
• The desire and will to focus on the real needs of businesses
• Building a strong direct sales force for customers
• Building a dynamic partnering network as well

Momberger says that Informatica already has all these pieces in place and that the company has never swayed from its key value proposition - the movement of data from any source to any target. He adds that DI gets battered a lot in the industry because of the lack of understanding and different definitions, but Informatica has always held strong with its core value proposition, and have been making headway with it.

"Our value proposition is deceptively simplistic," he observes, "but the truth is many businesses are only now awakening to the true value of DI. DI tools are needed for data to be consolidated and evaluated - a top priority for CIOs. It allows them to better get a single view of their company and all the data."

Another reason why Momberger believes Informatica stands out in the industry is because: "It is all we do. Data is our DNA, be it DI, data quality, data warehousing, data migration, data consolidation, data synchronization or master data management. Most other vendors do DI as a side-line business," he states.

The Asia Pacific market is still in the early stages of DI and therefore offers a lot of business opportunities, and Informatica has firmly entrenched itself in place, committed to making its presence felt in this space. Australia is a leader in this space, and Singapore, says Momberger, is one of the early adopters (mainly because it is a financial center hub and the fact that it is connected to multi-nationals world-wide) and can be regarded as almost visionary when it comes to the DI space. Indonesia is also a strong market especially in the financial services vertical. Of course, it's no surprise that China and India are considered drivers of the DI market. However, Japan and Korea, he observes, definitely need to address this space more closely, with Japan having the largest DI issues because of the amount of data they have to handle.

As a company, Informatica is working hard to ensure its brand-name is more well-known outside the IT world, especially outside the hardcore developer network. Momberger concludes, "We want to raise awareness of Informatica, of what we do, and how to work with and manage data effectively. To do all this well and successfully, we will leverage our partners."

With the DI space coming into the radar of analysts globally, the sky's the limit for Informatica.◊