Informatica has released Informatica 8.6. This release features new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) offerings, company officials say, including PowerCenter Real Time Edition, on-demand Data Loader Service, B2B Data Exchange, and Data Quality with identity resolution.

 

Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO, Informatica, describes Informatica 8.6 as a "comprehensive, unified, and open platform for data integration."

 

The product offers technology in four categories, company officials say: real time, near-universal data integration within an enterprise, on-demand data integration to retain control over outsourced, off-premise data, multi-enterprise integration to exchange data with partners and data quality products to "gain confidence in all data."

 

The product includes the PowerCenter Real Time Edition, with such features as streaming changed data capture, to support "the entire continuum of data integration latency or timeliness requirements from batch to real-time," company officials say.

 

"We used to write scripts to extract data from our local databases, transform the data, and schedule the file loads into Salesforce," said Mauricio del Rio, Senior CRM Analyst at Illumina. But with Informatica's On Demand Data Loader Service, "we can simply use a browser to configure and deploy our integration jobs."

 

About a month ago at Dreamforce Europe, Informatica announced the Informatica On Demand Data Loader Service for Salesforce, the newest addition to its SaaS offerings.

 

It's a bi-directional integration offering that allows Salesforce administrators to automate many Salesforce integration processes, like synchronizing account information with other applications, creating back office orders from closed opportunities and loading leads.

 

In addition to eliminating manual coding efforts, the IOD Data Loader is entirely Web-based, and "removes the need for on-premise software or hardware appliances," according to company officials.

 

The IOD Data Loader extends the capabilities of Salesforce.com's (News - Alert) Dataloader by adding an intuitive Web-based integration wizard, automating the scheduling of integration jobs, providing direct access to relational databases, transforming data through a drag and drop Web interface and importing and exporting Salesforce Dataloader maps.

 

Last September, at Dreamforce, Informatica announced its Data Quality Assessment for Salesforce.