Informatica Offers Real-Time Data AnalysisInformatica Offers Real-Time Data Analysis

Data warehousing has historically involved, well, historical data. But with today's faster pace of business, there's a growing need for "real-time" data warehousing--the ability to add up-to-the-minute transaction data for immediate analysis. Informatica Corp. this week will ship software that can pull data from operational systems and combine it with historical data for real-time analysis.

Today, data is usually extracted from operational systems in batch mode and loaded into data warehouses on a weekly, daily, or hourly basis. But that's too slow for some tasks. Credit-card issuers, for example, would like to combine a cardholder's credit history with immediate data about a pending transaction to help credit managers decide whether to let the customer exceed his credit limit.

Informatica's new software provides a way to extract data from enterprise application integration software and immediately load it into a data warehouse. Informatica is enhancing its PowerCenter data warehouse to process real-time data and is providing bidirectional PowerConnect modules for linking EAI software from Tibco, Vitria, and webMethods to a data warehouse. EAI software is used to link operational applications and provides a convenient means of tapping into operational data.

"There is an absolute crying need for analytics in real-time processes," says John Greenbaum, an analyst with Enterprise Applications Consulting. Although a number of vendors are developing technologies for real-time data warehousing, Greenbaum says that Informatica "understands this better than most." The new PowerConnect modules are priced at $60,000 for Windows systems and $82,500 for Unix systems. Pricing for PowerCenter averages $250,000.