Informatica Pushes Data Integration BoundariesInformatica Pushes Data Integration Boundaries

Informatica Corp. Monday debuted PowerCenter 8, the next release of its flagship data integration system with the ability to access and integrate structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Unstructured data such as Word and PDF documents are estimated to make as much as 90% of all information within most companies.

Data integration is becoming increasingly critical as companies try to combine data from multiple, disparate data sources for sales and marketing tasks, and to improve IT operations and cut costs. It's seen as a key element of data governance and is an important element of service-oriented architectures.

The new release, previously code-named "Zeus," also offers grid-computing capabilities for distributing workloads across available computing resources. And a new "pushdown optimization" feature allows businesses to push data transformation to be moved " when necessary " into a relational database to improve scalability.

The system provides new data profiling, cleansing, and matching features, and also offers improved high-availability and failover capabilities for all its components.

PowerCenter 8 will be available on a limited basis during the fourth quarter and generally available next April with a base price of $140,000.