Pushing The Edge Of Data IntegrationPushing The Edge Of Data Integration

Data integration is becoming increasingly important as companies wrestle with combining information from disparate sources for sales and marketing tasks, cutting IT costs, and complying with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley that demand accurate data.

Last week Informatica Corp. debuted PowerCenter 8, the next release of its flagship data-integration system with new capabilities for accessing and integrating structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Unstructured data such as Word and PDF documents make up as much as 90% of all information in most companies.

The release also offers grid-computing features for distributing workloads across available computing resources. And a new "pushdown optimization" feature lets businesses push data-transformation tasks into a relational database when needed to improve system scalability.

PowerCenter 8 also provides data profiling, cleansing, and matching features and offers improved high-availability and failover capabilities.

Data integration is an important component of service-oriented architectures, and Informatica expects it will be useful to businesses that outsource services, such as payroll and human-resource management, and have to collect and integrate data from outside service providers. The market for data-integration tools and services is expected to reach $13.6 billion by 2008, according to IDC.

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.