Menlo Park, California-based data mart specialist Informatica Corp believes it has countered the scalability arguments leveled at it by its data warehousing competitors with the shipping of its enterprise networked Data mart tool PowerCenter. The company began shipping its flagship PowerMart product in 1996 as a standalone, quick to implement, departmental data mart builder. Group director marketing David Downing says the proprietary PowerMart engine, written in C++ and using Informatica’s patented algorithms, is robust and scalable enough to have built a full data warehouse, but the company saw a niche for bringing small, easy to build Data marts to customers and turned its marketing efforts in this direction. Downing suggests the company’s competitors somewhat turned its own marketing against it by suggesting Informatica’s offering was ‘just for small Data marts’, and citing the ‘data island’ syndrome where a company ends up with a series of isolated, standalone data marts that don’t talk to each other. The company believes it has addressed this now with PowerCenter, based on its Enterprise Data Mart Architecture (CI No 3,329), an architecture for linking independent data marts across the enterprise connected by a common meta data store, which enables data marts to be built incrementally. The product has been shipping for three weeks, and Informatica says it already has ten customers, with at least twenty more prospects. Diaz Nesamoney, the company’s founder and chief technology officer, says many of the current 170 customers start building a single data mart with PowerMart, and then build up gradually. Many of these customers, he says, have matured to the point of requiring PowerCenter, which enables an unlimited number of marts to be built and interconnected, and the first ten PowerCenter customers are mainly all from Informatica’s existing customer base. With Microsoft Corp entering the data mart space in a serious way now – it has a ‘data mart in a box’ offering for NT based on its SQLServer 7.0 database – and companies such as Broadbase Information Systems Inc (CI No 3,1832) and Sagent Technology Inc also offering NT data mart products, Informatica is positioning itself higher up the chain with a serious, scaleable enterprise product that interfaces with mainframe data stores, which after all still house some 80% of the world’s data. It is however not unhappy that the concept of the data mart is about to get some serious, Microsoft marketing behind it. The privately held company does not publish its figures, but says revenues grew 600% in fiscal 1997, during which it singed 60 new customers in the fourth quarter, and opened a UK office. Many of these customers are Fortune 500 companies, Nesamoney says. PowerCenter starts around $250,000. á
