Informatica was at the big Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week showing off two services it says will make cloud-based apps work more effectively.
Informatica Cloud Data Quality Radar for Salesforce is designed specifically for the Salesforce’s CRM software-as a service (SaaS) platform, but Informatica’s vision is to deploy versions that work on both the cloud and more traditional on-premise application environments.
The second offering is Informatica Product 360 integrated with the new Salesforce Commerce Cloud, a digital commerce platform, which is now available.
Although Commerce Cloud was announced only recently, it’s essentially the Demandware Commerce Cloud that Salesforce acquired through the purchase of Demandware for $2.8 billion in June. Informatica was a certified partner of Demandware prior to its sale and has been working in the Salesforce ecosystem for 10 years.
Nagesh Kanumury, director of product management at Informatica, said Product 360 addresses issues that come up as enterprises have come to rely on multiple clouds and on-premises systems to archive and analyze data.
“The problem customers have is that you can’t be managing information that’s in multiple silos. If you can make it available anywhere, that gives you a longer time to react to changes in the market and your competition,” Kanumury told eWEEK.
Product 360 Commerce Cloud gives customers a single-vendor solution to accessing commerce-related product data from multiple sources within a Salesforce environment.
“The chances that a company has all of its data in Commerce Cloud [are] extremely thin,” said Kanumury. “As companies go through their digital transformation journey, they still have an ERP system and there are typically other data sources including the supply chain that needs to be reconciled. Product 360 is going to get you consistent product data.”
The new product, Informatica Cloud Data Quality Radar (or DQ Radar) identifies, fixes and monitors the quality of data within and across applications. Although Radar itself is a cloud-based subscription service, it works with both cloud and on-premises data and applications.
“We recognize the massive investments that exist within Salesforce environments, but also know organizations have many other applications that face challenges that include getting in and out of Salesforce,” Rob Karel, vice president of strategic marketing at Informatica, told eWEEK. “We’re bridging the gap between what’s happening on-premises and what’s happening with other clouds.”
Karel compared what DQ Radar does to a mechanic running a diagnostic on a specific car rather than one system designed for all cars—Informatica’s product for Salesforce is specifically tuned to identify data quality problems related to the CRM platform.
The out-of-the box system is designed to quickly do a health check of the customer’s Salesforce environment and then identify where there may be data consistency issues with such things as email or lead data. Karel said typically the IT department or consultants have to mitigate these issues—a process that could take as long as six months to resolve.
“DQ Radar is not a temporary patch like a finger in the dam. It takes proactive measures to optimize and improve processes,” said Karel.
He added that DQ Radar delivers “fast time-to-asset-value out-of-the-box” that looks for the most likely critical quality issues first in its diagnosis. “As you get more experience with the product you can customize the rules and personalize it,” he said.
The Marketo and Netsuite cloud application platforms are the next likely targets for DQ Radar, but Karel said Informatica is also looking at doing versions for on-premises applications as well.