'The need for data integration is universal'

Sohaib Abbasi joined Informatica as president and CEO

in July 2004 from Oracle where he worked for 20 years. Informatica is one of the

leading data integration software companies. He was a member of Oracle's

executive committee and was senior vice president of two major divisions, Oracle

Tools and Oracle Education. As part of his contribution, Abbasi envisioned and

launched the Oracle Tools business. He talks to Sudesh Prasad of Dataquest

about the data integration market and the opportunity that India offers in this

space

How are you positioned in the data integration market place?



Our singular objective is to establish Informatica as a predominant leader
in the data integration market. I know it is early days for the data integration

market and there is tremendous scope and opportunities for Informatica.

How important is data integration for businesses?



The need for data integration is universal. In my conversation with senior
executives, there are five key business imperatives. The first is the regulatory

compliance. More and more executives are spending time to develop compliance for

the regulatory regimes. The second imperative that I hear is modernization.

Businesses want to use latest technologies. The third theme that comes to focus

is post merger integration. A lot of consolidation is going on across various

industries. In order for them to ensure that they realize the synergy, they need

to have successful integration. The fourth theme that the businesses are asking

themselves is: how do we become more comfortable by focusing on the most

profitable products and customers? The last and very common theme is

outsourcing. All top IT initiatives are being driven by these business

imperatives. Business intelligence is being driven by regulatory compliance,

application integration is being driven by mergers and acquisitions, data hubs

is being driven by a desire to improve profitability, and BPO and SaaS are being

driven by outsourcing.

It turns out that every one of those projects requires data

integration. None of them will work without successful data integration. IDC has

estimated that organizations spend $13 bn in data integration.

How important is for India Informatica? Who are some of your

customers in India, and for what kind of solutions?



We are very excited about business prospects in India. India is no different
and all these imperative apply to companies based here. India enjoys one of the

highest growth in the IT sector in the Asia Pacific.

The domestic market continues to grow. We have about 25

customers in India who are using Informatica. ICICI Prudential is using our

products to build a large data warehouse to understand what is going on in their

business. LIC of India is building one of the largest data warehouses in the

world with about 60 Tb of data. I strongly believe that the number will continue

to grow with the growth of Indian companies. The more the businesses grow in

India, the more they need to take advantage of all the information and all of

the data that they have collected in the internal IT systems. In addition to

that opportunity, India also happens to be where some of our strategic partners

like TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Satyam reside. Jointly, we have won dozens of

customers around the world.

Both from the domestic market, where we think our businesses

will continue to grow at a much faster pace than elsewhere, and from our partner

ecosystem perspective, India will continue to grow at an increasing rate.

'We are very excited about business prospects in India. India enjoys one of the highest growth in the IT sector in the Asia Pacific'

What are some of the challenges that companies are facing in

terms of data integration?



One of the challenges that most companies are facing is that despite the
fact that they have invested millions of dollars automating a lot of business

functions, senior management still does not have any idea of what is going on in

the business. The fundamental reason being that as companies automate different

departments, they end up having data silos-the end result is that the senior

management does not have a clear, accurate view of what is going on across the

business. A lot of customers have built our data warehouses, which aggregate

information across all the disparate systems in order to gain better insights.

There are several customers in India who are using our products for just that.

How do you look at SaaS?



The challenge in SaaS is almost identical to that of business process
outsourcing. When customers subscribe to SaaS, their data is managed by the SaaS

vendors, and customers want access to all of that data. We are working with

several of the SaaS vendors. We work with salesforce.com, rightnow and other

companies.

How big is the M&A space as a business opportunity for you?



This is a very big opportunity for us. When two companies combine, in order
to gain some synergies-either operational efficiencies or being able to

identify common customers with cross sell and upsell opportunities-it is very

important for them to integrate data. Without application consolidation and data

integration, organizations would simply not realize the synergies.