Informatica brings order to data

With last week's introduction of a distributed data integration tool and this week's launch of its federal business unit, Informatica Corp. is poised to help government agencies make better use of vast stores of information.

The newest tool from the company is PowerChannel, which supports distributed data exchange across and among enterprises, said Geoffrey Stilley, director of federal sales and marketing.

"The government has thousands of databases running across various hardware platforms, so they can't talk to each other," Stilley said. "We take all the disparate databases into a big repository and run metadata [agents] and let them all talk."

When deployed with PowerCenter—Informatica's enterprise data integration platform—the new tool enables secure data exchanges across wide-area networks and firewalls, said Joe Nicholson, vice president of marketing on platform technologies.

"There's more and more information inside these organizations, and we integrate that information to provide a single view of the application they are undertaking," Nichol.son said. "PowerChannel can hook up Power.Centers to one another across a WAN or the Internet."

Federal users of Informatica products include the departments of Education, Defense and Justice, the U.S. Postal Service, NASA and many more. Stilley said the newly formed federal division has about 15 employees, including a sales staff and engineers.

"By the end of the government's fiscal year, we expect to have several, large installations," Stilley said.

PowerChannel can be purchased directly from Informatica or from resellers. The product is priced on a sliding scale based on data integration requirements, starting at $36,000 for two nodes.