Report Reveals Five Golden Opportunities to Optimize IT Budgets

Ventana Research Provides Roadmap for Minimizing "Keep The Lights On" Costs and Maximizing IT's Value to the Business

• Press Release
• Source: Informatica Corporation
• On 7:00 am EDT, Monday October 12, 2009

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Oct. 12, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA - News), the world's number one independent provider of data integration software, today announced the availability of a new report by Ventana Research outlining five key opportunities for IT organizations to significantly reduce their "Keep The Lights On" budget through efficient data management and thus free up funds for more strategic IT activities. According to the industry white paper, entitled Reducing the Cost of Keeping the Lights On: Golden Rules for Optimizing the KTLO Budget, seizing some or all of these opportunities can result in annual savings ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of millions while maximizing IT's ability to provide value to the business.

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"In good economic times as well as bad, IT needs to find ways to reduce its costs while delivering increased business value, and among the areas of focus for cost reduction and optimization should be data and information management," said Mark Smith, CEO and executive vice president of research, Ventana Research. "A huge percentage of IT budgets and resources go to managing data-related operations and to maintaining the data integration and data synchronization infrastructure underlying an organization's applications and systems. By using a common technology to automate its data-related infrastructure activities, IT can take a substantial bite out of KTLO costs and release already allocated funds for innovation."

Five Golden Opportunities to Seize Today

According to the Ventana Research report, it is essential for IT organizations to go beyond just assessing systems for potential savings through consolidation and other measures. IT must also start assessing existing data-related processes for optimization as their streamlining can deliver equally valuable savings and reduce the KTLO budget even faster. The report advocates focusing on the following five opportunities in this arena for the greatest and most rapid impact.

1. Reduce Costs with Data Archiving across Systems - With proper archiving required for compliance and the operations and sustained performance of many applications, Ventana Research recommends making "data archiving an essential IT activity that is automated using data integration technologies." This enables archiving processes to be consistent across systems and applications, avoiding the costs of maintaining specialized archiving processes and custom interfaces for each application. Says the report, by eliminating just six custom interfaces, an organization can reduce its dependence of specialized labor and may save as much as $1 million annually.
2. Automate Data and Application Interfaces to Streamline IT - According to the report, ensuring readily available, consistent and high quality data is the crux of information management. At a time where data must be easily accessible across many systems and business process, many organizations are hampered by a proliferation of point-to-point, custom data integration interfaces and siloed data quality processes, leading to runaway development and maintenance costs and suboptimal business intelligence. Ventana Research believes that "utilizing a common process and technology can ensure that the business's data quality and integration needs are met efficiently and can reduce IT operating costs."
3. Retire Outdated Applications with Information Lifecycle Management - While there might be sound reasons to retire an aging application, too often they are kept on life-support because of the importance of the data. This approach that can cost millions of dollars a year per large application. In contrast, an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) approach ensures that data from retired systems is processed, archived and kept accessible as needed to other applications and users. Ventana Research believes that "IT should adopt application-focused information lifecycle management to provide significant cost reduction and new efficiencies in IT operations."
4. Find Value and Integrate Legacy Systems Efficiently - According to the report, "in most sizeable organizations, systems more than 10 years old" drive more than one-third of underlying business processes. The costs of maintaining point-to-point system interconnects across these processes are enormous. Using as a model an organization supporting six legacy systems, each with a dedicated resource person, Ventana Research posits that "by standardizing data integration across legacy systems, the organization can reduce the headcount of technicians to two in the first year and to one individual the following year, saving $800,000 in year one and $1 million in year two."
5. Simplify IT and Reduce Coding through Data Integration - Organizations frequently deploy custom-coded or proprietary routines to replicate and synchronize data across systems, and they support these costly routines with largely manual processes. Suggesting that many of these tasks can be automated and managed from one tool, Ventana Research believes that "establishing a common method to integrate data across enterprise applications can reduce the operating costs of these systems while eliminating the need for dedicated resources that specialize in supporting data integration for each application, database and custom program.

"Ventana Research's recommendations for KTLO cost reduction are indeed golden, as witnessed by an Informatica customer that saved more than $15 million the first year alone by addressing four out of the five," said Girish Pancha, general manager, Data Integration, Informatica. "The Informatica Data Integration Platform and Informatica Application Information Lifecycle Management solution help companies seize all five opportunities and more, thus enabling IT to 'do more with less' while enhancing the alignment of IT with the objectives of the business."

About Ventana Research

Ventana Research is the leading benchmark research and advisory services firm. Ventana Research provides the most comprehensive analyst coverage in the industry; more than 2.5 million business and IT professionals around the world benefit from Ventana Research's insights. To learn how our benchmark research and assessment and advisory services can improve your organization's performance, visit www.ventanaresearch.com.

About Informatica

Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA - News) is the world's number one independent leader in data integration software. The Informatica Platform provides organizations with a comprehensive, unified, open and economical approach to lower IT costs and gain competitive advantage from their information assets. More than 3,700 enterprises worldwide rely on Informatica to access, integrate and trust their information assets held in the traditional enterprise and in the internet cloud. For more information, call +1 650-385-5000 (1-800-653-3871 in the U.S.), or visit www.informatica.com.

Note: Informatica, Informatica Data Integration Platform and Informatica Application Information Lifecycle Management are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.

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