Informatica World Tour 2016 Switzerland #IWT16

With his presentation “Data Changes Everything” Franz Aman, SVP Strategy and Operations at Informatica, introduced the innovations in Informatica Power Center version 10.1:
Digitalization forces huge changes in businesses. The rise of the digital economy, like Cloud and Internet of things, shortened product cycles enormously and forced disruptive Business Models. Franz Aman pointed out the possibilities of Data. Data is knowledge about your customer. It powers industries, profit and innovations.
This in mind, Informatica’s goal is to become #1 in Data Management. Improvement of productivity, TCO and performance are key drivers of the new version 10.1. Some of the highlights will be the improvement of Big Data and Master Data Management as well as the launch of Intelligent Streaming.

Afterwards Pablo Naicker, Novartis, and Thomas Schulte, ILM Specialist – Archive Solution Providers at Informatica, gave some insights into Application Archiving at Novartis.
The main goal of the project at the world leading healthcare company was to create a centralized IT structure to save costs, reduce risks and reduce the complexity. The main challenges for the IT were to enable a complex landscape and support a fragmented application landscape. In order to be able to eliminate 40% of the existing applications an enterprise archiving solution was needed.

So, why did Novartis choose Informatica? Besides the alignments of the software to the requirements of the companies, there has been a lot more key criteria. To name a few: Does the tool fit to the requirements of the industry? Does the implementation partner have proven delivery capabilities? How is the reputation of the Software vendor? How is the scalability of the tool?

In the following, Thomas Schulte presented some insights into the project planning and challenges of the Information Lifecycle Management at Novartis. According to the healthcare sector, two of the big issues have been the demand management and the elimination of risks. For example: Because of compliance and security reasons the infrastructure setup is divided into two independent instances for Switzerland and the US, each with three separate environments for development, quality assurance and a productive system. Furthermore Thomas Schulte pointed out the immense possibilities for cost reduction of cloud archiving.

Finally Pablo Naicker summarized the best practices for such Data and IT projects:

• Keep it simple
• Establish a governance model
• Establish the service
• Establish processes

Steve Holyer and Paul Garstang, Data Security Software Sales at Informatica, demonstrated the current Data Security Trends and challenges for companies. Especially the new EU Privacy Regulations GDPR is a real game changer. For example, companies need very detailed intelligence of every Data Breach now. Furthermore the right to claim of private persons has been extended fundamentally.

In principle, there are two basic areas of data security: Data Security Intelligence and Data Security Control. But how do companies know if they have the right security and reduce risks?
1) Define a policy for sensitive data.
2) Discover all sensitive data in your company and track the proliferation of it.
3) Discover and measure security risks.
4) Start designing and implementing optimizations. But make sure to track the changes and adjust your strategy regularly.

The presentation of the IT Solution Secure@Source of Informatica showed how software can support companies in Data Security. The possibility to define sensitive data with several aspects, access control, dynamic masking, dashboards and alerts are just a few of the helpful functionalities.

Tobias Grunow, Deloitte, presented their interesting study about how the Digital Transformation drives the Customer Experience. According to their results cybersecurity concerns and the need for a 24×7, omnichannel approach to servicing customers are the biggest digital disrupters. Furthermore to meet the customer expectations omnichannel environment, personalization and a 360-degree view of the customer are essential.
This requires not only a deep insight into their behaviours and relationships. Companies need to recognize barriers and eliminate data silos. Structured and unstructured data, as well as data from internal and external sources need to be linked. Tobias Grunow pointed out that Data Governance and the lack of executive sponsorship are two of the biggest obstacles to achieve a complete, holistic view of your customer.
Master Data Management (MDM), as a methology to provide data of the highest quality, accuracy and consistency to digital enterprises, was mentioned as strategy for success. MDM provides a single view of relevant data, a 360-degree view of critical relationships as well as a complete view of all interactions.

Michael Kohs, Senior Sales Consultant at Informatica, presented some of the innovations for the Informatica Cloud. Especially the integration of the cloud and its connectivity to third party apps and services has been improved. Furthermore the new dashboards, address validation and the light weight version will simplify the users life.

Vincent Loosli, Principal Sales Consultant at Informatica, presented the new features for Data Integration Releases 10 and 10.1. One main issue of the new releases was to improve the end-to-end data integration agility. Among other new functionalities customers will find a new data profiling visualization, new approval workflows, a new SQL to Mapping Converter and new dynamic mappings. Furthermore Informatica improved the administration and monitoring: the tool offers now a Birds Eye View of the service health and system usage for example. Also the Metadata Manager and the Business Glossary will offer some improvements in order to make it more comfortable for users and meet the business needs.

For the final presentation of the day Wolfgang Epting, Subject Matter Expert – Data Security Group at Informatica, captivated the audience with his great story telling skills. Not only with his comparison to world leading football managers, he pointed out the importance of having the right data for reliable test. With his story about Mr. Developer and Mr. Application Owner he convinced that test automation with reliable data prevents software defects and protects against financial losses.

To conclude, it can be said that the Informatica World Tour 2016 Switzerland provided useful insights and promising prospects for Informatica solutions. It was great to join the event and we are looking forward to the Informatica World Tour 2017!