Diaz Nesamoney, Informatica's president, explains, "We both worked at Unisys, and we'd been talking about forming our own company. We started out part- time in my garage."
Recalling the countless hours spent in that garage, Gaurav Dhillon, chief executive officer of Informatica, adds, "When the garage got too cold, we moved into Diaz's house."
"Even though we both had technology backgrounds, we realized we needed equal focus on the business side and the technology side. Initially I covered the technology side, and Gaurav handled the business side. Now that the company has grown to about 230 people, our roles have evolved. I now oversee day-to-day operations of the company internally while Gaurav focuses on long-term vision and strategy," explains Nesamoney.
The co-founders of Informatica Corporation, incorporated in 1993, have always taken a team approach to developing their company. "As we grew, we brought in people at each level to drive that piece of the business forward. I am very proud of the fact that we have kept the team spirit alive in spite of our growth. What makes our company unique is that we worry a lot more about getting something done than about who does it. We look for the strength of the individual and match that with the task at hand. Because nobody has all the skills necessary to make the company a success, we find people with complementary skills who are very passionate about what they do. We hire the best and give them the best in terms of technology, tools and whatever they need to be successful. Then we get out of their way. It works really well for us," says Dhillon.
Dhillon and Nesamoney share much more than the leadership of one of the fastest growing software companies in Silicon Valley. They share not only a contagious enthusiasm for their company, employees and products, but an evangelical fervor for the tangible benefit their technology provides to the more than 400 large companies throughout the world that are Informatica customers.
Informatica's data warehousing software products automate the extraction, transformation and load processes that reconcile data drawn from mainframe, relational and enterprise resource planning systems. Because Informatica's approach is meta data driven, it provides a scalable solution for developing and managing the business intelligence and analytic applications required for effective enterprise decision support.
Nesamoney adds, "The interesting thing is that while data integration may not sound like rocket science, it's not as simple as it sounds. Because a typical corporation today may have 15 or more different systems that run the day- to-day operations, it involves pulling the data together, consolidating it, cleaning it and then delivering it to the analytic systems. Only then can meaningful data analysis be conducted which leads to true business insight."
Why is there such a demand for the data integration platform products from Informatica? Dhillon explains, "I compare a large company's IT systems to the layers of rock in the Grand Canyon. Some of the old systems are fossils, but you can't move them away or everything will come down. Each system grows on the others. Since none of these systems could have known what was going to come after them, our products enable the new and old systems to work well together."
"People have started to realize that they must have a general-purpose infrastructure because the systems at the back end and applications on the front end keep changing. Today it's ERP, e-business and e-commerce. Tomorrow it could be anything," explains Nesamoney. "I think the biggest value proposition of our infrastructure is that we don't care what the system is - legacy, e-commerce, ERP or any combination of those. Our platform provides the foundation for all kinds of applications. We predicted that there would be a brave new 'distributed' world, and we were determined to take a distributed approach to our product development."
"We recognized that there would be a need for an off-the-shelf product to provide data integration to address rapidly increasing data volumes and the growing number of systems within each company. We felt it was necessary to put together a product category that would provide a backbone - a platform - for analytics. Our first product, PowerMart, enabled rapid data mart deployment. Realizing that we wanted to be able to scale that across the enterprise, we developed PowerCenter, a data-integration hub that completes our "hub-and-spoke" data warehouse architecture. PowerCenter represented a significant change in strategy and direction, and its release was a major milestone for us. We basically changed direction from addressing very tactical data mart type problems to the more strategic enterprise problems. We recently added capabilities to support prepackaged analytic applications. Our vision has stayed on track, and I give credit to Diaz for our product strategy. He always makes sure the railway cars are all lined up before the train leaves the station," says Dhillon.
Dhillon emphasizes that companies today recognize the importance of being able to analyze their corporate data to make effective decisions. "It's the ability to make smarter decisions faster that is driving this market," he states.
"The proliferation of the Web has really accelerated people's desire to know more about their business. They can point their browsers to such a variety of Web sites that they often can learn more about other companies than they can about their own business. The ability to easily gather information with a very easy-to-use, approachable, ubiquitous user interface is driving the demand. It is a push-pull situation. The pull is that there are more and more users recognizing the benefits of being able to access and analyze corporate data. The push is that the systems in their business are too many and too sophisticated for anybody to directly gather the information," says Nesamoney.
Be the first to comment on this post using the section below.