Informatica Corp. has announced PowerCenter 8.5, PowerExchange 8.5, and Informatica Data Quality 8.5, a comprehensive release that uniquely supports real-time integration competency centers. Through standardization and centralization, an ICC promotes data integration best practices and lowers costs through economies of scale. The real-time ICC delivers timely, trusted data to meet information needs of the business.

"More and more companies require trusted, real-time data to support operational initiatives such as master data management, data synchronization and data replication, as well as real-time enterprise data warehousing" said Girish Pancha, executive vice president, Informatica. "With Release 8.5 powering a real-time ICC, organizations can reuse existing integration assets to rapidly deliver new initiatives that drive business growth and profitability."

Despite the ever-increasing fragmentation of data, businesses demand a timely, holistic view of enterprise information. PowerExchange 8.5 provides real-time Changed Data Capture (CDC) from a variety of transactional systems enabling immediate access to up-to-date business data. In addition, PowerCenter 8.5 guarantees the ordered delivery of those changes across the enterprise.

"PowerCenter 8.5 takes Ameriprise in the direction it needs to go toward the real-time ICC," said John Holm, Director, Data Integration Center of Excellence at Ameriprise Financial. "This release offers us the ability to synchronize data across our applications, and deliver reliable, timely information to our users. PowerExchange 8.5 gives us the broadest possible access to our business-critical data - from ERP applications, mainframes, relational databases, and data warehouses to real-time messaging and web services."

Informatica Data Quality 8.5 enables proactive data quality with new capabilities that prevent inaccurate data from being input in the first place. Informatica Data Quality for Point of Entry empowers business users to validate addresses and check for duplicates as they enter data into applications.

As ICC teams become larger and dispersed, enterprise-grade scalability, security, and reliability are now critical requirements for IT management. PowerCenter 8.5 provides reentrant data services that scale dynamically and perform optimally regardless of service request volumes.

"The LinkShare Merchandiser product takes in data feeds from 700 advertisers and pushes it into a relational database before sending the information to nearly 7000 publishers," said David J. Ramos, director of Business Intelligence and Analytics at LinkShare. "We expect that PowerCenter 8.5's dynamically scalable web services will help us immensely."

To ensure data security throughout the project lifecycle, PowerCenter 8.5 introduces the new Data Masking option to obfuscate sensitive data as it is moved. In addition, PowerCenter 8.5 provides granular role-based access control, making it possible to protect against security breaches across large, geographically distributed ICC teams.

As the demand for IT and business alignment grows, IT must involve subject matter experts throughout the data integration and data quality lifecycle. Informatica Data Quality 8.5 introduces the Data Quality Assistant to help data stewards collaborate with IT to interactively review and address data quality exceptions. Coupled with the new Data Quality Dashboards and Reports option, these capabilities allow business users to be involved throughout the data quality lifecycle.

The new purpose-built Data Migration Tool helps mitigate risk associated with data migration projects. Leveraging best practice migration methodology, this tool accelerates data conversion by automating repetitive tasks, including maintaining reference data and performing mass changes.

PowerCenter Metadata Manager 8.5 accelerates project delivery by providing comprehensive impact analysis through personalized data lineage. It further facilitates collaboration by sharing annotations and saved searches.