Enterprise Decision Support Products Making Inroads At Insurers, Others

Informatica Corp., a Palo Alto, CA-based provider of software for enterprise business intelligence and analytic applications, says that more than 30 of the world's largest and financial services and insurance organizations have selected its software to deploy mission-critical enterprise data warehousing solutions for decision support.

Abbey National, Allstate Insurance, Dominion Securities and The Equitable are the newest members of Informatica's client roster, the company says. They join Capital Group; Charles Schwab; Citicorp; Credit Suisse First Boston; Fidelity Investments; First Union National Bank; John Hancock; INVESCO Funds Group; Liberty Mutual; Metropolitan Life; Oppenheimer Funds; Providian Financial; Prudential Investments; Salomon Smith Barney; SG Cowen; and The Money Store.

Informatica says some of these companies have standardized on Informatica's software platform across their entire enterprise for data integration and to deploy decision support applications.

"Financial services represents a significant vertical market in which companies are rapidly adopting data warehousing as mission-critical, core technology," said Gaurav Dhillon, CEO of Informatica. "Given our large and fast-growing base of customers in this arena, Informatica is well on its way to becoming the de facto standard platform for financial institutions as they leverage data warehousing to roll out business intelligence and analytic applications."

Informatica also says that Europe has taken notice of its products. "To keep up with the increased inbound flow of financial data and to maintain the level of resources dedicated to the bank's Data Management Group, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) selected Informatica's PowerMart to automate the delivery of data from financial transaction systems to a business intelligence data warehouse," the company announced. With 1,200 employees in 25 countries, the EBRD exists to foster the transition toward open market-oriented economies and to promote private and entrepreneurial initiative in the countries of central and eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

"PowerMart is exceptionally well designed," said Mark Sear, IT client manager, Data Management Group at EBRD. "Where it might have taken five days to do data migration by hand, it takes about two days with PowerMart. The product increased our response time, and we haven't needed to scale up resources. PowerMart made it a whole lot easier for us to provide data faster to the appropriate business departments that needed it."

EBRD is currently evaluating Informatica's PowerCenter as the solution on which the company may build a more mature and widely based data warehouse, the software provider says.