Informatica Teams with Influence to Work ERP Data
Playing to the strength of its data transformation solutions, Informatica Corp. (Palo Alto, Calif.) has entered into an agreement with Influence Software Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) to offer a new, packaged enterprise decision-support solution for companies in the manufacturing industry.
Under the terms of the licensing agreement, Informatica's PowerCenter and PowerMart data-integration software will be packaged with Influence Software's Influence Knowledge Warehouse (IKW) to provide manufacturing companies with the ability to leverage their investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, analyze business data and measure business performance.
Informatica designed PowerCenter, in particular, to provide a data warehousing platform that companies can use to transform data from all areas of their enterprise. PowerCenter is a hub software product used to integrate data from a number of different operational sources, including ERP and legacy systems.
Both PowerCenter and PowerMart are designed to speed and simplify the process of moving data from corporate operation systems--like ERP--into analytical applications. When Influence packages these offerings with its IKW, the end solution is expected to enable the consolidation of data from an organization's ERP systems and other operational data sources and deliver this data to Influence's Knowledge Applications, the analytic applications within IKW.
Although IKW runs on Windows NT and Unix platforms, it has the capability to pull data from an AS/400 server with the help of data warehouse solutions, such as those offered by D2K Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), according to an Influence Software spokesperson.
"Virtually all manufacturing companies today rely heavily on ERP systems to automate their global operational processes in a structured format," says Marv Mouchawar, president and CEO of Influence Software. "While ERP systems provide a solid backbone for capturing critical business data, they don’t provide the environment necessary to analyze the data they capture for business insight. By pairing the robust data-extraction capabilities of Informatica’s PowerCenter and PowerMart with Influence Software’s IKW, we offer companies in the manufacturing industry a comprehensive and flexible analytic solution capable of quickly delivering results."
--L. Greenemeier