Data integration fastest growing enterprise software market

BANGALORE, INDIA: Data is looked upon as a business tool these days. The reason we see business people are increasingly taking control of the data in the enterprises and investing more on data centric tools to power up the business process.

Margaret Breya, executive VP and CMO, Informatica Business Solutions Pvt Ltd reveals how technology is evolving to provide enterprises with actionable data. Excerpts:

CIOL: How important are data integration capabilities from an organization's perspective?

Margaret Breya: Data is no longer confined within the four walls of enterprises- the reason that data management is not just about handling the transactional information or the data lying in the backend system any more. Businesses need to apply a mechanism to combine the data residing in different sources and providing a unified view are important to drive business decisions and operations.

Enterprise data architecture and data flow are also changing drastically with the arrival of cloud, social, mobile. Therefore, cleaning up the massive volume of data coming from disparate sources and make it of decision quality, is a challenge that most of the businesses are facing today.

CIOs in the organizations need to be more nimble to meet this challenge. Be it building the information architecture to meet the real time data services requirements of the business or enabling a single of the customers to improve the decision making process- CIOs are now needed to to act as business advisory and help business select the right data management solutions.

CIOL: What are the key technology trends that will shape up the data integration solutions market further?

MB: Data integration is one of the fastest growing enterprise software market - it is growing faster than security and virtualization and that's quite a stunner. A lot of developments in this market will be seen further around Big Data, machine data and the Internet of Things.

We see a huge upside in the adoption of embeddable data management engine for applications and devices. The addressable market is huge comprising 52 thousand large enterprises and 60 million medium and small enterprises. The opportunity is quite huge in the devices space, if you take into account the prediction of 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020.

We hope to scale up this opportunity with our partners. We will continue to invest in our developer programmes to help developers build custom made applications to meet specific customer requirements across different verticals. Besides corporate and individual developers, we are focusing a lot on ISVs and will make a more robust offering available them in the next six months' time.

CIOL: What are the sectors that will see growth for data driven solutions in the time to come?

MB: You can't probably think of any sector today which is not information centric anymore. If we look at the volume of data, the fastest growing area is certainly the healthcare, user wise it is public sector, banking and retail and if we look at the devices growth, the most growing segments will be telecom and manufacturing.

If we look from our solutions perspective, it is the financial services including banking, insurance and capital markets that are definitely the high growth areas for us, as we have compelling solutions to move data very quickly and reliably. Next is public sector including healthcare and defence. The human services make it more information centric and one of the high growth segment for data centric solution. Retail is another area, where we see a lot of growth for real time offer management.

CIOL: Do you see growth in the midmarket segment as well? How do you design your midmarket product portfolio?

MB: For our enterprise class technology and solutions, we enjoy about 35 percent market share in the enterprise segment and going forward, we see an addressable market for data integration in the midmarket segment as well.

We are designing our product portfolio to suit the requirements of small and medium sized businesses with limited resources. We have introduced PowerCenter Express - tailored to the specific needs of small departmental projects and mid-market businesses. This is an easy-to-use downloadable product that can compete with open source data integration offerings. We have also added cloud products in the midmarket portfolio.

We have an aggressive penetration strategy for midmarket in the US, China and India, where we have started expanding our channels for these products. All our products in the midmarket portfolio will be available through subscription based pricing and will be made available in India next year through our distribution network.

CIOL: Where would you like to place India in your growth trajectory globally?

MB: We see India pioneering a lot of innovations in the core technology development space. As India is our largest R&D as well as core product development centre, hence you will see a lot of vertical solutions will be developed in India. A lot of customization and improvisation in the vertical solutions segment will be coming from the SIs based in India.

Vertical wise, we consider this region as one of our key centre of growth for telecom, as a majority of the telecom services providers are based in South East Asia and India. Retail is another area, where we will see India building some interesting solutions from scratch.