Ventana Research Provides Roadmap for Minimizing “Keep The
Lights On” Costs and Maximizing IT’s Value to the Business
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Oct. 12, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Informatica
Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA), the world’s number one independent provider of
data integration software, today announced the availability of a new report
by Ventana Research outlining five key opportunities for IT organizations to
significantly reduce their “Keep The Lights On” budget through efficient
data management and thus free up funds for more strategic IT activities.
According to the industry white paper, entitled Reducing the Cost of Keeping
the Lights On: Golden Rules for Optimizing the KTLO Budget, seizing some or
all of these opportunities can result in annual savings ranging from
hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of millions while maximizing IT’s
ability to provide value to the business.
“In good economic times as well as bad, IT needs to find ways to reduce its
costs while delivering increased business value, and among the areas of
focus for cost reduction and optimization should be data and information
management,” said Mark Smith, CEO and executive vice president of research,
Ventana Research. “A huge percentage of IT budgets and resources go to
managing data-related operations and to maintaining the data integration and
data synchronization infrastructure underlying an organization’s
applications and systems.
By using a common technology to automate its data-related infrastructure
activities, IT can take a substantial bite out of KTLO costs and release
already allocated funds for innovation.”
Five Golden Opportunities to Seize Today
According to the Ventana Research report, it is essential for IT
organizations to go beyond just assessing systems for potential savings
through consolidation and other measures. IT must also start assessing
existing data-related processes for optimization as their streamlining can
deliver equally valuable savings and reduce the KTLO budget even faster. The
report advocates focusing on the following five opportunities in this arena
for the greatest and most rapid impact.
1. Reduce Costs with Data Archiving across Systems – With proper
archiving required for compliance and the operations and sustained
performance of many applications, Ventana Research recommends
making “data archiving an essential IT activity that is automated
using data integration technologies.” This enables archiving
processes to be consistent across systems and applications,
avoiding the costs of maintaining specialized archiving processes
and custom interfaces for each application. Says the report, by
eliminating just six custom interfaces, an organization can reduce
its dependence of specialized labor and may save as much as $1
million annually.
2. Automate Data and Application Interfaces to Streamline IT –
According to the report, ensuring readily available, consistent
and high quality data is the crux of information management. At a
time where data must be easily accessible across many systems and
business process, many organizations are hampered by a
proliferation of point-to-point, custom data integration
interfaces and siloed data quality processes, leading to runaway
development and maintenance costs and suboptimal business
intelligence. Ventana Research believes that “utilizing a common
process and technology can ensure that the business’s data quality
and integration needs are met efficiently and can reduce IT
operating costs.”
3. Retire Outdated Applications with Information Lifecycle Management
– While there might be sound reasons to retire an aging
application, too often they are kept on life-support because of
the importance of the data. This approach that can cost millions
of dollars a year per large application. In contrast, an
Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) approach ensures that data
from retired systems is processed, archived and kept accessible as
needed to other applications and users. Ventana Research believes
that “IT should adopt application-focused information lifecycle
management to provide significant cost reduction and new
efficiencies in IT operations.”
4. Find Value and Integrate Legacy Systems Efficiently – According to
the report, “in most sizeable organizations, systems more than 10
years old” drive more than one-third of underlying business
processes. The costs of maintaining point-to-point system
interconnects across these processes are enormous. Using as a
model an organization supporting six legacy systems, each with a
dedicated resource person, Ventana Research posits that “by
standardizing data integration across legacy systems, the
organization can reduce the headcount of technicians to two in the
first year and to one individual the following year, saving
$800,000 in year one and $1 million in year two.”
5. Simplify IT and Reduce Coding through Data Integration –
Organizations frequently deploy custom-coded or proprietary
routines to replicate and synchronize data across systems, and
they support these costly routines with largely manual processes.
Suggesting that many of these tasks can be automated and managed
from one tool, Ventana Research believes that “establishing a
common method to integrate data across enterprise applications can
reduce the operating costs of these systems while eliminating the
need for dedicated resources that specialize in supporting data
integration for each application, database and custom program.
“Ventana Research’s recommendations for KTLO cost reduction are indeed
golden, as witnessed by an Informatica customer that saved more than
$15 million the first year alone by addressing four out of the five,”
said Girish Pancha, general manager, Data Integration, Informatica.
“The Informatica Data Integration Platform and Informatica Application
Information Lifecycle Management solution help companies seize all five
opportunities and more, thus enabling IT to ‘do more with less’ while
enhancing the alignment of IT with the objectives of the business.”
About Ventana Research
Ventana Research is the leading benchmark research and advisory services
firm. Ventana Research provides the most comprehensive analyst coverage in
the industry; more than 2.5 million business and IT professionals around the
world benefit from Ventana Research’s insights. To learn how our benchmark
research and assessment and advisory services can improve your
organization’s performance, visit www.ventanaresearch.com.
About Informatica
Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA) is the world’s number one independent
leader in data integration software. The Informatica Platform provides
organizations with a comprehensive, unified, open and economical approach to
lower IT costs and gain competitive advantage from their information assets.
More than 3,700 enterprises worldwide rely on Informatica to access,
integrate and trust their information assets held in the traditional
enterprise and in the internet cloud.
For more information, call +1 650-385-5000 (1-800-653-3871 in the U.S.), or
visit www.informatica.com.
Note: Informatica, Informatica Data Integration Platform and Informatica
Application Information Lifecycle Management are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in
jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may
be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.
