1/25/2010
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[University of Illinois computer science alumnus] Sohaib Abbasi is a former longtime executive at Oracle, the commercial software giant, who has been CEO of much-smaller Informatica for the past five years. In that time, he's presided over a significant turnaround, as the once-struggling company more than doubled its annual sales and increased annual earnings by nearly a factor of five.
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In a recent conversation [with the San Jose Mercury News], Abbasi said the public sector is his second biggest customer segment, after financial services.
Q What's driven the demand for data integration software? And what's going to drive growth in the future?
A If you look back over the last 20 years, organizations often purchased software to automate one department at a time. There were vendors such as SAP that focused on enterprise resource planning. PeopleSoft automated HR. Siebel automated the sales and marketing departments. As a result, there were all these silos that had been created. Informatica was the pioneer to integrate that data, to help customers gain a holistic view of their business.
What's happening more recently is the data is getting fragmented to cloud computing vendors. Any customer using Salesforce.com is relying on them to manage information on their behalf. So that trend is fragmenting the data, and making it harder to use for the overall business. The next wave of integration is beyond company boundaries.
Read the complete interview at: http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14222658?nclick_check=1