Informatica Launches Architecture for Universal Data Services

According to Informatica, the openness and extensibility of the UDS approach will allow third-party companies and customers to create their own shared services to plug into the architecture and take advantage of Informatica's data server. Third parties will also be able to embed the data server in their offerings and create new products that meet specific customer needs by combining new and existing UDS-enabled shared services.

As part of Informatica's future product roadmap, the company said it intends to evolve its existing shared services into "smart" services that will help accelerate design productivity, integration performance and manageability of integration processes. Among planned smart services is a smart integration design service that will use Informatica data server's metadata-based knowledge of data content, location and relationships to find desired data and propose how best to deliver it in order to free designers of those tasks.

Another projected smart service is a universal cost-based optimizer that extends Informatica's cost-based optimization capabilities across the integration process, making decisions on where, how and in what order to process the data. By reducing the human intervention presently required for many integration tasks, these and other smart services will make it easier for companies to start new integration projects, help to liberate IT from manually running many integration processes and free up resources for strategic initiatives, Informatica asserted.