Informatica Announces General Availability of PowerCenter 8

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq: INFA), a leading provider of data integration software, today announced the general availability of Informatica PowerCenter 8. The result of extensive input from Informatica customers and partners, PowerCenter 8 has set the standard for enterprise data integration with enhancements in four key areas: advanced data quality, enterprise data access, enterprise- wide deployment and developer productivity.

"PowerCenter 8 is by far Informatica's most innovative release -- delivering unprecedented advances within a single, unified and open data integration platform," said Girish Pancha, executive vice president of products, Informatica. "In partner and customer benchmarks, PowerCenter 8 has already demonstrated 50 percent performance gains over the previous release, often exceeding 100 percent in certain tests. Because of its powerful enterprise capabilities, we are already seeing nearly five times more upgrade requests for the initial release of PowerCenter 8 over PowerCenter 7."

Current customers of the new PowerCenter 8 release include Ace Hardware, Allianz Life, Amgen, BMW AG, DaimlerChrysler, FedEx, Gateway, HP Ireland, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Mutual of Omaha, Southern Company and the U.S. Postal Service. "With PowerCenter 8, Informatica has significantly broadened the definition of an enterprise data integration platform," said Mark Cothron, data integration architect at Ace Hardware. "At Ace Hardware, PowerCenter 8 will help us to overcome the challenges of implementing data integration as an enterprise-wide function, providing us with new features that deliver greater performance and scalability, and significantly increasing developer productivity."

Latest Enhancements to PowerCenter 8 Since the initial roll-out of PowerCenter 8 on a limited basis in December 2005, Informatica has made further enhancements to the generally available release, resulting in the following new capabilities: -- Advanced data quality products -- With Informatica's acquisition of Similarity Systems, PowerCenter 8 now includes new products that deliver advanced data quality capabilities: Informatica Data Quality and Informatica Data Explorer. -- Enhanced 64-bit platform support -- PowerCenter 8 now supports the most extensive list of 64-bit platforms in the industry. (See below for newly supported platforms and environments.) -- Expanded enterprise data access -- New PowerExchange options extend Informatica's leading platform-neutral approach, offering access to data sources such as JD Edwards OneWorld, DB2/UDB Real-time, IDMS Real-time, as well as changed data capture support for leading database environments.

New Visual Mapping Design Tool: Informatica Data Stencil

Concurrent with the PowerCenter 8 release, Informatica is also now offering a data-flow design tool based on Microsoft Visio: Informatica Data Stencil. Free of charge to customers, Data Stencil provides a Visio template that allows rapid construction of data flows, which directly feed PowerCenter 8's Mapping Generation product to automatically generate PowerCenter mappings. The tool works bi-directionally, so that existing PowerCenter mappings can create a visual map of the data flow. Customers can download Data Stencil and sample mapping templates by visiting http://devnet.informatica.com/datastencil.

Availability

PowerCenter 8 is now available on the following platforms: Windows 32-bit, Windows on Itanium, Solaris 32-bit, Solaris 64-bit, Solaris on x64/Opteron, AIX 32-bit, AIX 64-bit, HP/UX 32-bit, HP/UX 64-bit/Itanium, SuSe Linux on 64-bit, Redhat Linux 32-bit, Redhat Linux 64-bit.

Customers can learn more about PowerCenter 8 at InformaticaWorld '06, Informatica's annual customer conference, being held in San Francisco, California, May 23 - 25, 2006. For more information, visit http://www.informatica.com/events/user_conference/.

About Informatica

Informatica Corporation is a leading provider of enterprise data integration software and services. With Informatica, companies can gain greater business value by integrating all their information assets from across the enterprise. More than 2,500 companies worldwide rely on Informatica to reduce the cost and expedite the time to address data integration needs of any complexity and scale. For more information, call 650-385-5000 (1-800-970-1179 in the U.S.), or visit http://www.informatica.com.

NOTE: Informatica and PowerCenter are 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. The development, release and timing of any Informatica product features described in this release remain at the sole discretion of Informatica and should not be relied upon in making a purchasing decision.