Informatica Strikes OEM Agreement With SAP AG

SAP has long been accused of being "closed" and "proprietary" with many facets of our technology including our Business Intelligence and Performance Management capabilities. The statement I always used to hear before I joined SAP is that NetWeaver BI was "only good for SAP data". It never quite made sense to me, at least the way it was phrased, because SAP data is no different than non-SAP data. Our software runs on the most common relational database technologies including Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM's offerings, and uses tables, fields, and standard data types just like any other packaged software product. And sure enough, when I got here, it became readily apparent that, as much as we would like customers to be "all SAP", nobody here thinks this is realistic!

Our market research has proven that companies increasingly rely on SAP NetWeaver as the integration platform even across highly heterogeneous environments. For example, today there are already 70% of SAP NetWeaver BI customers integrating between 25% - 40% of non-SAP data, in many cases even up to 70% of the data being sourced outside of SAP systems. That being said, there are a lot of innovations that a company dedicated to data integration with a track record of excellence can really add that augment our core capabilities. Therefore, we are really happy to announce this partnership with Informatica, who has always provided fantastic data integration capabilities and has long been recognized as a market leader in this space. The added capabilities will further the flexibility for data integration while considerably lowering cost of integration, specifically in the case of integration of heterogeneous information infrastructures.

With a combination of our existing BI technology with tens of thousands of installations, new innovations like Business Intelligence Accelerator, and key capabilities being augmented by market-leading partners like Informatica, I am certain we will continue to observe the dramatic uptick in customer deployments that we are seeing today.

You can read the press release below:

Informatica Strikes OEM Agreement With SAP AG
Leading Enterprise Software Vendor Will Embed Cornerstone Informatica Products Into Key Software Offerings


REDWOOD CITY, Calif., July 23, 2007—Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), a leading provider of data integration software, today announced that it has entered into an OEM relationship with SAP AG (NYSE:SAP), the world's leading provider of business software.
Under the terms of this OEM agreement, SAP will embed Informatica's market-leading PowerCenter, PowerExchange and Metadata Manager software into SAP® performance management and analytic applications and the SAP NetWeaver® platform for master data management and business intelligence. By incorporating Informatica's products into its applications, SAP will now be able to offer customers the ability to better integrate and track data from non-SAP, third-party and legacy systems.

"With the continually increasing fragmentation of corporate data, there is more need than ever before to integrate, transform and manage corporate information effectively," said Paul Hoffman, executive vice president, Informatica Corp. "Our OEM relationship with SAP will help ensure that customers have access to Informatica's best-in-class software to connect their business data – regardless of the source – into their SAP business applications."

"This agreement with Informatica will enhance and extend SAP's business solutions and allow our customers to access this best-in-class technology to further SAP's goal: driving unparalleled visibility and management across an enterprise," said Nimish Mehta, senior vice president, Enterprise Information Management, SAP. "With this agreement, both our existing and new customers will benefit as Informatica and SAP work closely together to deliver world-class enterprise software to an ever-increasing customer base."