Wow am I remiss for not posting this article sooner…
SAP has agreed to include data federation tools from Informatica with some of its enterprise resource planning and analytics products.
The combination of the two products is intended to help customers analyze data stored in third-party or legacy systems. It also solves a marketing problem for SAP, as the applications from Informatica will help the company sell into larger enterprises with heterogeneous environments.
Under the terms of their agreement, SAP will embed Informatica’s PowerCenter, PowerExchange and Metadata Manager software into its performance management and business analytic applications and the NetWeaver platform for master data management and business intelligence.
My take: SAP is going head to head with Oracle… Oracle has been acquiring EIM assets at a rapid clip with Sunopsis and Hyperion, SAP has been building their own NetWeaver based BI offering, but there was huge traction with Hyperion to provide the enterprise wide integrated reporting so key to leveraging SAP’s information, but alas, this is no more. Now SAP must figure out how to fill that gap with an existing enterprise domain player to empower their own offer… enter Informatica. Hmmmm….
