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Informatica hosts service to move corporate data

Link to Salesforce.com data brings "software as a service" offering to back-office data integration tools.

Martin LaMonica Former Staff writer, CNET News
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT publication InfoWorld.
Martin LaMonica
Informatica, a company that provides tools for joining disparate sources of corporate data, on Thursday introduced its first hosted service.

The Informatica On Demand Data Replicator takes information and schema, or models of how stored data is structured, from a Salesforce.com application and moves it to an on-premise database.

A company could, for example, take products' sales information from Salesforce.com and put it into an on-premise database dedicated to analyzing sales trends.

Informatica intends to offer data integration services for other hosted applications but initially is focusing on selling to Saleforce.com customers, said John Hegstrom, director of product management for Informatica On Demand.

The hosted service eliminates the need for businesses to install data integration on-site. Instead, they pay a monthly fee for the service.

The introduction of the service indicates how hosted applications, often referred to as "software as a service," is branching out into different categories.

Companies regularly use hosted applications for important business functions like sales or support, but don't have simple ways of integrating information from various sources, Hegstrom said.

"For integration, you need to install some hardware and software and run it like a traditional IT project," he said. "This is for companies who just want something fast and easy to implement and don't want to build a complex solution."

Hegstrom said that Informatica will continue to offer its on-site software to corporations that want more control to customize their data integration projects.