Informatica Starts Federal Unit

Informatica Inc., a maker of data analysis tools, is launching a federal unit, the company will announce July 23.


"We have been getting a lot of federal business and decided to formalize the effort," said Geoff Stilley, director of federal sales and marketing for the Palo Alto, Calif., company. Informatica already counts the Navy, Army, Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development as customers.


Eventually, Stilley said, he would like the federal unit to generate 15 percent of Informatica's revenue. The company reported revenue of $101.2 million for the six months ending June 30, compared to $59.8 million in the same period in 2000.


The federal unit will be based in McLean Va.


The announcement came on the heels of two new Informatica product releases that Stilley said would play well in the public sector.

On July 16, the company released Informatica PowerChannel, which allows distributed sharing of data across geographically dispersed organizations. And June 25 saw the release of Informatica's real-time analytics solution, which culls and presents analytic and transaction data from enterprise systems in real-time.


According to Stiller, such tools would be useful for agencies that must undertake direct comparison of data from disparate systems. Agencies that are contemplating outsourcing, for example, could use the tools for public-private cost comparisons. Organizations that need to quickly aggregate data from far-flung locales would find value in such tools as well.


"Agencies have a lot of information; they just don't know how to get their hands around it," Stilley said.


Founded in 1993, publicly held Informatica serves over 1,200 global companies with its analytic software.


Among the integrators using Informatica software are IPI*GrammTech Ltd., San Antonio, which sells Informatica products through the General Services Administration schedule, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, New York, which uses Informatica products for its iAnalytics services and technologies.