REDWOOD CITY, Calif., June 4, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA), the leading independent provider of data integration software and services, today announced the business, technology and vertical winners of the 2009 Informatica Innovation Awards competition. The annual awards recognize innovative organizations who have achieved exemplary business value through their use of the Informatica Data Integration Platform. Judges chose eight individual business and technology enablement category winners, eleven vertical industry winners and one overall award for "A Strategic Approach to Data Integration" from over 3,600 customers. The overall honor goes to Carnival Cruise Lines for its strategic approach to data integration which plays a significant role in ensuring its passengers' safety.
This year's panel of judges includes industry experts Mark Smith, CEO & EVP Research, Ventana Research and Bob Melk, Senior Vice President and Group Publisher, IDG ENTERPRISE, in addition to Informatica executives.
Melk stated, "What stands out in judging the 2009 Informatica Innovation Awards is the sheer number of nominations and how each demonstrated bold leadership and innovation. In today's economic climate, these companies were able to move their companies' business forward while consistently delivering on cost savings. The winners were very strong."
"This year we are hosting a virtual awards ceremony to honor our most innovative customers. All of our winners have demonstrated a broad use and adoption of the Informatica data integration platform in delivering significant business advantage to their organizations. They have shown how to both empower business and IT users with the data they require and, at the same time, lower the costs of managing that data," said Chris Boorman, chief marketing officer, Informatica. "In the current economy IT must lower costs and 'do more with less', including deliver results in a timely and accurate manner. We are delighted to see so many nominations where companies are transforming their business by recognizing the value of being a data-driven enterprise."
The 2009 winners in each category are:
Business and Technology Enablement Award Winners
- NBC Universal for: Enabling better decision making by driving business intelligence
- Centene for: Delivering trusted information to drive data governance and reduce risk
- Bank of New York Mellon for: Accelerating shareholder value in mergers and acquisitions
- ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company with PricewaterhouseCoopers for: Driving operational excellence by outsourcing noncore functions, modernizing the business, or reducing IT costs
- Carnival Cruise Lines for: Improving customer information to enhance customer service or increase customer revenue
- Zyme Solutions for: Strengthening partner network effectiveness
- Smith & Nephew for: Fortifying overall operations with global data quality
- Bax Global/Schenker for: Cloud Computing
Vertical Industry Award Winners
- Duke Energy for: Energy and Utilities
- Bank of New York Mellon for: Financial Services
- BNSF for: Transportation
- Centene for: Healthcare
- Australian Pharmaceutical Industry for: Life Sciences
- Smith & Nephew for: Manufacturing
- NBC Universal for: Media/Entertainment
- Nike with Wipro for: Retail
- Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) for: Public Sector
- Carnival Cruise Lines for: Services
- Avaya for: Telecommunications
Overall Award Winner
- Carnival Cruise Lines for: A Strategic Approach to Data Integration
Winners Speak Up About Their Projects
"We believe that all our services and product offerings must ultimately end with meeting the needs of the consumer and the community. We recognized opportunities for improvement by addressing some of the challenges we were facing -- redundant/replicated data, a lack of historical data and an inflexible ERP/ETL solution. Working with Informatica and Teradata has given us the ability to significantly meet these challenges head on, in order for us to reach our goal of increased operational efficiencies across the Pharmacy business."
-- Brett Hart, Application Manager, API Pharmacy Division
"In the Asset Servicing domain, Informatica streamlined the merger integration between The Bank of New York and Mellon Financial Corporation. If we had continued down the hand-coded COBOL route and ignored the Informatica real-time integration solution, it would have taken more effort and 'time to market' to complete this high visibility Asset Servicing solution. In comparison to other tools in the market, Informatica offered us the breadth of flexibility, rapid time-to-market development capability, and low total cost of ownership we needed for our industry leading reporting system."
-- Davendra Lal, Vice President, The Bank of New York Mellon
"Centene's primary business objectives were to increase operational efficiencies, bridge the gap to real-time business decision making and employ data governance to reduce risk. Informatica has given Centene a consistent, state-by-state view of healthcare insurance members and their history with claims services, revenues and other management information. This has enabled us to respond to frequently changing state requirements where we provide coverage. Being recognized for our outstanding achievement is an honor."
-- Pat Kirkes, Solutions Architect, Centene
"We have always focused on leveraging the many advantages offered by technology for the benefit of all our stakeholders. Our investment in IT infrastructure has enabled us drive efficiencies in all our processes thereby offering world-class experiences to our stakeholders. This award is yet further recognition of our efforts and we are delighted to have been honored by this prestigious Informatica award. Informatica has empowered us to meet our data integration challenges with new insights from timely reports, fueled by our data warehouse, enhanced decision making, planning and forecasting, and a streamlined integration architecture, to service future right-time data demands."
-- Anita Pai, Executive Vice President, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Limited
"Informatica enhances the real-time data warehousing capabilities of the enterprise through its data integration platform. Significant value is provided to ICICI Prudential Life by shortening the decision making cycle, based on real-time operational insights brought about by the robust data integration framework."
-- Debdas Sen, Executive Director, Performance Improvement, Business Intelligence, PricewaterhouseCoopers Pvt. Limited
"NBC Universal operates in an extremely competitive environment where up-to-the-minute intelligence on viewers and ratings are critical. Informatica is the technological foundation for Data Integration that enables us to deliver timely and accurate business intelligence to users who make business decisions that impact our market positioning, operations and revenue. Being named an Informatica Innovation Award finalist underscores the competitive advantages we've been able to gain as a result of our vision and technology leadership."
-- Sashi Edupuganti, at NBC Universal
"For a company the size of Nike, with revenues totaling almost $20 billion, data integration is a critical piece of the company's enterprise architecture -- the piece that helps the company determine what people are buying, what the demand for new products will look like, what the supply chain needs to have in order for the retail stores to effectively sell. Ultimately, Informatica's data integration platform drives how Nike optimizes its revenue."
-- Steve Dennis, Enterprise Architect, Nike
"This represents the third time Wipro and one of its customers has won the Informatica Innovation Award. It is a testament of Wipro's and Informatica's joint ability to deliver high quality data integration solutions to our customers."
-- Pawan Kumar, Vice President, Business Intelligence and Information Management at Wipro Technologies
"Informatica is the foundation of our data quality initiatives which include the need for reliable and effective customer information, order management, and inventory data. With Informatica, we've saved over $1 million dollars by identifying and removing redundant data, increasing our data quality by 65 percent in 12 months. Being recognized and awarded for fortifying our overall operations with data quality solutions from Informatica is an honor."
-- Barbara Latulippe, Enterprise Data Architect, Smith& Nephew
About Informatica
Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA) is a leading provider of enterprise data integration software and services. With Informatica, organizations can gain greater business value by integrating their information assets from across the enterprise. More than 3,600 companies worldwide rely on Informatica to reduce the cost and expedite the time to address data integration needs of varying complexity and scale. For more information, call +1 650 385 5000 (1 800 653 9871 in the U.S.), or visit www.informatica.com.
Note: Informatica and Informatica Data Integration Platform are trademarks or 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.