Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ:INFA), Redwood City, Calif., a
leading provider of data integration software, has announced that the
CANAL+ Group, a leader in the French pay-TV market, has implemented the
Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform and Informatica
PowerExchange mainframe access software to help optimize its customer
relationship management (CRM) processes. In synchronizing changes to
customer data across its operational and CRM databases in near-real
time, the Informatica solution provides CANAL+ customer care officers
with access to fully up-to-date information, thus enhancing the
company's ability to deliver exemplary customer service to more
than 8 million subscribers.
Growing quickly in a competitive marketplace, CANAL+ sought to
streamline access to information for its customer service centers by
improving the performance and reliability of data exchanges between its
back-office IBM mainframe and front-office Siebel CRM application.
Instead of relying on expensive-to-develop and hard-to-maintain COBOL
routines to strengthen these exchanges, CANAL+ selected PowerExchange,
which uses advanced changed data capture (CDC) techniques to
automatically and non-invasively capture all updating actions to the
legacy mainframe databases as they occur. PowerCenter then integrates
the updates into the Siebel database so that customer-facing personnel
are able to consult consistent, timely and accurate views of each
subscriber.
"The Informatica solution has definitely helped propel our
customer service project forward and, as such, has been an important
factor in our success," said Pierre Gressier, director Information
Systems at the CANAL+ Group. "Rather than spending hundreds of
development man-days extracting all the data modifications from our
legacy system and sending them to Siebel, we have been able to install a
product that seamlessly synchronizes the data from our old to our new
system in almost real time. We have also gained a solution capable of
handling our seasonally fluctuating volumes, and which can evolve to
accommodate future developments in our customer care environment."
CANAL+'s Informatica solution currently handles between 50,000
and 200,000 daily updating actions. The entire solution was implemented
in under five months: a fraction of the time that an in-house developed
COBOL-coded solution would have required, and at a much lower cost.
Changes to the legacy DB2 databases are captured by PowerExchange in a
manner transparent to the mainframe's operation. The changed data
is sent to a Windows server on which PowerCenter operates where it is
transformed and mapped to the Siebel system for immediate use. Looking
ahead, with this "customer information hub" in place, the
Informatica solution provides CANAL+ with the flexibility and
scalability to capture, transform and synchronize data across multiple
systems, with the resulting data then delivered as needed in batch,
change, or real-time modes.
"The CANAL+ Group's use of Informatica underscores the
benefits of accurately synchronizing back-office data into front-office
systems so that it can be leveraged on demand to drive business growth
and customer satisfaction," said Brian Gentile, CMO of Informatica.
"Informatica's data integration platform provides
organizations with a secure, flexible and full-featured foundation for
developing and managing data synchronization efforts that include
on-premise and off-premise or outsourced data sources, no matter how
complex the environment.
About Informatica
Informatica Corporation is a leading provider of enterprise data
integration software and services. With Informatica, organizations can
gain greater business value by integrating all their information assets
from across the enterprise. More than 2,790 companies worldwide rely on
Informatica to reduce the cost and expedite the time to address data
integration needs of any complexity and scale.
For more information, call 650/385-5000 (1-800-653-9871 in the
U.S.), or visit http://www.informatica.com.
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