My Informatica Experience

The purpose of this page is to elaborate on my Informatica experience and background.  Here, you will find information pertaining to my history with Informatica (the company), and PowerMart / PowerCenter (the product line).

I started working with Informatica’s products after meeting the founders: Gaurav and Diaz.  They had 15 employees and had just moved from their garage to a building/office.  Nice guys.  The company had two great product (which grew into PowerMart and then later, PowerCenter).  Their 1.0 release was really buggy, but managed to produce enough SQL to get the job done faster than hand-coding, and I really liked the premise – so I began working with releases of the product on-site.

Nothing major happened until they produced the 2.3 release of the product.  The product (while still buggy) had quite a few improvements.  What I really liked was this aspect of having a repository in an RDBMS that multiple developers could attach to and share work.  This, along with the metadata driven GUI was a real boost to my projects and my customers in terms of productivity.   They weren’t yet listed on Gartners Magic quadrant as a player, as Gaurav and I talked – we discussed what was happening with the company, and what might be done about it.

You see – I needed the product to talk to SAP, and to read/use the PeopleSoft trees at the time.  They built an interface to work with PeopleSoft, and I was able to get my current company (of which I was an employee) to make an enterprise purchase – in fact, Gaurav was able to get PeopleSoft to OEM PowerMart at the time – which also helped tremendously.  Also, it was about this point that I looked around for a user group – because customer support was terrible.  I told G about this over and over again, that customers (including myself) were complaining to no end about the lack of support, and the lack of performance in the tool.

I found the Yahoo! Informatica Worldwide Developers group, it had 10 members, 123 questions, and was created originally by Dan Chatten.  The questions were old, and there was no-one answering them – so I set out to answer every single one I could.  Within a week, I had answered nearly all the questions posted – I was able to find work-arounds to problems like Sequence Generators (and moving from development to test to production), I was able to determine performance characteristics, and ran some tests on “what was faster/slower” within the tool (thus started my performance and tuning with Informatica).  By the next week our group had swelled to 30 members, and daily activity postings.  I continued answering the questions, and Dan C made me co-founder.

As Dan C and I continued to answer questions, and improve the “quality of the user experience” – Informatica released PowerMart and PowerCenter 3.0.  Gaurav invited me to speak at the first ever: Informatique (world wide users conference) in Florida.  Our user group grew to 300+ members in the first 3 months.  I agreed to speak.  Gaurav decided it would be good if he could get me out to HQ in the valley to talk to engineering in person about how the product was used / applied in the real world.  We still had tons of performance problems and a few major bugs that the community was complaining about.  Support still was a big problem at this time.  So I went to Silicon Valley, and had a meeting with nearly everyone inside the company including the engineers.   I discussed the performance issues, the major bugs, and the fact that engineering would “shift” or “change” functionality of specific components from release to release, and this isn’t good – that the functionality of the objects (like the lookup) needed to stay the same from release to release.  Gaurav and the engineers promised to help to make the product better.

PowerCenter was born shortly thereafter, and it was given abilities like partitioning and a few other “enterprise” pieces.  At the time, I needed Informatica’s product line to connect to Teradata – so we began discussing these options as well.  I had met folks at Teradata, and in fact – gone through Teradata Certified Masters Training (internall Prof. Svcs training) so I had learned some of the database features along the way.  This was good, Informatica included me as a liason between their Teradata Connect team and Teradata’s engineering staff.  I tried to weed out the finger-pointing, and get the connect working.  It was nice to know that Teradata’s engineers considered me smart enough to talk to me and tell me the problems that the connect was having.  I relayed this information to Informatica in a way tha I hope made sense to them.  They then began working on fixing their Teradata Connect (which took several years after that to get right).

It was about this time that they released PowerMart/PowerCenter 3.5 – there were major bug fixes, including some performance enhancements (finally) that were addressed in this release.  Most of the community on the Yahoo! group was fairly happy with the 3.5 release.  Our user community had grown to over 1600 professionals around the world in 6 months, and we were active with 30+ questions/postings a day on most days.  Informatica continued to contract with me to consult their engineering staff.

Along side the Yahoo! User group I built my own Informatica forums here, at danlinstedt.com – I answered different questions here (harder questions), and I produced downloadable documentation.  My user group grew to over 2000 professionals, and active postings as the Yahoo! group took a hit.  I was approached by Core Integration to “buy out” my site, and my users, so I agreed and partnered with them – and created the InnerCore on their site.  I moved my content, and all my postings over with the agreement that they would pay me $50k in the first 6 months.  They never paid (but that’s another story).  No complaining here….  Eventually they went on to sell the InnerCore to VIP Consulting Professionals – but again, that’s another story.

During this time, I continued to be a #1 resource for Informatica outside their employee walls (I was never an employee).  They continued to contract me for internal reviews, Alpha/beta release reviews, discussions with management about products/customers, etc…  I had visibility in to just about every customer they had – because I was on-site, teaching performance and tuning, fixing large scale systems architecture problems, handling partitioning and parallelism.  All the mean-while I was working with their Metadata team on PowerAnalyzer.  I helped them establish the vision of PA, how it fit, how it should fit, and what it should do.  It was a great concept, just riddled with a huge number of bugs that kept it from being fully implemented in the market place.

Informatica decided to make me their Chairman of their first ever Customer Advisory Board.  With this board, we met – we discussed the bugs, the fixes, the performance we’d like to see – and then we kicked off the User Group efforts, in hopes of getting feedback into engineering from ALL the customers.  In a separate effort, I worked with Informatica to develop it’s certification program, and it’s Informatica Developers Network.  We (Informatica and I) brought these elements forward to the CAB for review.  They all agreed this was a good idea, and so we pushed it forward into the market place.  The flaw?  Someone inside Informatica had ultimate control over the testing content, and the nature of the IDN.  Eventually Informatica made the statement: IDN must exist only if it can be profitable.  Unfortunately the IDN has faltered because of this (especially the forums hosted on Informatica’s sites) – no one felt that paying for forum based knowledge was worth it.

However, they re-tooled the IDN into a partnership program that worked very well up until recently.  And now they are re-working it again to meet the times of social networking.  I wonder what ever came of that effort?

Along the way I heard non-stop complaints about Informatica’s training materials, and trainers – so I decided to build my own classes.  I had had enough, so Core Integration Education was born.  Informatica also wanted me to teach their classes (on their behalf), so I did that too.  In fact, there was one time they asked me to teach IBM’s professional services organization about their product, so off I flew to Chicago – and taught an internal class to their partner IBM.  I continued to consult, and train at companies like AAA, Nike, Pepsi Bottling Company, and a whole host of other customers.  Everything from Performance and Tuning, to systems architecture, to database design, to the proper use of ETL.

PowerMart was merged into PowerCenter, and became one code line with different pricing options.  We all celebrated – because finally, when a bug was fixed – it worked across the platform.  I continued to teach, write, and speak about Informatica’s ETL product -  I got to work with some of the largest environments pushing 1 terabyte an hour or more into the database.  I was able to work with the performance team who ran the performance numbers/tests at the HP labs.  Very blessed indeed to have such an extensive career working with Informatica.

Along the way their management changed, and it seems – I (along with a lot of my other friends who put Informatica on the map) have been forgotten, discarded if you will.  Even though folks like me brought them millions of dollars in revenue for 10+ years running, and kept their clients from “throwing out” PowerCenter – in fact, turned them around into signing new support contracts.  Oh-well, companies are bound to get big – and I guess this is what happens.

Anyhow, I have a huge background in Informatica’s PowerCenter, and Metadata Manager products.  I have not yet worked with their Data Quality products, or some of their latest acquisitions.   I am an expert at their core product, along with their HA, Grid, Partitioning options, and performance and tuning.

If you would like in-house training, or consulting – please let me know.  I don’t come cheap, but if it’s training (non-custom) I can work with you on rates.  You can also see my custom built version of PowerCenter basics training (Developer 1) and my custom version of Performance and Tuning for PowerCenter at http://www.TrainOvation.com - 100% on-line training.

Feel Free to contact me.
Dan Linstedt
D...@DanLinstedt.com