Master of Complexity

by Jason Stamper, CBR

Sohaib Abassi is CEO of the largest independent data integration firm on the planet: Informatica. The firm has just acquired its way into the Complex Event Processing space, and launched a cloud integration platform to boot.

When Sohaib Abassi joined Oracle in 1982, it had just 30 employees. By the time he left 20 years later, it had 42,000 staff and annual revenues of $9.5bn, thanks in part to his leadership of two key divisions. Since he slipped on the CEO shoes at Informatica, he has taken sales there from $219m in fiscal 2004 to $455m in 2008 – a growth rate two and a half times higher than the software industry as a whole. “It’s a good time to be in this business,” he says modestly.

This month, Informatica launched into beta testing its Cloud 9 offering, which it claims is a comprehensive platform for cloud data integration. Expected to ship this December, the company says Informatica Cloud Platform enables developers and systems integrators to build, share and reuse custom data integration and data quality mappings and run them in the cloud. ….

Another area where the company is intent on expanding its footprint is Complex Event Processing, where frankly it is playing catch-up with Aleri, Avaya, IBM, Progress Software, Tibco and UC4. But Informatica’s Abassi believes it has given itself a credible story in the space thanks to its acquisition of CEP specialist Agent Logic in September. CEP helps enterprises rapidly detect, correlate, analyze and respond to event data. CBR report