OPTIMIZING BUSINESS VALUE WITH HYBRID APPS

An Informatica eBook April 4, 2014

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Table of Contents

03 04 05 06 07page page page page page

08 09 10 11 12page page page page page

Who is this eBook for?

Introduction The Genie Is Out Of The Bottle

IT and Business: The New Partnership

IT and Business: No More Silos

Hybrid – Not Just for Cars

Working The Way That You Work

Beyond Browsing New Data + New Thinking = New Value

The New Data Democracy

Who is this eBook for?

This eBook is intended for information technology and line of business executives and managers who are concerned on driving alignment between IT and business to maximize the impact and value of hybrid (mixed on-premise and cloud) applications to their organization.

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Introduction “Innovation is a continuum. You have to think about how the world is evolving and transforming. Are you part of the continuum?”

Marc Benioff interviewed for Forbes, September 2012.

SalesforceTM was as revolutionary as Salesforce.com promised it would be. Salesforce proved the cloud’s viability as a reliable enterprise application platform that could scale. More important, Salesforce broke the mold of complex, IT-controlled applications and put a powerful, flexible application in the hands of business users. And as Salesforce.com’s range of applications grew from sales, to support, to development, it became a force that IT had to understand and integrate into their existing application landscape.

At the same time Salesforce.com came of age, so did the web and mobile computing. Powered by

increasingly inexpensive bandwidth, new cloud-based business applications – many of which leveraged characteristics of apps like Facebook and Twitter - became the way that most new applications were deployed inside the enterprise.

With powerful departmental or point solutions and monthly subscription fees that could be charged to their company credit cards, business users could deploy cloud apps in minutes, not weeks or even months. Suddenly, many business users questioned the role – even the need – for centralized IT.

“With SalesforceTM, you can add a field in a minute. On the other hand. If you can’t get anything to put into that field for six months while you’re waiting to go through your IT process, how does this really help you? If you can’t respond to the data with the same amount of agility it’s essentially useless”.

TOSHIBA

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The Genie Is Out Of The Bottle

The bottom-line? There is no going back to the secure, predictable world of on-premise computing for IT - the cloud is a reality just as mobile is a reality. For better or worse, the genie is out of the bottle. IT must raise its vision from trying to control and manage these new forces to embracing and working with the tremendous potential that these forces unleash. Instead of trying to wrest power back from what some people call “shadow IT” based on line of business cloud apps each with

their own cloud data store, IT would be wise to use their knowledge and technical expertise to encourage agility and innovation and drive competitive advantage.

“Androids, iPads, Google Docs, Dropbox—these and other technologies are everywhere in enterprises today. Often, they enter the workplace with employees, not under the company’s auspices. They may raise alarms, but they also present valuable opportunities to those who successfully harness them”. Accenture, The Genie Is Out of the Bottle: Managing the

Infiltration of Consumer IT Into the Workforce, 2012.

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IT and Business: The New Partnership

For organizations to achieve their goals, IT and line of business must become partners. This doesn’t just mean IT and business getting along at a project level; it means that, top down, business leaders must ensure that they do not inadvertently create internal tension between business users who are striving to be more agile, innovative and competitive, and IT teams tasked with providing higher service levels to the business but often with reduced resources.

That is why this is a C-level issue – only sponsorship from the highest level of the organization can reconcile these mandates.

“IT organizations that do not match the request for IT as a service run the risk of internal customers bypassing the IT organization and consuming IT services from the external cloud, thereby placing the company at greater risk”.

Gartner

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IT and Business:No More Silos

Just as people and organizational mandates are part of the solution, so is technology and, specifically, data management. You don’t empower business users, create innovative new applications and drive competitive advantage by building data or application silos. You need a platform-based approach that makes data an enterprise-wide asset—a platform that gives business users visibility to spot new trends and the ability to meet challenges and opportunities by developing new apps.

An information silo is an insular management system incapable of reciprocal operation with other, related information systems.

Wikipedia

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Hybrid – Not Just for Cars

This platform approach enables a new paradigm where apps are able to access all the relevant data – internal, external, web, subscription and social. This is often referred to as a hybrid model, but it’s probably better thought of as a “source-agnostic model.” The massive proliferation of data –in terms of volume, types and sources – requires organizations to think about data in new ways. That doesn’t mean throwing away proven concepts around data quality and governance,

but it does mean harvesting, curating and managing data in ways that make it easily accessible to the widest possible audience.

In the next few pages, we will look at three ways in which combining existing and cloud data is changing the way that businesses and people work and interact.

"Hybrid cloud is the next evolution in cloud architecture, with adoption among enterprises expected to more than double by 2015”

Infonetics Research, 2014

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Working The Way That You Work

manufacturing, accounting and payments systems. However, instead of requiring a buyer to move between three or four different applications, each with their own data store and user interface, to make, reconcile and pay for a purchase, a data platform approach enables the buyer to manage the end-to-end procurement process from a single, consistent user-interface without worrying about whether the underlying apps are on-premise or in

the cloud, logging in and out of these apps and maybe even relying on a spreadsheet or manual notes to keep track of order and payment status.

No one wants to have to log in and out of multiple applications to accomplish the simplest process-level business tasks. With a data platform approach, new apps can be developed that follow the workflow of real-world business processes and not the silo-based limitations of last-generation apps.

For example, core business processes like procure-to-pay need information from your supplier and product master files, inventory,

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Beyond BrowsingThe world is mobile. “By 2017, 87% of the worldwide smart connected device market will be tablets and smartphone, with PCs (both desktop and laptop) being 13% of the market” (IDC, September 2013). The mobile phone or tablet is the computing platform of choice for the future. That means mobile apps need to progress beyond browsing data to taking action on that data.

A good example of this is how many banks have used mobile and cloud technologies and a data platform approach to change the way that they approach wealth management. Instead of calling a client, setting up a meeting, reviewing their portfolio, taking notes and then running offline scenarios before making recommendations, these days most banks have deployed mobile apps that enable advisers to meet with clients over coffee or lunch, call up their portfolio on a tablet, model different scenarios interactively and then allow the client to select the best scenario for them. This not only saves time but also provides the opportunity for relationship building in a relaxed casual environment.

Apps

Apps made up 47% of Internet traffic.

47%

Browsers

8% of traffic came from mobile browsers.

(comScore, February 2014)

8%

Internet Usage

Mobile devices accounted for 55% of Internet usage in the United States in January.

55%

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New Data + New Thinking = New Value

Combining location-based data collected from a mobile phone or from an in-store Bluetooth beacon with traditional CRM data and social media derived sentiment analysis data is enabling B2C companies to offer customers loyalty-based offers when they pass by store locations. Since these customers are already pre-disposed to buy at these stores, these incentives often trigger impulse purchases that the consumer would not otherwise have made.

But the opportunity of a data platform approach extends way beyond using internal data in new ways. The availability of demographic data, location-based data and social data to name but a few examples enable new classes of apps to be created that provide greater and greater insights into customer desire, buying patterns and location that can be harnessed to influence customer behavior, reinforce brand loyalty and therefore drive revenue and business value.

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The New Data Democracy

sponsors committed to change, visionary business leaders capable of translating change into action and responsive properly resourced IT to make this a reality.

If your organization is ready to put this new thinking into practice, Informatica is here to help you. As the world’s leading provider of data integration solutions, Informatica is uniquely placed to help your organization harness the power of the cloud and mobile to build a new

generation of apps that will drive business value and competitive advantage.

To learn more about how hybrid applications can be cost-effectively integrated into your business infrastructure, click here to download “Maximizing Integration ROI From A Hybrid Application Environment” a new piece of research commissioned by Informatica from Nucleus Research.

Data is no longer just an IT problem. In fact, even thinking about data and data management as a problem is out of step with the demands of today’s business imperative of making accurate, timely data available to widest possible audience.

The first step towards meeting the challenges and opportunity implicit in this approach isn’t about technology - it’s about people. To put this new thinking into practice needs C-level