Informatica Seeks Partners to Gain Traction In Fed Market

Informatica is pushing hard to get its software into federal government agencies.

Its data-integration solution, which enables users to combine disparate systems to make information more widely accessible throughout an organization, can help those federal agencies as they strive to meet a directive from the Department of Homeland Security to share information with state and local law enforcement and other entities, said Sanjay Poonen, vice president of worldwide marketing and Informatica's homeland security consultant.

While it's complex to link stovepipes of data at the national, state and local levels, it also represents a wealth of opportunity for solution providers.

>> Informatica says systems integrators' are 'virtual gatekeepers' to the federal market.

"Our [federal] business has really grown in the past four to six quarters," Poonen said. "We've seen significant effort by the government to modernize its infrastructure." Sales to federal agencies make up 10 percent to 15 percent of Informatica's revenue, he said.

Harry Piccariello, director of business development for Informatica's public sector unit, said the company relies on those partners that already hold GSA schedules to sell into the federal government.

"Everything in the federal government goes through a systems integrator," he said. "It eliminates conflict between our sales force and the [systems integrators]," who Piccariello described as the "virtual gatekeepers" to the federal market. "We have three or four GSA partners we use" for federal work, he added, noting that about half of Informatica's non-federal business is also channel-influenced.

IPI*GrammTech Ltd. is one of the solution providers Informatica is relying on to get its products into federal deployments. Dana Poole, executive vice president at the San Antonio-based company, said its five-year relationship with Informatica has been a fruitful one.

"We have significant business with them," Poole said, whose company tallies about $15 million in annual sales, about 60 percent of which comes from reselling products from Gateway, Micron and other hardware vendors. "In conjunction with their direct-sales force, we bring to the table the value-add of the government-procurement process, as well as some joint marketing," he said.

IPI*GrammTech, which also offers application development services, has helped bring Informatica into more than 50 federal agencies and departments, Poole said, including the U.S. Postal Service and the U.S. Navy.

With most federal customers and prospects, "we always find the same thing: Agencies have accumulated a number of databases and operating systems that don't talk to each other," he said.

That's one reason the company is successful, Informatica's Poonen said. "You can never count on one database being there [in a federal network]. You will get lots of databases and lots of mainframe systems. People look to us to say that we understand all the protocols of all the databases," he said.