Informatica World tour 9 in Houten

Today i went to the Informatica world tour 9 seminar in Houten, Netherlands. Why,well i wanted to know more about the strategy of Informatica. Overall you can say that the strategy of Informatica is focusing on the same points as Microsoft does. They both talk about Master Data Management (MDM), they both talk about Complex Event Processing (CEP), real time and self service BI.

I'm reading quite some stuff in other blogs about the "more versions of the truth" (not single) and real time processing (not datawarehousing). So what is this about? Why are vendors/analysists (and Informatica) saying this? Are there developments which supports this movement? I think there are a couple of developments on the market:
* Hardware is increasingly faster and networks are increasing faster.
* The need for agility of organisations.
Why is one version of the truth debated? Should we have multiple versions of the truth? should we go back to the multiple logic in multiple reports?

All of the above has to do with that the datawarehouse, as we know it today, will not be the one version of the truth, but could/would be onesource for the reports. Informatica is setting the datawarehouse a side and says that it's a source like any other. Perhaps a bit cleansed, uniformed, etc, but a source like any other. Informatica puts their tools in the middle (who doesn't).

An IDC speakers (Martin Canning) told multiple times that real time processing is coming in next years. Informatica processes requests from the reports/analytic tools and decides from which source they gather information (DWH, Source, whatever). Not sure whether it's al real time.

So, i'm wondering what will be the role of datawarehouse in the future? Should there consolidated information stored? Or history for auditing and trend analysis? Informatica didn't talk about this. System of record, i didn't hear about it. Old data? It's ballast and you don't need it, said one of the speakers.

What to put in a datawarehouse and what not? Who is this going to decide?

As my post above shows, there a lot questions to be answered in the coming time. An interesting era (the information era) has started.

So, Tommorow i go to Neuss, Germany for the Launch of SQL Server 2008 R2. Great! See what they will talk about.

Greetz,
Hennie