CANAL+ Group Stays in Sync With Customers Via Informatica Data Integration Platform

CANAL+ Group Stays in Sync With Customers Via Informatica Data Integration Platform

Leading French pay-TV company using Informatica PowerCenter and PowerExchange to synchronize back-office and front-office systems for enhanced customer responsiveness

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ:INFA), a leading provider of data integration software, today announced that the CANAL+ Group, a leader in the French pay-TV market, has implemented the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform and Informatica PowerExchange mainframe access software to help optimize its customer relationship management (CRM) processes. In synchronizing changes to customer data across its operational and CRM databases in near-real time, the Informatica solution provides CANAL+ customer care officers with access to fully up-to-date information, thus enhancing the company's ability to deliver exemplary customer service to more than 8 million subscribers.

Growing quickly in a competitive marketplace, CANAL+ sought to streamline access to information for its customer service centers by improving the performance and reliability of data exchanges between its back-office IBM mainframe and front-office Siebel CRM application. Instead of relying on expensive-to-develop and hard-to-maintain COBOL routines to strengthen these exchanges, CANAL+ selected PowerExchange, which uses advanced changed data capture (CDC) techniques to automatically and non-invasively capture all updating actions to the legacy mainframe databases as they occur. PowerCenter then integrates the updates into the Siebel database so that customer-facing personnel are able to consult consistent, timely and accurate views of each subscriber.

"The Informatica solution has definitely helped propel our customer service project forward and, as such, has been an important factor in our success," said Pierre Gressier, director Information Systems at the CANAL+ Group. "Rather than spending hundreds of development man-days extracting all the data modifications from our legacy system and sending them to Siebel, we have been able to install a product that seamlessly synchronizes the data from our old to our new system in almost real time. We have also gained a solution capable of handling our seasonally fluctuating volumes, and which can evolve to accommodate future developments in our customer care environment."

CANAL+'s Informatica solution currently handles between 50,000 and 200,000 daily updating actions. The entire solution was implemented in under five months: a fraction of the time that an in-house developed COBOL-coded solution would have required, and at a much lower cost. Changes to the legacy DB2 databases are captured by PowerExchange in a manner transparent to the mainframe's operation. The changed data is sent to a Windows server on which PowerCenter operates where it is transformed and mapped to the Siebel system for immediate use. Looking ahead, with this "customer information hub" in place, the Informatica solution provides CANAL+ with the flexibility and scalability to capture, transform and synchronize data across multiple systems, with the resulting data then delivered as needed in batch, change, or real-time modes.

"The CANAL+ Group's use of Informatica underscores the benefits of accurately synchronizing back-office data into front-office systems so that it can be leveraged on demand to drive business growth and customer satisfaction," said Brian Gentile, CMO of Informatica. "Informatica's data integration platform provides organizations with a secure, flexible and full- featured foundation for developing and managing data synchronization efforts that include on-premise and off-premise or outsourced data sources, no matter how complex the environment.

About Informatica

Informatica Corporation is a leading provider of enterprise data integration software and services. With Informatica, organizations can gain greater business value by integrating all their information assets from across the enterprise. More than 2,790 companies worldwide rely on Informatica to reduce the cost and expedite the time to address data integration needs of any complexity and scale. For more information, call 650-385-5000 (1-800-653-9871 in the U.S.), or visit http://www.informatica.com/.

Note: Informatica, PowerCenter and PowerExchange are trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.

First Call Analyst:
FCMN Contact:

Source: Informatica Corporation

CONTACT: Deborah Wiltshire of Informatica Corporation, +1-650-385-5360,
mobile, +1-650-862-8186, dwiltshire@informatica.com; or Radley Moss of Text
100, +1-212-331-8429, mobile, +1-917-583-2349, informatica@text100.com

Web site:

http://www.informatica.com/

-------
Profile: intent