Many of you know that SSG is an Oracle partner and that we support many clients who rely on Oracle’s Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) product. We have worked with BRM for over 13 years and have some of the most knowledgeable BRM experts in the industry.
What you may not know is that we are also an Informatica partner and that we have a growing Data Integration and Data Management practice based on years of experience with Enterprise data. Our focus is a different from the typical Business Intelligence (BI) services that are common in the marketplace. Even at SSG we’ve struggled to define what our overall focus is, in this area, since BI is only a portion of what we do.
The term “BI” focuses on building and managing Data Warehouses or Data Marts. We can do BI, of course, but there are many other data management needs that we focus on, and which are just as strategic. All of them have been driven by challenges that our clients have faced.
Some of those challenges have been driven by these questions. How well are we:
- Sharing data between our systems in a timely manner? (Data Integration)
- Ensuring we have all the information about Customer/Vendors/Products/Accounts in one place? (Master Data Management)
- Monitoring the quality of our business data so it can be trusted? (Data Quality)
- Sharing the right data with the right permissions with partners, vendors and customers? (Data Federation)
- Having an Enterprise Strategy for managing our data more cost effectively? (Data Governance)
- Managing the growing volume of historical data? (Information Life Cycle Management)
For almost 20 years, our staff has worked with client data in all of these situations. Even before the acronyms and buzzwords, we were providing organizations with solutions to help them better manage their critical data to grow their businesses and reduce costs.
With that in mind we have now strategically partnered with Informatica to extend our capabilities. (Ironically, we have leverage Informatica in the past to implement solutions but never taken the next step to partner with them…)
We are excited about this because Informatica helps us better serve our clients who want to get the most from their data and control costs. Companies spend more than they realize managing their data (or suffering from the lack of data management) and their are great solutions to remedy that.
Informatica is laser-focused on Data Management and all of its complexities. Regardless of where your data resides, they help streamline the discovery, assessment, cleanup, organization and distribution of your information using the KISS principle.
In my next few posts I’ll review the data management challenges, listed above, along with how SSG can address them more effectively with Informatica solutions.
