(BNSF issued the following news release on June 5.)
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Informatica Corporation a leading provider of data integration software, today announced that BNSF Railway Company (BNSF) has selected Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition and Informatica PowerExchange as the data integration foundation for its real-time, Web-enabled goods and services tracking system and other customer-facing applications.
By improving performance and reducing the costs of BNSF’s data integration capabilities, PowerCenter and PowerExchange will help reduce BNSF’s data integration expenditures and deliver further data-driven services that increase BNSF customer satisfaction.
“Informatica will provide us with a scalable framework for leveraging the tremendous amount of data generated by the transportation systems that literally run the railroad day-to-day,” said Jeff McIntyre, assistant vice president, Technology Services, BNSF Railway. “Equally as important, Informatica also provides a unified platform with PowerCenter Advanced Edition that addresses the entire data integration lifecycle.”
The Informatica solution will provide BNSF with a platform for integrating real-time data on shipments and logistics from its mainframe transactional systems. The system can make that information available immediately to BNSF customers via the Web. BNSF estimates the solution will capture more than 50 million data changes per day initially, with minimal impact on mainframe performance, while providing the scalability to handle progressively larger data volumes and entirely new applications moving forward.
Until now, BNSF relied on custom-coded interfaces to access the source databases of its mainframe systems. With Informatica PowerExchange providing non-invasive access to mainframe data without coding, BNSF will be capturing changed-only data. These data updates will then be incorporated into a real- time operational data store (ODS) for end-user querying — thus saving expensive mainframe CPU cycles, decreasing the latency between the update and the data store, and breaking its reliance on expensive-to-maintain hand-coded interfaces.
“BNSF Railway illustrates why it’s not only important to have the capability for unlocking critical data from mainframe transaction systems, it is equally important to do so in a cost-effective, efficient and extensible fashion,” said Paul Hoffman, executive vice president of worldwide sales at Informatica. “Like many companies, BNSF outsources much of its transactional processing, and thus is on a ‘pay as you go’ basis for mainframe CPU utilization. Informatica’s non-invasive mainframe sourcing and efficient changed data capture avoids extraneous mainframe cycles while opening the door for companies like BNSF to find new ways to extend the use of their operational data for competitive advantage.”
PowerCenter Advanced Edition is the market’s most robust platform for enterprise data integration, expanding the definition of a data integration platform by incorporating metadata-analysis and data-ready reporting, cost- effective grid computing and team-based development capabilities into a single offering. With PowerCenter Advanced Edition, companies can realize the benefits of a single platform that addresses the full data integration lifecycle — helping them drive productivity and lower IT maintenance costs, and gain a substantial cost advantage with a rapid out-of-the-box experience.
A subsidiary of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation (NYSE: BNI – News), BNSF Railway operates one of the largest railroad networks in North America, with about 32,000 route miles in 28 states and two Canadian provinces. The railway is among the world’s top transporters of intermodal traffic, moves more grain than any other American railroad, transports the components of many of the products we depend on daily, and hauls enough low-sulphur coal to generate about ten percent of the electricity produced in the United States. BNSF Railway is an industry leader in Web-enabling a variety of customer transactions at www.bnsf.com.
About Informatica
Informatica Corporation is a leading provider of enterprise data integration software and services. With Informatica, companies can gain greater business value by integrating all their information assets from across the enterprise. More than 2,500 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 (1-800-970-1179 in the U.S.), or visit www.informatica.com.