With its grid and federation capabilities, PowerCenter 8 allows Informatica to cater to midsize and large enterprises that are centralizing increasingly mission-critical, real-time data integration projects, said Philip Russo, an analyst at The Data Warehousing Institute in Seattle.

Take Oak Brook, Ill.-based Ace Hardware Corp. for example. Ace began using Informatica four years ago for basic extract, transform and load (ETL) batch data jobs, said Mark Cothran, data warehouse architect at Ace and a PowerCenter 8 beta tester. Ace runs IBM's DB2 database on an IBM mainframe, supported by an NCR Teradata data warehouse. Today, the 5,000-store co-operative uses PowerCenter to translate orders from an outside e-commerce provider in near real time. Cothran praised PowerCenter 8's support of Java transformations, as well as its grid and push-down features. Despite running predominantly IBM gear, Cothran said he hasn't been approached by IBM to switch to its data integration software.

"I haven't, and I wouldn't," Cothran said.

By contrast, Atique Shah, executive vice president of CRM at Churchill Downs Inc., home of the Kentucky Derby, said he chose Ascential's software a year and a half ago in a vendor bake-off that included Informatica. The Louisville-based company uses Ascential software to integrate "millions and millions of daily transactions" during the racing season from seven horse racetracks and 22 off-track betting locations around the country.

Shah chose Ascential's DataStage because of its ability to "talk to our existing infrastructure." Ascential's support and pricing also figured prominently, as did ease of use. "The learning curve was much shorter than in previous implementations. In two and a half weeks, one of my guys was writing his own scripts, doing his own ETL routines."