It usually isn’t difficult to get me to Vegas, after all, I come from a line of degenerate gamblers and my team, the Green Bay Packers, was in the NFL playoffs.  This particular weekend also happened to be the 2015 Partner Forum for Informatica.  Each year, Informatica has a conference for all its Ecosystem Partners, including GSIs, RSIs, VARs, ISVs, and lastly, Cloud (Salesforce.com) Consulting Partners like Silverline.  The conference gives the Informatica’s partners an opportunity to understand Informatica’s Strategic Initiatives for the new year and network with Informatica Sales teams.

Now, my colleagues all scoffed at the notion that I was actually going to Vegas on a weekend for work, especially since I brought along one of my colleagues shared my fondness for games of chance.  I don’t blame them, I would have done the same thing in their position.  Its part of the reason why I had to write this blog, to convince them I actually paid attention during the conference.  I’ll admit, I did skip a couple of sessions while the Packers were playing, but I actually participated in 80% of the Partner Forum, including some very productive meetings with the Cloud Leadership team.

Having attended Informatica Partner Forums for the past 4 years, this year was by far the best for Silverline, or for that matter, any partner looking to either invest in or expand their Cloud Integration capabilities.  While past Partner Forums touched upon Cloud Integration or Cloud MDM in breakout sessions, this year Cloud Modernization was featured prominently throughout the event. All in all, I am bullish about our partnership with Informatica and I am excited about the investments they are making to capture the market opportunity for Cloud.

Here are some specific highlights I found compelling during the Informatica Partner Forum:

Cloud Academy
Informatica Cloud Academy provides the training and competency paths to achieve Informatica Cloud Certification and the highest merit level for Informatica Cloud expertise – an Informatica Cloud Master Certification. We’re really excited for this new Academy and looking forward to achieving our certification.

Cloud Analytics
Informatica’s Cloud portfolio is seamlessly integrated with Wave, the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, enabling companies to understand customers like never before. More than 3,000 organizations are using Informatica Cloud to connect Salesforce to every app – from cloud and on-premises to social and mobile.

“The Informatica Cloud portfolio offers companies the end-to-end functionality for analytics-centric integration which is needed to achieve the game-changing value proposition of Salesforce Analytics Cloud – customer insight for everyone, on any device,” said Anil Chakravarthy, executive vice president and chief product officer, Informatica. “The new era of cloud analytics is here today and together, Salesforce and Informatica, deliver the insights that organizations never thought were possible.”

Growing Investment in Partner Ecosystem
Informatica is focusing more and more on helping their Partners grow through tools like the Cloud Partner Practice Accelerator and the Informatica Cloud Academy. To me, this shows how focused Informatica is on customer success; by enabling partners to expand and improve their services practice by solving problems and delighting customers with their offerings.

Informatica offers a full suite of products on the AppExchange, visit the Informatica website to learn more.