Las Vegas :  Informatica Corporation, the world’s number one independent provider of data integration software, today announced the winners of the 2015 Informatica Innovation Awards. Seven organizations were presented with this prestigious honor during a reception on May 12 at Informatica World in Las Vegas. The annual Informatica Innovation Awards recognize data-centric organizations that have demonstrated leadership in using Informatica solutions to help drive innovation and business advantage.

Carefully chosen from more than 5,800 Informatica customers, Innovation Awards winners are organizations that are transforming their businesses by using Informatica solutions to help unleash the full potential of their data. Nominations were judged on several criteria, including transformational impact, creativity and innovation, scope, complexity and environmental or social impact. Organizations were honored in six categories: Analytics, Application Consolidation, Cloud Modernization, Data Governance, Total Customer Relationship and Architectural Platform. The 2015 Innovation Awards winners and finalists, along with their implementation partners, where applicable, include:

Analytics – Honoring organizations that have enabled improved decision-making and growth with innovative, data-centric analytics solutions and access to fresh, accurate and complete data.

Winner: Johnson & Johnson – Johnson & Johnson Finance has embarked on an enterprise initiative to provide people, processes and technology to create an enterprise platform for global Finance data, leveraging big data and business intelligence capabilities. Some key innovations at Johnson & Johnson include:

Data integrations across hundreds of operating companies with an approach for sustainable data quality.

Processing scalability to support very large data volumes and enable rapid access to information / analytics.

Augmented active archival approach to cost effectively store and “data-mine” insights from historical financial data.

Finalists: A leading telecommunications company (Dean and Edwards) and Transamerica Corporation (Cloudera)

Application Consolidation – Celebrating companies that have successfully used data integration technologies to reduce costs, lower risk, streamline IT infrastructure, increase operating efficiencies or simplify integration during complex application-to-application data integration, application data migration, application data consolidation or data synchronization projects.

Winner: Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) – DTCC launched an initiative to transform its legacy Risk systems to a more robust technology while improving time to market, data management and integration capabilities. As a part of this initiative, the overall application interface design was a significant focus area due to the multitude of point-to-point integration interfaces between the legacy DTCC Risk applications. As a result, a hub-based solution was introduced to simplify the architecture, promote reuse, and ensure a higher quality of data integration results while providing a more cost efficient alternative to maintaining existing point-to-point interfaces. Additionally, the hub-based solution has simplified maintenance and support while improving visibility of integrated data for better data management on a scalable platform, allowing future growth and potential usage in other areas of the organization for data integration.

Finalists: Discount Tire Company and Humana Inc.

Cloud Modernization – Recognizing enterprises that have built an innovative enterprise data management infrastructure to manage a hybrid environment, including both cloud and on-premise assets to enable their organizations to create new value through increased business agility, conversion of capital to operating costs and the ability to address new modern business requirements.

Winner: BT – To help unify reporting across many instances of Salesforce and nearly 5,000 users, BT implemented a multi-tenant cloud integration solution across BT Retail, including BT Business. This initiative helps ensure that timely, holistic, relevant Salesforce information is available to the leadership team. As a result, BT Business has been able to streamline and accelerate their bid management process and improve productivity. Specifically, BT was able to reduce a 15-day development to only three days and reduce the time it took to create sales dashboards from a two-week manual process to an automated process that happens daily in 60 minutes.

Finalist: The Weather Company

Data Governance – Honoring organizations that have achieved strong business-IT collaboration and are empowering business stakeholders to have greater control and visibility of their critical data assets.

Co-winner: Cleveland Clinic (Informatica Professional Services) – To successfully transition to a value-based health care model and provide for a better patient experience, Cleveland Clinic established an Enterprise Information Management and Governance (EIMG) initiative. With solutions in hand, the leaders of Cleveland Clinic EIMG began an initiative to inform, educate, recruit, demonstrate value and viability, and ultimately change long-standing behaviors and practice standards. With some early accomplishments with data quality, Cleveland Clinic is on its way to establishing general, widespread acceptance and willing adoption, which is critical to the success of the program.

Co-winner: The World Bank Group – Tasked to reduce the organization’s exposure to fraud, waste and abuse, World Bank implemented data quality and master data management (MDM) technologies for visibility into its customer base and to confirm contact information. Data quality and MDM have also streamlined the bank’s ability to conduct business, moving it away from hand coding and laborious manual effort.

Finalists: NN Group (Deloitte) and Bank of New Zealand (Informatica Professional Services)

Total Customer Relationship – Celebrating companies that are fueling business applications with clean, consistent and connected customer information to boost marketing campaign effectiveness, make relevant cross-sell and up-sell offers and deliver consistent customer experiences across touch points.

Winner: Hyatt Hotels & Resorts – To understand the total customer relationship across Hyatt’s global brands, locations and touch points, Hyatt consolidated its multiple sources of core customer information into a single, trusted location. The effort is now building clean, consistent and connected customer profiles, which enables Hyatt colleagues worldwide to create more personalized experiences across functions and hotels. The new centralized hub also fuels analytics, marketing automation and campaign management.

Finalist: Citrix (Cognizant Technology Solutions)

Architectural Platform – Recognizing enterprises that are driving business agility, developer and business productivity and lower IT and business costs through self-service, data integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) implementations.

Winner: Fidelity Investments – To increase its business agility, Fidelity Investments moved to a shared services architecture that included implementing a sophisticated, real-time Data Integration Platform-as-a-Service for its Asset Management business, dubbed the EZPaaS Data Integration Platform-as-a-Service (EZPaaS DI). By standardizing data integration technology and IT development processes, EZPaaS DI is now the single place for applications to provision data integration that serves myriad needs across the Fidelity enterprise. EzPaaS DI has simplified development and ongoing management, reduced costs and accelerated access to and processing of data. This has made it easier for developers and analysts to discover and use data for their projects.