Informatica debuts pay-as-you-go data integration service

IDG News Service - Hoping to pique the interest of the cloud-curious enterprise, data-integration software provider Informatica has unveiled a low-cost, cloud-based data integration service, called Informatica Cloud Express.

Pricing for the service, which will be available in January, will start at $99 per month, and will allow up to 250 integration jobs per day.

The offering is the newest pricing plan for the company's Informatica Cloud, which was introduced in 2006. This service allows an administrator to create online integration jobs that fuse data from multiple sources, including databases, flat files and software-as-a-service applications.

The plan's pay-as-you-go model features eight pricing tiers, based on monthly usage. At the low end, users can copy up to 300,000 records for $99 a month. With the priciest option, users can move up to 50 million records a month for $2,000.

Informatica announced this new offering at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference this week and focused its pitch on Salesforce users.

"Informatica Cloud Express is an extremely flexible, economical and easy way to integrate enterprise data with Salesforce CRM and [Salesforce's] Force.com applications," said Ron Papas, general manager for the Informatica Cloud service, in a statement. He noted that Informatica's Data Loader Service, a basic records transfer service for Salesforce-hosted records, has consistently been one of the most widely used applications on Salesforce's AppExchange.

Also at the Salesforce event, Informatica technicians demonstrated how to use Informatica Cloud to copy data residing in Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases over to Salesforce's newly launched Database.com.

For heavier users of Informatica Cloud, the company also offers some additional fixed-pricing models, ranging from $1,500 to $6,000 a month. It also offers a free data loading service that can be used for simple migration tasks.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com