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Event Summary
"PALO ALTO, Calif., /PRNewswire/ -- Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq: INFA),
a leading provider of integrated analytic solutions for e-business, announced
the general availability of the internationalized versions of Informatica
PowerCenter, Informatica PowerMart, Informatica PowerConnect for SAP
R/3 and Informatica PowerConnect for PeopleSoft software, the company's
market-leading data-integration software products.
This
new functionality strengthens Informatica's global reach by enabling resellers
and distributors around the world to convert Informatica software to any
major language for resale in their local markets. Mitsubishi Electric
Corporation, one of Japan's leading technology companies, helped complete
the conversion of Informatica software to support Kanji and has already
sold licenses to some of Japan's largest companies.
"The
globalization of our products is an important milestone for Informatica
as it strengthens our ability to build market share around the globe,"
said Diaz Nesamoney, president of Informatica. "The upgraded version will
enable both large companies based solely overseas as well as U.S. customers
with multi-national operations to adopt Informatica software. As our customers
expand their e-business operations globally, they can continue to leverage
Informatica to maintain a similar competitive advantage on a worldwide
scale."
PowerCenter,
PowerMart, PowerConnect for SAP R/3, and PowerConnect for PeopleSoft have
been enhanced to support the Unicode standard, a universal character-encoding
scheme that defines a consistent method for encoding multilingual text.
Unicode
enables the exchange of text data internationally and creates the foundation
for global software. The recognized standard technology for internationalization
worldwide, Unicode currently enables the conversion of all major languages
of the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Asia, and the
Pacific Basin."
Market
Impact
Internationalization of data movement products via Unicode support is
becoming critically important to a vendor's ability to compete in the
market. Multi-national corporations will not be satisfied with support
for only the North American code pages (code pages 850 and 437). Multi-byte
support is crucial for the accurate exchange of international data streams.
Unicode
is a superset of the ASCII character set that uses two bytes for each
character rather than one. Able to handle 65,536 character combinations
rather than just 256, it can house the alphabets of most of the world's
languages. ISO (the International Standards Organization) defines a four-byte
character set for world alphabets, but also uses Unicode as a subset.
(For information, visit www.unicode.org.)
User
Recommendations
Customers evaluating data warehouse solutions should ensure that multi-byte
support is included in the products they consider. Even if single-byte
support is currently the only requirement (all data is presumed to be
in North American languages), it takes a period of years for vendors to
add multi-byte support, and requirements may change in a shorter period
of time. Unicode is only a double-byte character set, but it is a good
step in the direction of full ISO four-byte character set support.
Another
requirement to be considered is whether text such as Windows help files
should support multiple languages (Japanese Kanji is the usual starting
point for vendors). Historically, English has been the language of computer
access and programming, but non-English speaking countries have become
increasingly unhappy with this custom and want native-language support.