Background

Informatica is a leader in enterprise cloud data management — accelerating companies’ data-driven digital transformations. Over the past 25 years, Informatica has helped more than 9,000 customers unleash the power of data. The company has 700+ partners and a network of 500,000+ certified, skilled developers worldwide. 

Named a leader in five different Gartner Magic Quadrants, Informatica also has a long history of working closely and successfully with the industry analyst community. Given the key role analysts play in influencing customers’ decision-making and market perception, it’s important for Informatica’s analyst relations (AR) team to constantly build and maintain analyst relationships, to help maintain this track record of success.

Challenge

With a variety of solutions — from data engineering, to data quality and governance, to integration platform as a service (iPaaS), to master data management and more — serving customers across all industries, Informatica competes in a large number of markets, and is relevant to a large number of analysts. Tracking all these analysts (along with their current and upcoming research, requests, and history with Informatica) and keeping them well-informed aren’t easy tasks… but they’re important ones. As Informatica grew organically and through acquisitions, its universe of relevant analysts continued to multiply. 

The manual processes Informatica used to find and monitor analysts — and track and report on interactions — couldn’t keep pace. These processes had become cumbersome, time-intensive and error-prone, with critical data siloed in Excel spreadsheets, emails and network file shares across the company, with very little automation and workflow. It was often difficult to quickly access full, detailed histories of past analyst interactions and accurately determine next steps. Plus, requests for AR metrics and internal reports ate up too much precious time. The team was seeking a way to improve productivity.

Solution

To improve and expedite tracking, reporting and workflows, Informatica turned to ARInsights. With ARInsights’ flagship ARchitect platform, companies can more effectively manage their AR programs and build valuable relationships. ARchitect includes a comprehensive, continuously updated database, with more than 7,600 analysts from more than 1,000 different firms. Informatica also uses ARchitect’s interaction management features to organize, plan and coordinate analyst interactions, and track and measure program success.

Results

Today, Informatica communicates with about 280 analysts at more than 50 firms — averaging 1,500 interactions a year across 10 different product lines. ARinsights helps the AR team manage and scale those efforts — increasing efficiency and productivity, and enabling Informatica to rapidly identify new, relevant analysts (especially useful as the company makes acquisitions in new areas).

For Informatica, the benefits of using ARchitect were immediate and dramatic:

  • Easier and enhanced reporting — Monthly reports on analyst interactions and activity that used to take four to five hours to generate are now cranked out in 15 minutes, according to Peggy O’Neill, the company’s VP of industry analyst relations. 
  • Comprehensive tracking — Informatica can now centrally and easily track analyst interactions by product, region, analyst and more. 
  • Fostering relationships — Informatica also makes regular use of ARchitect to create custom analyst groups, to better manage relationships across its large product portfolio. 
  • Effective emails — With ARchitect’s Outlook add-in, O’Neill’s team can enhance productivity, referencing entire conversation histories in one click and synchronizing calendar entries with interactions in ARchitect. In addition, ARchitect’s email function makes it easy to create, send and track emails to predefined analyst groups. This is also useful at Informatica-hosted analyst events, enabling Informatica to quickly send update emails (such as with scheduling information) to event-specific groups. 
  • Targeting newer analysts — Informatica can use ARchitect to rapidly identify a wide range of analysts that cover relevant areas and push out updates to them on a regular basis — helping create new relationships, fortify current ones, and drive positive coverage and recommendations. The company’s AR team also plans to use ARchitect’s briefing book functionality in the future, to more easily prepare executives for meetings with analysts. 

For more information on Informatica’s successful AR program and use of ARInsights: