Everything you always wanted to Know about HIPPO but ...It's great when you get asked a challenging question which actually really helps you to explain what's unique about your product. Shailesh Chaudhri did this yesterday in a related Informatica Group. Shailesh asked ?Mark, I believe HIPPO is a great product but then does it just not fetch all this information from the Informatica Repository? Why invest so much when Informatica Reporting services, connected to the repository gives nearly similar results. A few tweaks here and there and you get Dashboards created which give you the necessary information.?In my reply I agreed with Shailesh that Informatica has some great tools and let him know that this question arises quite regularly during webex demonstrations and conversations with prospective customers. I think that one of our existing customers from a major global bank put it best when he said that the Informatica solution and HIPPO are like two sides of a coin: the Informatica tools focus on the Informatica repository and the HIPPO solution looks outward from the Repository to what is happening in the infrastructure around Informatica. And you know what? I think he hit the nail on the head. Only 25% of the information that HIPPO provides comes from Informatica and the remaining 75% comes from the Host CPUs, Memory, I/O, Storage and the databases that your Powercenter processes interact with. The unique thing about HIPPO is that it puts this information into the context of Informatica and of your own projects. Let's take an example; if you have an application called Finance Data Warehouse which is made up of various Informatica processes, stored procedures and scripts then HIPPO allows you to create a logical grouping of these processes, Informatica and non-Informatica alike, and then produce a deep-grained analysis of the performance, cost and efficiency of this project and the trends of all of these key metrics. This isn't available in the Informatica Reporting Services tool because its focus, good though it is, is on the Informatica repository.All of the information that HIPPO stores is held in an open data model in a database of your choice so if you would like to use Infa Reporting Services to build your own reports rather than use our browser-based reports then that's great. We are completely open about our data model so anyone who use Reporting services on HIPPO's Repository gets our full support!So, thanks Shailesh, yours was a really perceptive question that gets to the heart of what's different about HIPPO!

?There's an Abundance of Data but a shortage of thinking about Data?.

This is a line from Monday's presentation by Steve Levitt, the author of FREAKONOMICS, at TeraData Partners 11. His presentation has been a real hit if the Twitter traffic is anything to go by. The flow of tweets on #TDPUG11 dried up for a while and then there was a deluge. This is the new metric of a quality presentation; when a presentation is so good that it ?stops the traffic? on Twitter! Steve?s presentation is worth a whole article in it's own right but let's focus on that one line ? ?there's an abundance of Data but a shortage of thinking about Data?. I?d been reading recently about Process BI: the marrying of Business Process Management techniques and BI. It's an idea that has been around for a while but what struck me was the thought that IT gladly helps the business develop these types of applications to improve business operational efficiency by identifying unnecessary costs or to find ways to increase customer satisfaction. Read more at http://tinyurl.com/66lokm4

A great artice on HIPPO in September's Inside Reference Data - one of the top financial tech publications in the City of London; Assertive Software to Upgrade Informatica Performance Tool Author: Carla Mangado Inside Reference Data | 08 Sep 2011 | 16:45 Category: Data Management Firms aim to make data visualization user-specific Assertive Software plans to release version 3 of Hippo, its performance profiling and capacity planning tool for Informatica?s PowerCenter product, this October, Inside Reference Data has learned....see the whole artice at http://www.waterstechnology.com/inside-reference-data/news/2106814/assertive-software-upgrade-informatica-performance-tool

What do we, as Informatica Developers, Architects, PMs and Hub Administrators need to do to make the Factory model of Data Integration work? There are few who would argue that John Schmidt and David Lyle have not successfully made the case for the Factory method as the key Data Integration model for this decade in their book ?Lean Integration: An Integrated Factory approach to Business Agility?. It is clear too that Informatica have firmly aligned their methodology with this approach. So is the wider Informatica community ready to make the great leap forward to the Factory model? Well yes, I believe it is, but first it needs to take the covers off and let a little light in! Consider the challenges of applying Toyota's Lean model, which lies behind the Factory model, to the working practices of the average Data Integration team. Lean argues for the continuous application of nine principles. No.7, for example, the ?Visual Management? principle, states that system operations should be transparent so that everyone can see and understand what is happening. Is this common or even possible in a Data Integration environment? Rarely. Until now much has been left un-monitored until problems manifest themselves as system failures or schedule overruns. It is time to recognise that times have changed. New tools have emerged that enable the Factory aim of continuous improvement supported by continuous measurement and feedback. Data Integration teams can now specify the quality measures and performance standards that applications must maintain in their environment. New advances mean that quality and performance attainment can be monitored and communicated constantly using the new generation of visual tools available to Informatica development teams, support staff and Hub administrators. By putting the tools and the targets together then we produce the kinds of automated feedback loops that enable the applications we build to ultimately create customer value, reduce costs and increase profitability. HIPPO is the first tool of this new generation of applications to bring an Informatica focus to performance monitoring of Data Integration processes, environments and resource usage using data visualisation techniques. More tools are emerging which focus on code quality and testing each sharing the same principle: unless we measure then we cannot improve and unless we measure constantly then continuous improvement is not possible. If you are considering implementing a Factory model then take the opportunity to include continuous performance monitoring to achieve more than just a point-in-time success in reducing costs and getting maximum value from your Data Integration environment.www.seethehippo.com

HIPPO's hub management module gets your recharge model 100% right, 100% of the time. We produce summary reports of project usage by your chosen timeframe to enable you to aggregate project recharge totals, we produce detailed reports to enable you to drill down to the individual workflows and sessions to view their usage as an overall percentage of the whole. We can even summarise the critical failure picture for the month to help you identify which projects consume most out-of-hours support costs.Whether you are a Grid Administrator or a member of a project team who relies on a shared Grid environment or an analyst estimating the Informatica costs of a new business initiative then consider HIPPO's unique Hub Manager functionality to optimise your recharge process and get the most out of your Grid environment.

HIPPO has just been awarded the Informatica Marketplace Seal of Approval! This means that it has undergone rigorous lifecycle testing and validation of up to 30 days by Informatica Global Customer Support. This comprehensive validation process is based on 7 levels of criteria that include a review of the Block's functional specifications; assessment of architecture; validation of use cases with end-to-end demos; check of product availability and system reqs; black box testing, stability testing stress testing and performance testing; installation, documentation and deployment procedures.

The next level I guess is to be able to also manage the resources by setting limits on CPU/memory certiain services can use. This could be very valuable in big organizations and as SaaS is gaining importance.

We're working on some fantastic updates for HIPPO. We're always keen to hear from the community about how we can improve HIPPO - get in touch!