Informatica Data Integration Platform Improves Operational Efficiency For Dept. Of Ed

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Feb 11, 2002

Administering 70 percent of all student aid, office of student financial assistance leverages Informatica Power Center to improve access to information

Enterprise analytics leader Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA) has announced that the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Student Financial Assistance (SFA) is currently using the Informatica Power Center data integration platform to help consolidate its vast amounts of information to support improving customer and employee satisfaction as well as lowering the cost for delivering student financial assistance.

The departments within the office of SFA are organized in channels around the customers they serve. The Informatica platform is currently used within the Students Channel, the Financial Partners Channel, and the office of the chief financial officer (CFO). Informatica Power Center is used in the Students Channel for administering the Federal Direct Loan Program and in the Financial Partners Channel that deals with student lending among financial partners that include guarantee agencies, lenders, and loan servicers. In the office of the CFO, the Informatica data integration platform is used for financial management.

The Informatica data integration platform is deployed on a Sun Microsystems server sourcing data from mainframe applications and populating Oracle-based data marts housed on HP 9000 class servers.

"As a performance-based organization that handles 70 percent of the nation's student financial aid, the SFA is an excellent example of a large enterprise that can leverage its enormous amount of data by transforming it into valuable business insight," said Geoff Stilley, director, Federal sales and marketing of Informatica Corporation. "We are pleased that Informatica has won the confidence of the SFA through our ability to manage and improve access to enormous amounts of data."

About the Department of Education, Office of Student Financial Assistance(SFA)The 1998 Reauthorization of Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965established SFA as the first Performance Based Organization (PBO) within the Federal government. With more than 1,200 employees, SFA administers more than $60 billion of financial aid a year to college students, about 70percent of all student aid, to help millions of students and families pay for postsecondary education.