Salesforce Certification: Informatica Specialist

Okay, it’s not an official Salesforce certification, but hear us out.

Informatica enables you to migrate data from different data sources and transform data according to business requirements. Founded in 1993, at its core, the company is an enterprise-grade extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool used in building out your data warehouse. The company’s technologies are frequently used to migrate or connect data into Salesforce.

Salesforce + Informatica 

If Salesforce is the heart of your business but you’re only using it to manage your sales pipeline, it’s time to think bigger. 

1. Your customer data needs to be integrated across all of your systems
2. Your data needs to be clean and accurate
3. Users need to be able to efficiently access the data whenever they need it

Salesforce enables all of this, empowering your business teams with direct access to data and reporting. Many companies store all of their data in Salesforce, but if you are working with legacy systems, Informatica can help you connect your data, wherever it lives, for a unified view of your business. You can integrate Informatica with many Salesforce products including:

Sales Cloud

Speed up sales cycles, increase agility, and reduce operating costs by synchronizing Sales Cloud with back-office systems such as SAP, Oracle EBS, Siebel, Microsoft SQL Server, Marketo, NetSuite, Workday, and many others. 

Service Cloud

Use Informatica to build efficient client service processes to update case data in real-time across Service Cloud, mobile and on-premises systems. Support agents follow process wizards that automate tasks, eliminate data entry errors and improve their time-to-resolution statistics.

Salesforce Platform

Build your custom Salesforce app more efficiently and safely applying best practices for Salesforce sandbox management. Informatica can help you to quickly create discrete and referentially intact test data sets. 

Analytics Cloud

Understand your customers with data sets populated into Salesforce with accurate, clean, and consistent data from your data warehouse.

Marketing Cloud

Enhance campaign ROI, improve marketing segmentation, and boost Salesforce Marketing Cloud reporting accuracy when you synchronize massive amounts of account, contact, and lead data between Salesforce Marketing Cloud data extensions, traditional enterprise systems, and enterprise data warehouses. 

Considerations for Salesforce and Informatica integration

Informatica has put together a list of best practices to consider for Salesforce data and application integration:

1. What data and apps do you need to connect?
2. How frequent do you need to sync your data – batch, real-time, or, do you opt for a hybrid approach that utilizes both batch and real-time?
3. Who will maintain your integration, business users or developers?
4. How will you maintain data quality?
5. Are you prepared to maintain an intelligent data catalog to help provide order and visibility to the data available to your users, and manage who sees what?

Informatica Specialist Certifications

So, we’ve established this is not technically a Salesforce certification, but a complementary certification nonetheless.

Informatica certification is in heavy demand by enterprise companies who have large databases they would like to connect to Salesforce. If you work with Salesforce, this certification will expand on the methods you know to integrate Salesforce plus enable you to provide additional value to your internal teams or clients.

The Informatica Secure@Source Certification covers product installation, architecture, server management, configuration, discovery, dashboard, user access and activity, security policy and actions, and, anomaly detection. 

To understand a little bit more about this certification, we talked with Isidro, a member of our development team at Oktana. He told us this certification is oriented to consultants who want to be specialists in database administration. It helps you learn how to manage large databases in the cloud, and it doesn’t require code because it’s all at the configuration level. But, it does require prior knowledge of information security, database security, protocols and encryption.

In Isidro’s circumstance, he had prior knowledge of network protocols and monitoring, so he found that section was easier to understand. He recommends 10 to 15 hours of study to earn this certification.

If you are part of our team, Oktana will provide you with some extra resources to help you successfully pass the exam and continue to develop your career with Salesforce technologies. If you’re interested in joining our team, checkout Oktana Careers.