By Rob Karel and James Kobielus

Strategic partnerships are a dime a dozen in the data management industry. Vendors announce partnership deals so often that it’s a challenge to distinguish the mundane from the noteworthy. Case in point: Earlier this week, HP and Informatica entered into a partnership that is not entirely new—after all, their relationship long predates this announcement—but could be the start of  a relationship of considerable strategic importance to both partners.

What the two vendors announced was a multipronged joint approach to the data integration (DI) and data warehousing (DW) markets. First, they announced that HP “will sell and deliver a set of data integration solutions with embedded Informatica technology,” including the latter’s flagship data integration, data quality (DQ), and identity resolution software solutions. Also, the partners plan to develop solutions that combine Informatica’s software with HP Neoview, a high-end, massively parallel data warehousing (DW) appliance. Furthermore, HP and Informatica will develop horizontal and vertical solution accelerators through industry-specific data models drawn from their respective consulting ecosystems, with principal reliance on HP’s BI consulting organization, the foundation of which came from HP’s 2006 acquisition of Knightsbridge Consulting.