IDG News Service — Informatica is launching version 9 of its data integration platform on Tuesday, a release that emphasizes improved data quality, business-IT collaboration and assembling information from both on- and off-premise sources.

New browser-based tools help business analysts more easily communicate their data requirements to IT staffers. The software automatically generates implementation details from those requirements, minimizing the chance something will get altered in translation, the company said.

Informatica 9 also includes data-quality monitoring tools tailored for various job roles within a company, from business users to developers. The idea is to improve data quality by "empowering" different user types to keep tabs on the data they know most intimately.

The release also includes new SOA (service-oriented architecture) data services aimed at helping companies stitch together information from a variety of on-premise and cloud-based applications.

The services build on a string of cloud-based announcements the company made beginning several years ago, including support for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and an integration with Salesforce.com.

Right now, cloud-based integration projects aren't contributing a significant portion of the vendor's revenue, but the company is "well-prepared to take advantage" when those scenarios become more pervasive, said CEO Sohaib Abbasi.

All told, Informatica 9 could raise the competitive stakes between the vendor and larger rivals such as IBM and Oracle, the latter of which made an announcement around real-time data integration on Tuesday.

Informatica also faces challenges from smaller companies like startup SnapLogic, which was formed by Informatica cofounder Gaurav Dhillon.