Data integration specialist Informatica has become the latest software vendor to address the burgeoning software-as-a-service market with the launch of an on-demand service for integrating data held in hosted applications with data held on premises.

The company said that its new On Demand Data Replicator would allow organisations to replicate corporate data and data schemas held in Salesforce.com applications to an on-premise database, without them having to install any in-house data integration software.

Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO of Informatica, said that the new suite would help meet the growing challenge of managing corporate data that is becoming " fragmented between internal systems and externally hosted systems". He added that the on-demand suite would allow firms to "rapidly and cost-effectively replicate their off-premise data to ensure all the transactional and master data is available on-premise as needed".

The new suite will be made available as part of Salesforce.com's Apex Connect Initiative and will further bolster the vendor's partner network as it seeks to give users greater insight and control over data held in its hosted apps.

The move comes just weeks after business intelligence software specialist Cognos also extended its support for Salesforce's applications with the launch of a new toolset that allows joint customers to better report on data held in their Salesforce applications.