Informatica continues to reengineer components of its portfolio to be cloud-native and to bundle components into its iPaaS Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC). Informatica is really at the dead center of the digital transformation movement through data and continues to thrill with new product developments, partnerships and global customer stories. Several items caught my eye this year at Informatica World.​

IDMC components are cloud-native, architected with a microservices architecture, with a flow of metadata and artificial intelligence (named CLAIRE) through the components and with unifying capabilities and search results across tools. Having the capabilities of all these tools in one interface provides an enterprise with insight into what is likely an increasingly complex environment. The new interface is also enabled with more natural language query capabilities. IDMC is sold in a consumption-based model where Informatica customers purchase Informatica processing units as opposed to individual services.

Frameworks are forming around the newly emerging enterprise stack, which includes dedicated compute, storage, data integration, streaming, analytics, exploration, data lake, business intelligence, machine learning, identity management, data catalog, data observability and knowledge graph. Though Informatica will never complete this stack alone, it certainly has a strong value proposition for IDMC consideration as a foundation of the stack, filled out by Informatica’s rich ecosystem of partners which include all the major hyperscalers and analytic databases. This list includes AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Snowflake, Oracle, and Databricks, all of which had mainstage representation at World.

All of these have deep integrations with the IDMC platform to bring best-of-breed cloud data management solutions to joint customers, with deeper integrations across the board announced at World. Perhaps none were more prominent than Google with the announcement of a data loader to move data from IDMC into the Google BigQuery data warehouse.

Three Things that Caught My Eye at Informatica World

Emphasis on Master Data Management

Master Data Management (MDM) is foundational to digital transformation. With so many viable stores for data that have emerged in the enterprise, having common data of widespread interest is one way to create enormous efficiency. Yet, few vendors embrace MDM as transformative. Informatica is not one of them.

IDMC was originally released as part of Informatica World 2021. At this year’s World, Informatica added domain-focused, and quickly provisioned, master data management (MDM) applications to IDMC. This was part of a refreshing major emphasis on MDM as a core component of IDMC. MDM is essential to the new enterprise stack, which is complex and must be streamlined around the build and distribution of data needed by multiple applications. There were several initiatives to make MDM easier and autonomous.

Shift into Vertical Solutions

Informatica also announced pre-built IDMC stacks for the financial services and healthcare industries. This appears to be a direction for Informatica since Jitesh Ghai, chief product officer at Informatica, extensively laid out the need for industry-specific platforms. Many other industry players are following this route as well with built-in best practices and customer-centric features in their offerings.

Leveraging Its Access to Data

Finally, Informatica added predictive data intelligence. With access to 11 petabytes of metadata (32 trillion transactions per month & doubling every year) from customers, predictive data intelligence uses AI/CLAIRE to understand how the data is being used.

AI can recommend data quality rules, the data to use for an application and it can do automatic classification, automatic parsing of data into fields, and retrieving text from and generating description of images. Technology like this makes it easier to alter business operations in response to, say, an environmental flag. Next Informatica will be looking at more proactive measures.​

If you want to make a pure bet on enterprise data, there are few plays left. Informatica is one of the few pure breed data companies out there. Consider that it is now 28 years old and, though they took a hiatus from the public market during 2015-2021 to work on becoming cloud native, it is still intact with a matured form of its original vision and focus which was centered around (still popular) PowerCenter.