INFORMATICA WINTER LAUNCH

Today, Informatica announced their Winter Launch. It’s a huge release, encompassing the bulk of their vast data management portfolio. As one of the few larger companies out there primarily focused on data management, I consider their moves a bellwether for the industry, and worth knowing about.

Improvements are being made in Next-Gen Analytics, an AI-Powered Data Catalog, 360 Engagement and a new “success” portal, but what caught my eye the most is some Data Governance & Privacy additions. The new Axon Data Marketplace provides a simple, storefront experience for finding, requesting and getting data assets relevant for any analytics or data science project. It allows distributed data consumers to use existing, trusted data assets in a manner consistent with the organization’s privacy and sensitivity policies.

Managing data keeps getting harder as we accumulate more of it, make knowledge workers out of more and more workers, expand our data horizons to multiple clouds, need more of it in real-time and need it all now for artificial intelligence algorithms. At the same time, the role of data governance has expanded.

A top job of managing data must be to manage risk. This includes improving regulatory compliance, accounting for data privacy by design, enhancing data quality, reliability and accessibility.

With so many options now viable for data in some dramatically different cost profiles, controlling cost is now a top job for data managers. This includes improving operational efficiencies, reducing the cost of analytics and improving the accuracy of software orders.

And of course a top job today is to go far beyond fulfilling business orders, and to using our data wits to drive business value. This includes increasing customer intimacy/experience, driving product/ offering innovation and reducing time-to-market for products/offerings.

Analytics are critical to realizing this kind of business value, yet business analytics needs aren’t being fulfilled. An inability to compete on data is a significant competitive threat to many, with the percentage of data actually used for analytics embarrassingly low.

Data needs to be easier to find, trust and use and it’s into this fray that the Winter Release of Informatica Axon Data Marketplace improvements step into.

Adding intelligence and automation to scale democratization, Axon Data Marketplace will now:

• Use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to auto generate the Data Quality Rules based on the Business Rules
• Provide recommendation based on existing rule or generates a new one if none found
• Provide control to the Glossary Stakeholders to define and apply Data Quality checks without having to involve Data Quality team
• Automate data quality assessment and reporting across all sources

There were already many benefits to a data marketplace. Since less than 40% of executives are confident they know where company’s data is stored, finding data assets is important. This leads to greater trust in data, more use of data and a reduction in the cost of operations. The innovations in Informatica Axon Data Marketplace Winter Release will amplify these benefits for the data-driven, and aspiring, organization.