INFORMATICA WORLD EMPHASIZES AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FUTURE
The recent Informatica World Conference was the 20th World Conference and comes on the heels of last year’s celebratory 25th anniversary of the company.
At World this year, Informatica staked its claim in which area will define the enterprise competitive landscape. Informatica clearly sees a near-term disruption courtesy of the capabilities known as artificial intelligence. Speaker after speaker told of how the product set is much better due to artificial intelligence-based revisions. As they said eloquently “ “AI Needs Data – and Data Needs AI”. “Data 3.0” (now) represents a profound shift in exponential scale-out of the data that organizations are generating and need to be putting to use.
AI will start with automation. Enterprises must survey their operations for what can be automated with AI. Informatica tools are well suited for accomplishing this, has recent AI enhancements in cloud/hybrid, 360 engagement, next-generation analytics, data governance and privacy, and enterprise data catalog. For example, the laborious task of data discovery is being automated along with the associated tasks of generating and maintaining data quality rules, and sharing metadata.
Still the “Switzerland of data”, Informatica had major announcements with all the major cloud platforms. Informatica executives repeatedly spoke of “hybrid cloud” and acknowledged its on-premises legacy is still strong, but the path to the cloud is strongly evident.
Their product strategy is now based on three prongs: Best of breed products, Data solutions that unify business & technology and an Intelligent data platform.
Although not a World announcement, something I dug into more was the acquisition of AllSight, which will enable enterprises to drive richer, deeper, and longer-lasting relationships with their customers through enterprise-wide use of customer data and analytics by incorporating detail data into MDM. This is data that you may not necessarily store in MDM. You can get its value into MDM however. This represents an interesting and potentially inevitable step for the emerging Customer 360 market – integration with MDM.
The announcement highlights for the data professional included:
- The Data Governance and Privacy Solutions will provide comprehensive support for organizations seeking to increase business value from their data governance programs.
- Informatica said it will have Amazon Web Services manage the transfer of client data to the cloud with the help of artificial intelligence.
- Informatica to enable commercial users to more easily leverage massive amounts of data for use in artificial intelligence, machine learning and other advanced digital capabilities in Google Cloud.
- A joint data discovery and cloud migration assessment to help organizations assess the data they need to migrate to Amazon Redshift.
Overall, this was a very strong set of announcements and conference at this time for Informatica. Unlike most enterprises who achieved some notoriety 20 years ago, Informatica not only survives, but in many ways still leads in enterprise software.
