Informatica empowers business users and improves customer success in its Winter ’20 release

The new capabilities of Informatica’s winter release make data more consumable for business users

Organizations have a bevy of data spanning their on-premises and cloud environments and a growing number of employees utilizing that data — from more technical personnel, such as data scientists who are using the data to create AI and machine learning models, to data analysts and business users who are leveraging data for analytics. Simultaneously, government regulations around data privacy, such as the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in the European Union, are becoming more stringent across geographies, requiring enterprises have visibility into and control over all their data.

Informatica, through its iPaaS portfolio, can enable enterprises to derive greater value from their data sets and meet these tightening regulations with governance tools. Informatica further defined its value proposition at its Winter 2020 virtual launch event in December, announcing numerous product enhancements and capabilities, including improvements to its data governance and customer success solutions that help analysts and nontechnical business users leverage their company’s data.

As data regulations tighten, Informatica maintains governance while simplifying data requisition

Informatica’s recent updates around data governance and privacy include two key areas of the process: helping customers understand the quality of their data and streamlining their data processing pipeline. The vendor is using natural language processing to automatically generate a data quality maplet based on the functional specifications outlined by a customer’s data steward. This capability significantly reduces time to value for data sets, as data stewards typically have to collaborate with subject matter experts to create a maplet, a process that could take weeks before data can be fully utilized.

To empower business users and analysts once the data is available for analytics and reporting, Informatica created the Informatica Data Marketplace, a feature in the vendor’s Axon Data Governance offering. The marketplace is akin to consumer-oriented online shopping experiences, as business users and analysts can search data by category, subcategory and other filters. Once an employee requests a data set, it alerts the relevant data steward regarding which data set the employee would like and the intended use of the asset. Enabling data stewards to accept or deny access to these requests ensures that governance policies are still being met while democratizing data by giving data consumers more autonomy. TBR expects this will be a noteworthy selling point for Informatica as it engages with modernizing enterprises that are faced with complexities in their data governance growing alongside the number of employees consuming data.

Informatica’s enhanced Customer Success Platform helps customers from onboarding to ongoing

Business-to-business technology providers that will succeed in the 2020s understand customer success is a strategic imperative. Gone are the days of binary, transaction-oriented customer relationships with communication blackouts between product sale and renewal. Informatica understands this shift in business buying behavior, highlighted by new Customer Success Platform capabilities including the DIANA intelligent agent for license and administrative support, personalized recommendations for employee onboarding and training, product learning paths with novice to expert-level training on Informatica products, and support from Informatica experts through Concierge.

Informatica is ensuring organizations are attaining the greatest value from its offerings by scaling customers’ workforces with on-demand training, and once trained, enabling the workforce to solve issues on an ongoing basis via DIANA and Informatica experts. TBR believes these capabilities will make Informatica stickier in customers’ organizations, further increasing renewal rates throughout its customer base.

Informatica has positioned itself for success as enterprises demand more personalized engagement

In an era where customers are adopting best-of-breed offerings from multiple vendors, enterprises need a third-party integration provider that can unify their entire IT environment. Informatica will remain a leading vendor in this regard, as its ongoing innovation will continue to appeal to technical personnel such as data engineers and data scientists, while becoming more attractive to business decision makers with new capabilities at the business user level. Furthermore, Informatica’s investment in customer success will help attract and retain customers as enterprises expect, and demand, more personal vendor engagement.