At its customer conference, Informatica unifies cloud-agnostic data management

TBR perspective

According to TBR’s December 2020 Digital Transformation: Voice of the Customer Research, 61% of respondents indicate cloud computing is the leading technology they purchase as part of their central digital transformation (DT) initiatives. Over the course of the next five years, enterprises will continue to lead with cloud-first strategies — a trend that will be accelerated due to lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. As customers move outside the data center, control over IT assets rapidly changes, as by no longer owning their hardware, customers can focus on data to drive innovation. Since cloud migration is the first step in unlocking data insights, Informatica is positioning its new solutions, most notably Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), as the foundation for true digital transformation. While maintaining strong ties to technical specialists, such as data scientists and engineers, Informatica’s ability to enable DT with a cloud-first approach positions the company to expand its applicability to nontechnical influencers and evolve its portfolio for a data-driven economy, which will be underpinned by cloud infrastructure.

By unifying data management with the cloud, IDMC will serve as the connection point for Informatica’s entire portfolio

Historically, Informatica’s Intelligent Data Platform (IDP) has underpinned much of the company’s core portfolio and provided customers a landing spot for their data management, integration, quality and security services. However, as cloud continues to dominate the technology landscape, Informatica’s strategy and market messaging are evolving to address customers’ challenges around storing data in the cloud. While leveraging the same underlying technology as IDP, IDMC takes data integration and management to the next level, offering customers over 260 services natively built into the platform, which can be deployed in the public or private cloud and consumed in a pay-as-you-go manner. Meanwhile, at the core of the platform remains Informatica’s embedded AI engine, CLAIRE, which acts as a system of record for metadata and helps customers derive insights across assets and product modules. The launch of IDMC reaffirms Informatica’s commitment to the cloud and modern applications, as IDMC serves as a complete replacement of IDP, which largely supported traditional software. Nonetheless, with a more scalable delivery model, the release mirrors the modular approach Informatica has always applied to data, offering customers choice and flexibility when it comes to the services that can be deployed on top of the platform, and their underlying data sources. For example, during the event’s opening remarks, Informatica Chief Product Officer Jitesh Ghai discussed how the company’s services are agnostic across infrastructures and data processing methods. An example of this impartiality is highlighted in services like Database Ingestion, which allows customers to take data residing in an Oracle database and move it into storage with an Azure data lake, for example. Informatica’s Data Integration service on IDMC is another example of how customers can leverage Informatica to integrate data across leading public clouds as an alternative to using three competing services from each cloud provider.

Supported by the cloud, Informatica’s platform services and capabilities meet customers’ specific business needs

Customer experience (CX) also remains the cornerstone of digital transformation efforts, and customers are adopting CX frameworks backed by emerging technologies, including AI and machine learning (ML) to complement their back-office operations. CX remains integral to Informatica’s strategy, evidenced by the January 2021 launch of Informatica Customer 360 as a SaaS solution. Customer & Business 360 is one of the core capabilities supported by IDMC in providing customers with a single-pane view of data across key business functions. Other capabilities of the platform that are in line with the main benefits of cloud computing include data discovery, ingestion, preparation, cleansing, records, delivery and governance. Throughout the event, one of the customer highlights was from Peloton (Nasdaq: PTON), a born-in-the-cloud company that has adopted IDMC to support its daily volume of roughly 10 million to 15 million records. Further, the New York State Department of Health adopted Informatica’s platform and leveraged the benefits of cloud-native analytics to support decisions and drive efficiencies during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Emphasizing data-driven business initiatives is a key gap IDMC aims to fill, as the platform not only supports customers’ IT initiatives, such as data engineering and warehousing, but also targets core business functions, such as e-commerce and finance. TBR suspects these core capabilities delivered through IDMC will provide Informatica with a strong competitive position, as the company unifies IT teams and line-of-business leaders through a cohesive data platform. 

What would have been a large gathering in the heart of Las Vegas became Informatica’s biggest virtual event, which hosted over 10,000 registrants and featured talks from customers, partners and industry experts on their experiences with data and the critical role it is playing in the digital economy. Informatica World 2021’s theme of going from “Binary to Extraordinary” speaks to Informatica’s main announcement — the launch of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud — as the company looks to support a variety of data-centric use cases, which are positioned for success when built in the cloud. While Informatica’s neutral standing — as the “the Switzerland of data,” as CEO Amit Walia puts it — remains unchanged, a cloud-first approach positions the company to meet a unique set of challenges enterprises face in the cloud, regardless of underlying infrastructure or deployment method.