Informatica debuts its intelligent data management cloud
Informatica on Tuesday is officially unveiling its intelligent data management cloud (IDMC), an AI-powered platform designed to serve a broad base of users working with data in multi-cloud environments. Along with that, the company is announcing a series of partnerships and integrations with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.
Informatica has been in the business of data management tools for more than 20 years, and in that span of time, data has become increasingly valuable, Informatica Chief Product Officer Jitesh Ghai told ZDNet.
"We recognize our community of data-led practitioners has grown well beyond technical ETL experts, well beyond data engineers and data scientists," he said. Now, it includes "non-technical users who want to operate with facts. Gut-based decision making has been laid bare as insufficient moving forward."
As data becomes more valuable, so does data management, Informatica argues. Its IDMC offers more than 200 intelligent cloud services, powered by Informatica's AI engine CLAIRE. It applies AI to metadata to give an organization an understanding of its "data estate," Ghai explained.
The "data estate" tells you about the fragmentation of data -- its location and the various domains of data. "And through that insight," Ghai said, Informatica will "automate the ability to connect to data, to build data pipelines, process data, provision it for analytics... to apply advanced transformations to cleanse that data and trust it... to match, merge and build a single source of truth."
From there, the platform aims to make data more accessible to business users with features like the "data marketplace." With the marketplace, users can "shop for data" much as one would shop for consumer goods on the Amazon marketplace, Ghai explained.
The IDMC is micro-services based and API-driven, with elastic and serverless processing. It's built for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The platform is already running at scale, processing more than 17 trillion transactions each month. It's leveraging over 11 petabytes of active metadata, Ghai said, to drive the data management that thousands of organizations are using for everything from customer experience modernization to supply chain management and financial transformations.
Unilever, for example, is using Informatica to get a "360 view" of their customers, Ghai said. The consumer goods conglomerate is leveraging its data to learn how to deeply engage with customers via their resellers. It's also using data to manage its supply chain.
"More organizations want to be data-led than ever before," Ghai said. "In the old world, we were focused on Fortune 500. In the new world, we're focused well beyond the Global 2000."
To reach as many customers as possible, Informatica is partnering with Microsoft to make the IDMC free on Azure for customers who want a simple testing opportunity. Otherwise, the IDMC is available in a consumption-based pricing model. Informatica is also expanding its Azure global footprint with new IDMC regions in Asia and Europe.
The free service provides 100 compute hours per month at no charge for Cloud Data Integration Services, Cloud Mass Ingestion Services, and out-of-the box connectivity to the most popular on-premise, cloud, and SaaS data sources and applications.
Meanwhile, Informatica is partnering with AWS to launch integrated cloud-native data governance and catalog as-a-service. The solution offers Informatica and Amazon Redshift integration, enabling customers to speed up data onboarding.
On Google Cloud, Informatica is making available Cloud Data Integration (CDI) Elastic, and it's improving Cloud Mass Ingestion and API Management. Informatica's partnership with Google Cloud has seen 135 percent year-over-year growth since 2019, the company said.