David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

Organizations are accelerating their digital transformation and looking for innovative ways to engage with customers in this new digital era of data management. The goal is to understand how to manage the growing volume of data in real time, across all sources and platforms, and use it to inform, streamline and transform internal operations. Over the years, the adoption of cloud computing has gained momentum with more and more organizations trying to make use of applications, data, analytics and self-service business intelligence (BI) tools running on top of cloud-computing infrastructure in order to improve efficiency. However, cloud adoption means living with a mix of on-premises and multiple cloud-based systems in a hybrid computing environment. The challenge is to ensure that processes, applications and data can still be integrated across cloud and on-premises systems. Our research shows that organizations still have a significant requirement for on-premises data management but also have a growing requirement for cloud-based capabilities.

Informatica offers a comprehensive portfolio that contains the tools needed to connect to mobile, cloud and on-premises sources. Informatica’s data-management platform connects to existing on-premises investments while providing data management and analytics capabilities in the cloud.

Organizations also need robust data integration and information management capabilities to accelerate digital transformation and support rapid innovation. Ventana Research asserts that by 2023, more than one-half of organizations’ data-integration processes will be enhanced by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to increase accuracy, agility and speed. Informatica made a big transition by moving to the cloud many years ago. They have successfully migrated their stack to become a cloud-native stack. Using AI/ML, Informatica adds intelligence to data management, governance and security, accelerating enterprise data cataloging, and improving the productivity of data engineers and big data users.

Informatica's product portfolio is focused on data integration: extract, transform, load, information lifecycle management, business-to-business data exchange, cloud-computing integration, event processing, data masking, data quality, data replication, data virtualization, master data management, messaging and data governance. These components form a toolset for establishing and maintaining data warehouses and data lakes. Informatica’s platform includes real-time data integration, data quality, master data management, application integration, data governance, and connectors for social media and Salesforce. Informatica Cloud Integration Platform offers support for both cloud and on-premises data sources, including application connectivity, mappings and templates.

Informatica recently introduced Informatica Cloud Data Integration and Cloud Data Integration Elastic in Advanced Serverless deployment environments. Serverless is a cloud architecture that frees organizations from managing servers or virtual machines (VMs). Advanced Serverless enables customers to leverage serverless computing to process data-integration pipelines. Business personnel can run either their data integration or their Spark-based data integration jobs in serverless mode. This eliminates the need to manage hardware or software, thus simplifying DevOps and DataOps, allowing developers to focus on business logic and deploy new data pipelines quickly.

Informatica also announced updates to its Intelligent Data Platform, adding in serverless capabilities for cloud data warehousing and data lakes, enabling application developers to focus on business logic rather than worry about scalability or server provisioning and maintenance. The Informatica Intelligent Data Platform is built on a microservices-based, API-driven and AI-powered architecture. This type of architecture provides the scalability needed for cloud-based services allowing various components within the platform to scale independently as dictated by the workloads. Serverless is easy to deploy, can rapidly spin up an application, and offers improved flexibility and scalability. With serverless offerings, Informatica is staying on top of the trends in cloud-computing architectures.

Informatica’s CLAIRE engine uses AI/ML techniques and metadata capabilities of the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform to accelerate and automate core data-management and governance processes. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog (EDC) is an AI-powered data catalog that provides a machine-learning-based discovery engine to scan and catalog data assets across cloud and on-premises. The Informatica EDC creates a "catalog of catalogs" with AI-driven data discovery across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, providing broad metadata connectivity to support organizations in driving their data-driven digital transformations.

Informatica has rearchitected its products to be based around microservices, which is helpful for operating and scaling in the cloud. They have also invested in bringing the entire portfolio to the cloud. As a result, nearly any organization can use Informatica products for its data integration, management and governance requirements.

Organizations that have multiple data-management requirements, such as data integration, master data management, data quality and data catalog, should consider Informatica when evaluating vendors. Informatica offers a breadth of capabilities which are readily available in the cloud with support for on-premises as well. Organizations that have just started migrating to the cloud can also consider Informatica for their transition. With such a wide portfolio of products, make sure to review the various components of Informatica to select the ones that best suit the needs of your organization.

Regards,

David Menninger