With its new version 9.5, Informatica takes a big step in its evolution from a data-integration point-solution to a comprehensive data management suite for big data, says Wikibon Analyst Jeff Kelly in his latest Alert, “Informatica 9.5 Focus on Big Data Maturity.”  All of the major enhancements and new features are intended to make realizing business value from big data simpler and faster, focusing specifically on three related trends: big transaction data, big interaction data, and big data processing.

Informatica defines big transaction data is large volumes of structured, transactional data in systems like SAP HANA and Oracle Exadata. Informatica extends data integration capabilities including support for data formats and standards used in large verticals such as financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, and government to these database systems.

Big interaction data includes data from social media/networking and machine- and sensor-generated data. Informatica adds what it calls “social master data management” capabilities such as the ability to pull data from Facebook and other social networks into customer profiles in CRM systems and MDM hubs. The process is highly automated but can be set to require human review, and it only will use data that the customer agrees to share and is terminated if that authorization is revoked, according to Informatica VP of Solutions and Platform Product Marketing Judy Ko.

The big data processing tools are designed to help companies doing Hadoop proof-of-concept or experimental projects evolve those into large-scale production. They include an expansion of Informatica’s visual data capabilities to support Hadoop, allowing developers to integrate and manipulate Hadoop-based data without writing MapReduce or other code.

Kelly says that this last area has political implications, with a for-profit company selling extensions to an open source platform, and he suggests that Informatica should build a larger presence in the Open Source community to support this. However, at this time no equivalent open source capabilities exist, and companies are having problems migrating their proof-of-concept Hadoop systems into production environments without them.

Kelly recommends that companies still in experimental or proof-of-concept mode with Hadoop work exclusively with open source tools. Those ready to move Hadoop to production environments, however, should take a close look at Informatica V9.5.

As with all Wikibon published research, the full analysis is available free-of-charge on the Wikibon site, and readers are invited to add their own comments.