As Big Data keeps getting bigger, companies are looking for better ways to cleanse, manage and integrate their data streams to prepare them for meaningful analysis. It may be necessary (and exciting) to hand-code and keep servers on-premise at a startup, but as companies grow and mature, they need professional, reliable, powerful services to help them use large quantities of data effectively. And that’s where Informatica Corp. comes in.

The cloud gives powerful tools for analytics

Scott Hedrick, director, Big Data Ecosystem at Informatica, revealed during his interview with theCUBE at AWS Summit 2015 that transitioning to the cloud can give companies powerful tools to prepare their data for analytics. On-site data integration and analysis systems can be brittle, complex and time consuming to build and maintain — it’s a non-trivial task, and there are processing constraints based on CPU power and other factors to consider.

But transitioning also has its tradeoffs: new software to learn, data pipelines to switch over, etc. Is it worth the effort? Hedrick said Informatica is set up to handle these complexities. “You can pick and choose where you want to run it and how quickly you want to embrace the cloud,” he explained. Their systems allow users to re-purpose existing data pipelines to feed into the cloud servers, whether for storage or more complicated techniques, such as data quality evaluation, mastering or native profiling.

Allowing for the integration of Big Data

One strength of cloud systems like Informatica’s, according to Hedrick, is that they also allow for the integration of much larger amounts of data from many more sources than on-site systems, including social, machine, or web log data, and they can help companies put that data to work in new ways. Companies can combine new data streams with things like “traditional relational data or transactional data to get new insights and put new operational systems in place,” Hedrick stated.

Despite talk of upcoming changes to their business structure, Hedrick said that it’s business as usual at the company. He also forecasted some of the upcoming themes that will be discussed at Informatica World, including analytics, cloud modernization, and the way Informatica allows for app consolidation and migration in an agile and manageable way — a necessity for big companies in today’s marketplace.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS Summit 2015.