Amid predictions that heads of marketing will soon outspend heads of IT on technology, Informatica LLC is rolling out a version of its Intelligent Data Lake integration and analysis platform targeted specifically at marketers. And in the spirit of eating one’s own dog food, it said it has tested the new Marketing Data Lake product inside its own walls for the past nine months.

“It has often been difficult for marketers to justify investments, which is why we set out to build a more accountable and agile marketing machine,” said Franz Aman, senior vice president of marketing at Informatica. “The results have been transformational.”

Marketing Data Lake is aimed at the problem many marketers face in trying to patch together data from a wide variety of operational, analytical and unstructured sources. This plays well to Informatica’s traditional strength as a data Switzerland that can understand and combine formats from different sources. “Seventy-five percent of big data projects aren’t delivering value because customers have no way to tie things together,” said Informatica CPO Amit Walia. “They’re cobbling it together. We connect to any kind of database and application type and understand that data.”

As an example of the value of that integration, Informatica said its marketers now use heat maps to detect spikes in Web traffic and other marketing engagements, such as email click-throughs at the account level. This enables more targeted follow-up by telesales people with details about the specific products customers have shown interested in. Informatica said it’s also using the platform to continually mine for promising prospect interactions, and to review, analyze and evaluate its marketing activities for ROI purposes.

Marketing Data Lake can be used to consolidate data across popular marketing platforms from Marketo Inc., Salesforce.com Inc., Adobe Systems Inc.’s Analytics and others. It accommodates predictive lead scoring from Lattice Engines Inc., demographic and social data from Demandbase Inc. and visualizations from Tableau Software Inc.  The platform can also tap into and store semi-structured data, such as Salesforce text fields, and unstructured data, such as text from Twitter feeds and other social media data, the company said.

Flexible integration makes the analytics process exploratory and recursive with the option of formalizing the capture of  important data. “As analysts find stuff they didn’t know, they can prepare it in our data preparation utility and put it back into the lake,” Walia said. “Behind the scenes all kinds of maps are generated, so if the analyst wants to operationalize data he can do it with one click.”

Informatica said the Marketing Data Lake is particularly useful for account-based marketing, the hot new discipline that combines data from different sources to generate a rich profile of prospects at the account level. It’s also useful for segmentation/personalization and analysis of forms abandonment.

Informatica went private in a $5.3 billion deal last summer, taking investments from Microsoft and Salesforce in the process. Walia said the company’s three-pillared product strategy is to build best-of-breed products that can handle all types of structured, unstructured and semi structured data, make its platform metadata-driven to connect data across the enterprise in a single view and to make its applications end-user-friendly while maintaining full IT governance and control.

Vishal Bamba, vice president of innovation and architecture at customer Transamerica Corp.  said, “We’ve been able to reduce the time it takes to integrate and relate customer information into an end-to-end customer journey from weeks to hours.”

Availability is scheduled for the second or third quarter. The inner workings are detailed in a free book, The Marketing Data Lake, or How a New Generation of Marketing Analytics (and a Big Data Mindset) Changes… Absolutely Everything.

Photo by Francis Vallance via Flickr CC.