Informatica Corp. is doubling down on its Intelligent Data Management Cloud with a series of announcements today at its Informatica World conference in Las Vegas.

They include expanded artificial intelligence capabilities, vertical market features and a broader scope of master data management products. The announcements come as the company is completing what it says is a full shift to an all-cloud business model, a campaign that is been ongoing for the past seven years.

“We built IDMC from scratch and have gone from zero dollars in subscriptions to more than half a billion dollars,” said Informatica Chief Executive Amit Walia. With renewal rates of well over 90%, he added, “we’re a very sticky business.”

Cloud enticements

In line with the transition, Informatica is launching a cloud modernization initiative to help customers transition from its on-premises PowerCenter to IDMC. Cloud Data Integration for PowerCenter is described as a onetime, low-touch upgrade that enables PowerCenter users to move to the cloud up to six times faster while reusing all of their existing artifacts and realizing up to 20-fold cost savings.

Informatica is also joining the parade of companies that are integrating generative artificial intelligence into their products. The company is enhancing its Claire intelligent metadata automation engine with Generative Pre-trained Transformer technology of the type used in the popular ChatGPT question-answering application.

Claire currently processes 54 trillion monthly transactions and houses 23 petabytes of metadata. The addition of GPT can dramatically simplify and speed enterprise data management, the company said. Claire GPT replaces technical queries with natural language questions and thereby broadens the base of potential users and self-service applications. The company said GPT integration can result in up to an 80% reduction in time spent on data management tasks. Claire GPT will be integrated into IDMC during the second half of the year.

Informatica is also extending its existing AI copilot capabilities to include generated classifications with no manual inputs, inferred data lineage, multicolumn completeness analysis and automatic mapping. “Once customers turn on [Claire GPT] we can scout their entire enterprise and bring all the metadata into one place so you can start making decisions against it,” said Walia said.

ESG support

In a bid to court more customers in vertical industries, the company is also launching a set of capabilities specific to the environmental, social and governance principles most organizations now follow as part of their sustainability initiatives. IDMC for ESG Sustainability covers the full data lifecycle, including discovery, ingestion, integration of data and applications, quality improvement, consolidated data view, governance, privacy, and data sharing and democratization.

“We’ve not focused a lot of verticalization before because we did a lot of that work through system integrators,” Walia said. “But in the current world, customers want a lot of stuff out of the box. The user interface for data governance may be the same across industries, but how you surface it is different for pharmaceuticals and retailers?”

IDMC for ESG Sustainability helps companies access and integrate data to support regulatory compliance, achieve comprehensive views of ESG data and measure the impact of ESG initiatives, the company said.

Cloud partnerships

In keeping with its cloud-first positioning, Informatica is broadening relationships with the three largest cloud hyperscalers. The company said its no-code Cloud Data Integration-Free data preparation suite is now available for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Redshift from within the Redshift console. Customers can process up to 20 million rows and use up to 10 processing hours per month for data pipelines and data integration at no charge.

The company also plans to offer IDMC and Cloud Data Governance and Catalog as native services on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud, making it easier for Azure customers to access, provision, onboard, configure and manage IDMC from within the Azure portal.

Finally, Informatica’s Intelligent Master Data Management software-as-a-service application will be made available natively on Google LLC’s Cloud and IMDC will become a native service on Google Cloud in Europe.

Photo: Informatica