Informatica Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of jointly developed integrations between Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud and Microsoft’s Azure cloud ecosystem, including the Fabric integrated data analytics platform Microsoft announced in May.

The partnership accompanies Microsoft’s announcement of Fabric’s general availability at its Ignite conference. The highlight is the integration of Informatica capabilities directly into Fabric as a native feature. Users will be able to access Informatica’s data quality and observability services natively within the fabric user experience.

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• Exclusive: Informatica and Microsoft team on native data integration for Fabric analytics

Described as a single platform for all of the data and analytics tools organizations need to build artificial intelligence applications, Fabric integrates the Azure Data Factory integration service, analytics service and Power BI business intelligence platform into a single software-as-a-service product. It’s built on top of a unified logical data lake called OneLake that aggregates all of an organization’s analytical data and eliminates the need for extracts, copies and data movement.

Integrated user interface

Informatica’s integration services will “look like just another Fabric experience,” said Jitesh Ghai (pictured), Informatica’s chief product officer. “Leveraging our artificial intelligence and machine learning engine against Fabric data, we’re jointly enabling our customers to realize trusted data and analytics.”

Informatica’s data quality tools cover such technical dimensions as latency, timeliness, consistency and standardization, along with business logic rules and standards that apply to functions within the business. IDMC provides data profiling, quality, observability and integration with interactions supported by Claire GPT, Informatica’s intelligent metadata automation engine.

The two companies are also expected to announce that Informatica will leverage Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service to expand AI capabilities within Clair GPT. “We’re primarily leveraging the OpenAI large language model to enable a simple prompt-based experience to understand intent and deliver outcomes,” Ghai said.

Informatica said it will release IDMC connectors for the OneLake, Lakehouse and DataWarehouse components of Fabric. The connectors support data ingestion into the Delta and Parquet file formats with SQL endpoints.

“There are multiple connectors across the various services within Fabric to move and process data on Fabric as well as to derive metadata from data stored in Fabric so it can governed,” Ghai said. “This is all done through the native interfaces that Fabric brings to the market.”

The nonexclusive arrangement allows existing Informatica customers to procure services directly from the vendor or through the Azure Marketplace Using Azure credits.

Photo: SiliconANGLE