Take multiple spigots spouting torrents of data, add multicloud topping, and stir in pressing privacy and compliance concerns; the resulting beast is tough to roll into an application and shimmy through the window to business value before it shuts.

Informatica LLC thinks it can pull it off for customers by being the best-in-breed data asset management software suite — and a thoroughly integrated one. It’s relying heavily on application program interfaces to pull all the pickup sticks together.

For the last five decades, reliability was all that most customers really wanted from a database, according to Anil Chakravarthy (pictured), chief executive officer of Informatica. Scale and performance have become more important in recent years, he added. Today, connectivity, governance, security and privacy are equally important.

“All these need to become design principals for whoever is thinking about the database,” he said. The company just announced Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for Azure with Microsoft Corp. for data warehouse modernization.

Chakravarthy spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Informatica World event in Las Vegas. They discussed how APIs define Informatica’s latest technology, as well as its growing partner ecosystem. (* Disclosure below.)

API easy buttons for customers and ecosystem

Any data software technology ought to make meaningfully connecting disparate data sources together (in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation and other legislation) a priority, according to Chakravarthy. Informatica’s Enterprise Data Catalog accomplishes this with APIs that correlate data throughout an enterprise and beyond.

“Tomorrow, if you say, ‘Look, I want to know where my European customer data is,’ just go to the catalog, and it will tell you,” he stated.

APIs enable a data-first approach to transcend the mess of scattered data sources. “The APIs expose the data to different applications and different users; they don’t need to know how the processing is happening,” Chakravarthy said. This means data could come from an Apache Spark engine or something else in another corner of the universe. “At the application level it’s exposed through APIs, and they get to use the APIs,” he added

Informatica is building ecosystem integrations via APIs, as well. It now has over 500 partners. “That’s where this focus on being an API-driven, microservices-driven architecture really helps us,” Chakravarthy said. “That way, when you scale new partners, you don’t have to do custom work for each partner — that really helps us scale much faster.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Informatica World event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World 2018. Neither Informatica LLC, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE