Informatica LLC has become synonymous with enterprise data management. Now in its 25th year, it has become one the premier providers of enterprise-grade data solutions in on-premises and cloud environments.

Informatica’s Intelligent Data Platform solution portfolio supports sophisticated requirements of data managers, data engineers, data scientists, data curators and other professionals working in private, public and hybrid cloud environments. As amply demonstrated this week at Informatica World 2018, the vendor has sustained its momentum in revenue growth, customer adoption, solution innovation and partner engagement. Informatica, which was taken private a few years ago, reports continued growth in cloud subscription revenues and now has around 9,000 customers and hundreds of partners worldwide, representing every geography and industry.

Informatica’s business fundamentals are as strong as anybody’s in the data management arena. It offers mature solutions for setting up and managing enterprise data lakes and big data streaming infrastructures in private, public and hybrid multiclouds. It provides comprehensive solutions for the data management pipeline, from discovering, ingesting and integrating disparate data types to cleansing, enhancing, securing and governing it all. And it has a huge and diversified partner ecosystem of cloud service providers, independent software vendors, system integrators and consultants.

Like most vendors in this segment, Informatica has been shifting its focus toward enterprise applications that persist data in hybrid clouds, tap into artificial intelligence, process privacy-sensitive data and manage data assets within democratized environments by a new breed of professional that the company refers to as “citizen integrators.”

Demonstrating ongoing investments in all of those areas, Informatica this week announced general availability of several solutions that it had preannounced earlier this year to help enterprise customers deal with key cloud data management challenges, as well as making one brand-new announcement:

• Discovering data assets anywhere across hybrid cloud environments: To support a wide range of data management challenges, enterprise users require faster, more agile, more intelligent and contextualized tools for discovering relevant data across complex multiclouds. In April, Informatica announced intelligent metadata APIs, enhanced AI algorithms and additional public-cloud connectivity options for its Enterprise Data Catalog. The new APIs gave users one-click, self-service access to the rich content of Enterprise Data Catalog from within their own applications, as well as the ability to enrich their applications with metadata intelligence and data recommendations. The release included AI to improve data curation and classification for structured and unstructured data. And it added new connectivity and single-click deployment on AWS and Microsoft Azure. In this week’s announcement, it has added to its Enterprise Data Catalog the ability to drive automatic discovery of data domains and data entities, discover extended data lineage and expose open REST application programming interfaces.
• Democratizing of cloud data management across the enterprise: Data management teams are expanding to include such roles as data scientists in the lifecycle of machine learning models and other data-derived application assets. Informatica provides a comprehensive platform in which data engineers, data scientists, information security and business analysts can collaborate with minimal friction on common ML and other data analytics pipelines, both massive-ingest batch and real-time streaming, within an end-to-end DevOps framework. To serve the increasingly democratized enterprise data landscape, Informatica this week announced the general availability of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services or IICS. Preannounced in March, IICS is an integration platform as a service, or iPaaS, that provides a consistent look and feel across all experiences tailored to diverse user roles through a common user interface shell. It supports comprehensive big data discovery, management and automation in a self-service and serverless cloud integration hub. IICS includes services for integrating data and applications within private and hybrid multiclouds, as well as in B2B environments. It provides comprehensive services for enterprise-grade data quality and governance, master data management and API management. The solution leverages Informatica’s metadata-rich CLAIRE engine for data discovery, integration, lineage, catalog and other AI-powered iPaaS capabilities. IICS also provides a broad range of connectivity with more than 150 connectors for simplified, plug-and-play connectivity across multicloud and hybrid applications, without writing a single line of code. Users can also leverage a service connector within the platform to configure connectivity and join others that have integrated with thousands of endpoints.
• Accelerating agile data integration through intelligent cloud microservices: Serverless computing is a key new paradigm for addressing hybrid data cloud requirements. In these and other cloud computing environments, microservices provide stateless, event-driven and asynchronous access to key application functions. This week, Informatica announced general availability of the IICS Cloud Application Integration and Intelligent APIs that it had preannounced in March. These new APIs access microservices in the serverless IICS environment, tapping into Informatica’s metadata-driven AI capabilities for API and application integration in hybrid clouds. The APIs allow data professionals to rapidly implement processes, services and data integrations using APIs, data sets and event processing without writing a single line of code. They enable easy orchestration of applications, services and data sources to expose REST, OData and SOAP APIs.
• Enforcing comprehensive data privacy protection and regulatory compliance: Many enterprises are racing to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation when it goes into full effect this Friday. This week, Informatica announced general availability of an AI-driven data discovery and remediation solution that it had preannounced last month. The solution helps enterprises to comply with privacy protection mandates such as the GDPR. It helps customers automatically discover new and existing data assets across hybrid clouds, identify and mask sensitive data, and perform risk analyses to determine effective courses of remediation. It embeds metadata-driven AI to provide data managers with recommendations for automating and accelerating privacy and security workflows. And it integrates with customers’ investments in existing Informatica solutions, including Enterprise Data Catalog, Informatica Data Quality, Axon Data Governance and Secure@Source.
• Moving enterprise data assets into the public cloud: Public cloud providers are expanding their presence in enterprise data environments. Consequently, many data management vendors are bringing their solution portfolios more completely into the leading public cloud ecosystems. Informatica has partnerships with several leading public cloud providers: Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This week, Informatica highlighted all of these partnerships on the mainstage and in sessions. And, in the primary piece of new news at the event, it announced several new integrations with Microsoft Azure. It made its Enterprise Data Catalog available through the Azure portal, thereby enabling customers to easily find specific data in their enterprise data lakes and then move it to Azure. Informatica rolled out a new Data Accelerator to help customers modernize legacy data warehouse workloads that they migrate to Azure. It gave customers the ability to migrate data with a single click to Azure SQL Data Warehouse. And it is offering a preview of IICS on Azure, which is due for general availability in the second half of this year.

Though it has a comprehensive solution portfolio that addresses most established data management requirements, Informatica will miss significant new opportunities going forward if it fails — from its own portfolio and/or within its partner ecosystem — to address the following emerging enterprise requirements for managing hybrid big-data multiclouds:

• Blockchain data management: To evolve into the next big enterprise data environment, Informatica should support discovery, integration and curation of data stored in private and public blockchains in hybrid multiclouds.
• End-to-end GDPR compliance: To move away from ad-hoc, tactical compliance response, Informatica should deploy a comprehensive GDPR compliance platform that builds on customer investments in big data catalog, data lineage, data governance, metadata management and master data management solutions and adds critical infrastructure such as customer-accessible consent portals.
• Graph-contextualized master data management: To deepen the contextual intelligence of its AI-enriched metadata tooling, Informatica should add support for sophisticated graph modeling in support of semantic, relationship and other analytics requirements of master data management applications in the cloud.
• Kubernetes data microservices orchestration: To improve distributed interoperability of its own and its partners’ solutions, Informatica should embed an agile Kubernetes orchestration layer for managing data and application integration across heterogeneous multiclouds of containerized microservices.
• Embedded data-management digital assistants: To boost customer experience, Informatica should consider adding AI-powered digital-assistant capabilities — such as recommendation, search and curation — to its portfolio for mobile apps for boosting the productivity of “citizen integrators.”
• AI pipeline automation: To address the most important new enterprise data governance challenge, Informatica should roll out solutions that automate data ingestion, preparation and data-driven model training tasks in the building and operationalization of ML, deep learning and other AI workflows.
• Algorithmic accountability: To help customers respond to mandates in GDPR and other regulatory mandates, Informatica should provide tools, leveraging their big data catalog and data governance technologies, to automate the rollup of data lineage into reports, dashboards and other outputs that document algorithmic outcomes.

One key concern in Informatica’s outlook going forward is how it will be able to withstand encroachment into its core cloud data management segments from key public cloud partners. In particular, Microsoft has a hybrid cloud go-to-market focus that’s equivalent to Informatica’s, as well as a portfolio of mature data integration, governance, master data management and analytics offerings of its own. As mutual customers bring more of their data assets into Azure, facilitated in part by some of the joint solutions that the partners announced this week, how will Informatica be able to hold onto those accounts if they have easy access to equivalent Microsoft-branded solutions?

Here is commentary from three top Informatica executives who were interviewed this week on theCUBE at Informatica World 2018, with many more interviews on that page as well:

Anil Chakravarthy, chief executive officer:

Sally Jenkins, executive vice president and chief marketing officer:

Amit Walia, president, products and strategic ecosystems:

Photo: Informatica/Twitter