Driving Innovation and Value: Informatica a Leader in Data Intelligence

Advanced technologies such as AI, machine learning and IoT are revolutionizing business operations, placing intelligent automation at the heart of enterprise transformation. This evolution not only drives efficiency and breeds innovation but also underlines the pivotal role of superior data management. Harnessing machine learning and AI to their fullest potential demands robust data management that unlocks actionable insights and drives operational excellence.

At the core of this digital transformation is the necessity to manage and understand data efficiently. A modern AI-powered data management solution with enterprise data cataloging capabilities is critical, acting as a central hub for discovering, understanding and accessing reliable data quickly. There has been a marked development of Data Catalogs responding to the current needs of businesses, not only by embedding new technology, like generative AI (GenAI), but also by broadening their data management capabilities, as outlined in the newly published IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Data Intelligence Platform Software 2024 Vendor Assessment: “an evolution of the IDC data catalog software evaluation into a data intelligence software platform evaluation in 2024, with a focus on data stewardship, cataloging, lineage, quality, and data product hub/marketplace functionality.” ¹

Moreover, developing these broader platform capabilities facilitates the use of GenAI systems in businesses. “Data intelligence software inclusive of data stewardship, data cataloging, data quality, data lineage, and data product hubs (internal data marketplaces) provide key capabilities in support of AI initiatives and the need to deliver AI-ready data.”

As a foundation, high-quality, trusted data is essential for delivering reliable AI outcomes. For a CDO, the ultimate goal is to leverage data as a strategic asset. High-quality, dependable data ensures that this asset is reliable, actionable and capable of delivering significant value across all facets of the business.

This insight is underlined in Informatica’s 2024 CDO Insights Survey, which reveals that data quality underpins the top data strategy priorities for 2024 including delivering reliable and consistent data fit for generative AI (39%), enhancing data-driven culture and data literacy (39%) and improving governance over data and data processes (38%).²

The Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) solution represents a significant advancement in data management by offering a seamless, unified experience in a comprehensive data intelligence platform. It equips CDOs with tools to deliver reliable data that enhances business performance. Informatica was named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Data Intelligence Platform Software 2024 Vendor Assessment. (see Figure 1 below).

Figure 1: IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market.  The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral or minus next to the vendor name. IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Data Intelligence Platform Software 2024 Vendor Assessment.³

IDMC provides genuine customer value by offering six key innovative capabilities that industry analysts have identified as essential in modern data management solutions:

1. Driving Data Management Efficiency Through AI-Powered Automation

The IDC MarketScape highlights the significance of AI, machine learning (ML) and automation in modern data catalog solutions. “AI is embedded in IDMC with CLAIRE. CLAIRE is a metadata-powered AI engine that leverages machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to drive intelligence and productivity across all platform capabilities with context-aware recommendations, automation, and insights.” ⁴ This automation reduces manual effort while enhancing metadata accuracy and reliability, saving time and simplifying the management of large data volumes across different environments. Consequently, this reduces the time and effort required for data integration projects, allowing enterprises to focus on strategic business initiatives.

2.  Enhancing Data Quality and Governance

The AI-powered CLAIRE engine in IDMC automates data quality tasks, including anomaly detection, data matching and cleansing. This ensures high-quality data crucial for accurate reporting and decision-making. IDMC uses AI to automatically discover and classify data across the enterprise. This helps organizations quickly identify sensitive data, ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. IDMC helps organizations maintain high data quality standards, reducing compliance risks and improving data governance.

3. Unlocking Actionable Insights

The AI capabilities of IDMC enable predictive analytics by identifying patterns and trends in data, including pattern recognition, anomaly detection and forecasting, such as customer behavior analysis. This helps businesses anticipate future outcomes, optimize operations and make proactive decisions. IDMC delivers by offering capabilities that transform raw data into valuable business intelligence, helping enterprises stay competitive in dynamic markets. 

4. Connected Data Intelligence Platform

The IDC MarketScape identifies the transition from a traditional data catalog to a data intelligence software platform, aligning with IDMC's capabilities. By emphasizing data stewardship, cataloging, lineage and quality, as well as providing a robust data marketplace, IDMC supports an integrated approach to data management. It automates many data management tasks, such as data classification, lineage tracking and policy enforcement. This evolution marks a significant leap in addressing complex data needs across industries.

5. The Marketplace Advantage

The IDC MarketScape highlights the importance of a data product hub or marketplace, and the Informatica Data Marketplace, part of IDMC, provides a solution that enables self-service access to data, allowing business users to find, understand and utilize data without needing extensive technical skills. This functionality allows businesses to benefit from a centralized platform for data exchange and collaboration, encouraging innovation and accelerating digital transformation efforts. This democratization of data fosters a data-driven culture across the organization.

6. Empowering Business Growth

As a cloud-native solution, IDMC can easily scale to meet the growing data needs of organizations. This flexibility allows businesses to adapt quickly to changing data landscapes and leverage new opportunities. It enables businesses to harness the full potential of their data, ultimately driving innovation, efficiency and business performance.

The IDC MarketScape highlights the unified capabilities of IDMC: “IDMC is based on a common foundation of metadata which every data intelligence and integration function in the platform shares and leverages. This enables integrated capabilities supporting end-to-end data intelligence, scalability and flexibility. The metadata powers AI technology for automated data discovery, streamlining data identification, categorizing, and curation. IDMC has a broad range of data connectivity, depth of cataloging and lineage functionality, and proven data quality capabilities.”⁵ We believe this emphasizes the opportunity for an end-to-end solution that is built for the future of data governance. IDMC provides comprehensive cloud-native and AI-powered data management capabilities, without sacrificing individual solutions functionality such as data cataloging, to meet the key challenges to business success:

• Cloud Data Governance and Catalog (CDGC) combines data governance, data catalog and data quality capabilities into a singular tool for automating data intelligence insights. It unifies the capabilities of data discovery, data lineage, data profiling, data quality, business glossary creation, stakeholder and policy management, and the ability to document and govern AI models and their implementations. CDGC intelligently scans metadata to discover and understand your enterprise data, using AI-powered data lineage that is vital in managing compliance effectively and responsibly, especially for AI systems governance.
• Data Integration accesses and integrates data at scale using elastic and serverless computing, empowering your organization to connect the dots between different structured and unstructured data sources, such as social media platform data, app information, payment tools, CRM, ERP reports, etc., so you can make smarter business decisions.
• API and Application Integration connect your applications and automate end-to-end business processes and workflows, reducing the effect of siloing through intelligent automation.
• Data Quality automates insights and delivers consistent, trusted and governed data across the enterprise. In the Dresner report, it is the second-ranked technology and initiative strategic to Business Intelligence. Operationalizing AI models and improving their accuracy by fueling them with high-quality, authoritative, trustworthy data can boost revenue and profitability.
• Master Data Management (MDM) and 360 Applications enable you to innovate with 360-degree views of data and trusted intelligent insights, connecting multiple domains into an enterprise-wide view of the business.
• Data Marketplace offers the industry’s only cloud-native, AI-powered solution for data sharing that can enable better workforce productivity by empowering governed, trusted, self-service access for all data consumers.
• Cloud Data Access Management can help reduce regulatory risk by ensuring the accuracy and protection of sensitive data and sharing the right data with the right users with protected data request workflows.

Paycor

As a leading provider of HR software for over three decades, Paycor empowers leaders and HR teams at over 40,000 small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to navigate massive technology shifts. Now, Paycor is embracing artificial intelligence (AI), launching more than 20 AI initiatives including chatbots, copilots, virtual assistants and machine-learning algorithms to help internal teams automate and lower costs and support external, AI-powered product lines to drive customer growth.

Goal: Paycor decided to bring teams together by embracing the power of a comprehensive data platform, to manage agreements and certified data workflows. A common data foundation would cleanse, organize and vet data before making it available to business users through a series of data marts and APIs. This required support from billing, customer relationship management (CRM) and finance systems, as well as product data for customer-facing tools and applications.

Solution: The answer was a multi-tenant cloud data warehouse, built in partnership with Informatica and Snowflake. For fast and accurate data pipelines, the team tapped Informatica Cloud Data Integration, benefiting from its 600+ no-code cloud connectors and AI-powered data quality to accelerate safe migrations.

Results: Paycor’s journey also showed a substantial reduction in IT overhead as an upside. The HR leader retired multiple existing data vendors and homegrown systems, saving nearly $400,000 in direct annual support costs. The team also saw significant indirect savings, including an estimated 36,500 analyst work hours, which could now be dedicated to more strategic work. All these benefits equated to a 512% return on its investment in its cloud data warehouse – in less than two and a half months – according to an independent study by Nucleus Research.

“Informatica was our platform of choice because they already knew how to wrangle data from all these different systems into one cloud data warehouse. The flexibility of the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) helps us quickly get data into Snowflake and we don’t need a bunch of unique skill sets or a wide variety of people.” Christopher Eldredge, Vice President, Data Office, Paycor.

(Get more insight into ways customers are finding success using connected data management, from Helia, Holiday Inn Club Vacations and Genesis Energy).

The path forward involves holistic, comprehensive governance capabilities — an evolution from siloed solutions to integrated platforms that provide connected data management for better customer outcomes. Ultimately, this helps drive data-driven digital transformation in modern, AI-powered enterprises. 

eBook: Maximize GenAI Impact with an Enterprise-Class Data Catalog | Informatica

_{¹IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Data Intelligence Platform Software 2024 Vendor Assessment, By: Stewart Bond, Marlanna Bozicevich, December 2024, IDC #US51467224}

 _{IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market.  The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral or minus next to the vendor name.}

_{²The Rise of Generative AI in Business - Transforming Data Strategies | Informatica}

_{³ IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Data Intelligence Platform Software 2024 Vendor Assessment, By: Stewart Bond, Marlanna Bozicevich, December 2024, IDC #US51467224}

_{⁴ IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Data Intelligence Platform Software 2024 Vendor Assessment, By: Stewart Bond, Marlanna Bozicevich, December 2024, IDC #US51467224}

_{⁵ IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Data Intelligence Platform Software 2024 Vendor Assessment, By: Stewart Bond, Marlanna Bozicevich, December 2024, IDC #US51467224}