Informatica World: Unveiling Innovations to Simplify Data Management

This week at Informatica World in Las Vegas, I announced several innovations that aim to simplify data management and accelerate cloud deployments. These innovations empower users across a broad range of industries to bring their data to life.

Managing data can be a challenging and intricate process. The numerous point solutions on the market often fall short in addressing these challenges since they lack unified and centralized metadata across the data lifecycle. Moreover, these solutions often suffer from interoperability and integration issues, leading to significant time and investments to achieve the desired overall net outcomes and fulfill various business use cases. The process of stacking hundreds of point solutions only increases data management complexity, fragmentation, resources, and time to delivering business value.

Enterprises need a modern data architecture that allows them to start small and scale as their business demands evolve. They need a more mature approach to streamlining data management to effectively capitalize on their investment to achieve a high ROI. Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC), powered by a modern data architecture (Figure 1), significantly simplifies data management. IDMC is:

• Independent, neutral, hybrid and multi-cloud
• Open, modular and flexible
• Complete and best of breed
• Secure, elastic and serverless
• No code, low code, providing data prep and code experiences for virtually all skill sets

Over the past 12 months we have been driving numerous innovations in IDMC, and I’ll highlight some key innovations that we announced this week.

Based on the Informatica CLAIRE® AI engine, CLAIRE GPT will enable simpler, faster, more accessible data management. The industry’s first generative AI-powered data management platform, CLAIRE GPT will leverage petabytes of metadata from multitenant CLAIRE to deliver a unified interface, automation and simplicity across all data management functions in IDMC. It will help increase productivity by:

• Simplifying data management: Interact with and manage your data through a text-to-IDMC interface, create rapid first drafts of mappings and data quality rules, and automate repetitive tasks.
• Delivering turbocharged data democratization and self-service: Data consumers can discover, explore and understand data using natural language, and data producers can generate data pipelines, create new data assets and create data quality rules using simple natural language prompts.
• Providing an integrated in-context data experience at the point of consumption: CLAIRE GPT–powered capabilities will be available in context through IDMC applications, BI tools, AI tools, enterprise social tools, browsers and search engines. CLAIRE GPT will supply contextual data intelligence tailored to individual needs when and where data is being consumed.
• Introducing new AI copilot innovations: Expanded capabilities include inferred data lineage, automated data classifications with no manual inputs, automated mapping and advanced anomaly detection for improved data quality.

Our new Cloud Data Integration for PowerCenter (CDI-PC) is designed to be a one-time, low-touch upgrade that enables PowerCenter customers to significantly accelerate and simplify the process of moving traditional on-premises workloads to the cloud (IDMC). With CDI-PC and PC2Cloud Self-Service Modernization, customers will be able to:

• Move to the cloud up to six times faster: Accelerate time to value by running PowerCenter workloads “as is,” without the need for metadata or business logic migration.
• Reuse 100% of PowerCenter artifacts and assets in the cloud: Worry no more about losing assets, resources or insights from potentially years' worth of business logic.
• Realize anticipated cost savings of up to 20 times: PC2Cloud Self-Service Modernization automates the migration of over 90% of PowerCenter assets to the cloud — with no upgrades, administrative overhead, patching or maintenance of PowerCenter needed.
• Proceed at a self-directed pace: Transition your PowerCenter assets to cloud artifacts at your own pace, in iterations or phases depending on business priorities, budget and resources.
• Experience a unified interface: Manage and monitor both on-premises and cloud environments from a single, centralized panel.

Informatica is bringing three new cloud security features to market that are designed to provide you with greater peace of mind and more flexibility in controlling access to your data assets. These include:

• Private link: Create a private connection between your environment and Informatica via Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure without having to rely on the public internet.
• Customer-managed keys: Create and control your own encryption keys without making those keys available to a cloud provider or compromising performance.
• Secure Agent key vault: Store and manage connector credentials in a third-party secrets vault. Informatica will access these credentials at run time only as needed.

The new IDMC for ESG Sustainability facilitates the process of satisfying ESG regulatory mandates and helps you integrate ESG data into business decision-making processes. This includes measuring ESG performance and aligning to sustainable development goals. IDMC for ESG Sustainability leverages Informatica cloud-native solutions as an integrated platform to help you access and leverage fit-for-business-use ESG data to support your top ESG business priorities:

• Regulatory compliance: Satisfy industry regulations more easily, including EU Taxonomy, EU SFDR, EU CSRD and TCFD, by allowing compliance teams to respond quickly to regulatory requests and to leverage clean, valid and transparent data for regulatory report submissions.
• 360-degree view of ESG data: Integrate ESG data into business decision-making processes across “risks and opportunities” and “strategy and resource allocation.”
• ESG impact measurement: Measure ESG performance and alignment to 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations (UN) and improve ESG standards.
• Value chain due diligence: Decarbonize supply chains across the four “Rs” of reduce, reuse, recycle and recover. Manage and enforce human rights and environment policies, such as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in the U.S.

Our modern data governance solution, a service of IDMC, enables today’s digital businesses to automate and simplify data governance, democratization and observability for analytics, AI and data-driven decision-making. The Informatica solution offers simple, modular cataloging, governance, quality, observability and marketplace capabilities. Powered by CLAIRE metadata intelligence, the solution helps increase productivity, reduce costs and drive faster time to value for businesses of all sizes, allowing you to:

• Simplify and automate data governance and observability: Use AI-powered predictive data intelligence.
• Empower all data consumers: Enable them to find, understand, trust and access data
• Scale analytics and AI: Help ensure trusted, reliable, high-quality data and data pipelines with observability.
• Help ensure data is shared and used responsibly: Align with policies and standards.

According to a recent study,¹ nearly 97% of data engineers are experiencing burnout, with 80% having considered leaving their career entirely. To help counter this trend and drive higher data engineering productivity, we’re introducing game-changing AI and machine learning (ML) innovations such as automatic mapping generation and CLAIRE-powered recommendations for expression transformations. Data engineers can also now:

• Easily drive reverse ETL processes: Use built-in wizards and change data capture (CDC) support when extracting data from popular cloud data warehouses and use hundreds of SaaS and applications as targets. Support for new replication sources and targets such as Google BigQuery, Databricks Delta and more has also been added.
• Use your favorite programming language or IDE without context switching: Leverage the power of IDMC with INFACore, now GA. And operationalize AI/ML models with ModelServe, now also GA.
• Enjoy faster processing and reduced data egress charges and data loading costs on Snowflake: Use ELT for advanced data integration tasks.

New all-in-one MDM enhancements provide data stewards with sophisticated data quality error reporting and remediation capabilities, enabling unparalleled efficiency. Auto generation of mappings accelerates productivity and time to value. Additional MDM enhancements include:

• Multidomain MDM SaaS on Google Cloud: Deploy intelligent MDM on Google Cloud, in addition to Azure and AWS.
• Legal entity industry extension for financial services: Get a comprehensive view of legal entities and their risk exposure. This extension includes data model, GLEIF² enrichment and reports that accurately aggregate risk exposures including credit rating, country of risk and sanctions.
• ESG extension for compliance: Comply with ESG regulations, including supply chain risk, ESG rating and compliance, and emission data reporting and maintenance.
• New MDM cloud modernization program: Assist organizations to move from on-premises MDM systems to Informatica’s modern, all-in-one platform, cloud native MDM.

IDMC powers digital transformation for over 5,000 customers around the world. Here are just a few noteworthy examples:

• Sanofi: The French multinational pharmaceutical firm is accelerating drug and vaccine development by creating a “OneMesh” data foundation with IDMC.
• Valmont: With IDMC, the U.S.-based infrastructure and irrigation equipment provider democratizes data from multiple product lines and manufacturing facilities across the organization.
• Great Clips: The U.S. hair salon chain uses IDMC capabilities to improve customer interactions, resulting in increased salon check-ins.

The IDMC enhancements we announced at Informatica World can significantly improve productivity and efficiency, reduce overall cost and resources, and accelerate ROI by drastically simplifying data management and democratizing data at scale with speed. Learn more about the Intelligent Data Management Cloud.

¹https://tdwi.org/articles/2023/02/21/ppm-all-how-to-fix-data-engineer-burnout.aspx
²https://www.gleif.org/en