Informatica’s Ecosystem Helps Customers Forge Ahead with Enterprise-Grade GenAI

As more organizations look to build and deploy generative AI (GenAI) applications, they need new technologies, such as vector databases and models-as-a-service, to do it. And that requires modern data architectures that incorporate these new GenAI-enabling technologies—and the right industry partnerships to drive them forward.

Informatica has been laying the groundwork for these emerging architectures through engineering and go-to-market partnerships with leading hyperscalers, global system integrators (GSIs), consulting companies, and many other vendors and implementers. We call it our ecosystem, and it’s proving a huge advantage in the push for GenAI. At Informatica World 2024 in Las Vegas this week, we announced the latest developments including new and improved integrations with Microsoft and Snowflake.

The goal of these and other strategic collaborations is to help our customers accelerate their GenAI initiatives by enabling them to create and manage the data pipelines they need to move forward with high quality, trusted and governed data. At Informatica World 2024, we heard loud and clear that everyone is ready for AI—but their data isn’t.

Here’s how Informatica CEO Amit Walia describes the challenge: “As more enterprises chart their path to impactful generative AI, high quality, secure, and governed data must be their compass.”

Amit made those comments when he announced deeper integration between Informatica’s AI-powered Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform and Microsoft’s Azure Cloud and Microsoft Fabric. No doubt, this need for high-quality, secure, and governed data applies to everything we’re doing with our partners and customers.

This is why an ecosystem of industry leaders is now more essential than ever. It can speed up enterprise GenAI projects by lessening complexity. Our GSIs and other partners came out in full force at Informatica World 2024. And we were thrilled to have virtual guest appearances by Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI Group, at Microsoft and Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake.

Our partners have been gearing up to help our joint customers build the data foundations they need to pursue new opportunities with GenAI. In fact, last year 12,000 GSI and channel partners were certified on Informatica technologies and practices.

In just one example among many of how our partnerships are helping drive customer value, we heard how Royal Caribbean Group took on a strategic business initiative using the Informatica platform to build a data-powered, AI-forward Information Hub. And the vacation-industry leader did that with the help of two of our partners—Deloitte and LumenData.

It’s clear that many organizations are eager to get going with enterprise GenAI, but they face challenges. Trusted data is a big one. Too many organizations lack the modern data-management capabilities and best practices they need to establish the high level of data quality that GenAI requires for success.

Another challenge: GenAI may potentially introduce added complexity to today’s IT environments, which are already bogged down by too many disparate technologies and myriad data sources. By one estimate, 41% of companies have more than 1,000 data sources. Data teams need to turn that fire hose of raw data into a governed data foundation.

Informatica’s answer to growing complexity is a unified, integrated, and seamless data-management experience delivered as IDMC cloud services. This includes data and application integration, data quality, master data management, governance, and much more.

Now, we have just introduced product advances that are an important part of the bigger picture. And we’re taking steps to ensure that all of the technology pieces customers might want to use work well together. In collaboration with our partners, we have created reference architectures—or solution blueprints—for enterprise-grade GenAI. There are blueprints for AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Snowflake with more Ecosystems coming soon!

As a next step in Informatica’s ongoing co-development with Microsoft, we introduced native integrations to make it simpler for Azure and Microsoft Fabric customers to discover, manage, and deploy AI-powered data management services within IDMC to create trusted data.

We also announced new innovations for the Snowflake Data Cloud.

• Native SQL ELT for Snowflake - lets customers develop ELT (extract, load, transform) pipelines guaranteed to run on Snowflake compute for better performance. Native SQL ELT supports more than 250 Snowflake-specific functions directly from IDMC.
• Blueprint for Enterprise-Grade GenAI Applications with Cortex - combines Snowflake’s Cortex GenAI service with IDMC, delivering a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) solution that grounds GenAI applications with trusted data and metadata while ensuring appropriate data access controls.

As you can see, there’s tremendous potential value in these solution blueprints and product integrations due to the speed and efficiency they offer data teams as they move from GenAI exploration to implementation.

The key takeaway is this: Informatica’s ecosystem can help customers make the leap from public GenAI—the popular text- and image-generating large language models (LLMs) now used by more than 100 million people—to enterprise-class GenAI models and applications that incorporate their private data.

There’s no reason to wait. The architectures, infrastructure, data-management tools, and ecosystem are advancing at lightning speed to enable a GenAI future. And Informatica is ready to help our customers seize this opportunity now.