For years, Informatica and Databricks have built a deep, strategic partnership, reflected by Informatica’s status as a Select tier Databricks Technology Partner, Databricks being recognized as Informatica’s 2024 Global Ecosystem Growth Partner of the Year, and Informatica’s recognition as Databricks’ 2024 Data Integration Partner of the Year. These awards represent our alignment and mutual commitment to the success of our joint customers – enabling them to accelerate analytics outcomes and create innovative AI applications fueled by trusted, governed, high-quality data.

Here are several examples of this mutual commitment in action:

Over the past year, Informatica has continued to make it easier for Databricks customers to bring their enterprise data to Databricks in three key ways:

1. Data Connectivity: Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) enables our joint customers to bring data from several hundred cloud, SaaS and on-premises systems to Databricks through multiple modes of integration from change data capture to ELT and ETL
2. Expanding User Personas on Databricks: While Databricks provide best-in-class experiences for developers, Informatica provides a leading no-code/low-code data ingestion and data transformation experience for other data professionals
3. Data Governance: Through Informatica’s Data Quality and Data Governance tooling and Unity Catalog-validated services, IDMC can help extend enterprise-grade governance across the entire data estate

Unity Catalog is a cornerstone of the Databricks Data Intelligence platform in terms of how users organize, secure and govern data within Databricks. All of the critical IDMC services, including data integration, data quality, data governance and catalog, and data access management, are fully leveraging the rich metadata of Unity Catalog.

From a customer perspective, this means that with Informatica and Unity Catalog, they will have a true enterprise-wide data governance capability with the ability to rapidly source, discover and consume data within Databricks with complete transparency and in compliance with organizational data access policies.

Informatica’s entire business is built around the importance of metadata for the enterprise. Our full support of Unity Catalog enables IDMC customers to have a truly enterprise-wide view of their metadata.

Open Table file formats like Apache Iceberg and Delta Parquet are becoming increasingly popular for use on cloud data platforms. These formats have tremendous benefits for customers in the form of portability and optimizing price-to-performance for analytics and AI use cases.

A key challenge with using these file formats is similar to that of other data modernization projects: data still needs to:

• Get from operational systems to these file formats
• Be prepared for different use case
• Be cataloged and governed.

As a result, the dominant data transformation pattern remains ELT with these formats, and Informatica’s Native SQL ELT and Databricks SQL is a perfect way to prepare data that is being stored in Open Table formats.

Additionally, there remains a strong and growing need for data governance and data quality as customers adopt these formats and make data more portable. IDMC and Unity Catalog provide the ideal way to satisfy this need.

One of our big areas of focus with Databricks is to empower customers to develop enterprise-grade Gen AI applications. Gen AI applications benefit from access to high-quality, trusted enterprise data that speaks the language of the business and industry. We are hugely invested in and committed to driving Gen AI and Gen AI-driven outcomes for our customers.

Informatica’s Blueprint for Enterprise-grade GenAI with Mosaic AI is a comprehensive view on how to deploy RAG-chain applications with trusted data and critical metadata context. It provides no-code scaffolding that will only accelerate the development and deployment of Gen AI applications on Databricks.

With these new innovations, Informatica and Databricks look forward to helping customers harness data intelligence with AI-ready data and succeed on their analytics and AI journey

We have numerous areas of innovation still to pursue and view the combination of IDMC and the Databricks Data Intelligence platform as a game-changer for our customers.

Want to dig in and learn more? Listen to Amit Walia, Informatica CEO, and Adam Conway, Databricks SVP of Product, discuss the topics above in more detail.

Additional Resources

On Demand Webinar: Intelligent Data Engineering: Beyond the AI Hype: Intelligent Data Engineering: Beyond the AI Hype | Databricks

On-Demand Webinar: Unlocking the Power of AI and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in the Enterprise: Unlocking the Power of AI and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in the Enterprise | TDWI