Welcome to Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is now the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud. Learn more. 

Today, we are incredibly excited to announce General Availability of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services - Winter 2017 December Release. At Informatica, our mission is to accelerate data driven digital transformation of businesses. At the heart of the mission is the innovation in enterprise cloud data management space to meet growing needs of enterprises. To realize this goal, we built Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) from ground up leveraging cloud native frameworks.

Based on a micro services architecture and a modern user interface, the IICS platform is built for the future to provide complete end-to-end data management in a uniform, non-siloed approach. IICS unifies existing Informatica cloud service offerings and expands into a full suite of cloud data management services over time. IICS will be comprised of four clouds: Integration Cloud, Data Quality & Governance Cloud, Master Data Management Cloud, and Data Security Cloud, powered by a common core platform and the Informatica CLAIRE metadata intelligence engine. 

The Winter 2017 December Release is the initial offering of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services and covers Cloud Data Integration within Integration Cloud. This release offers a rich set of new capabilities to our customers. Below are some highlights of this release:

First, the new user interface design provides a consistent look and feel across all intelligent cloud services and experiences tailored to user roles: Designer, Operator and Administrator using a common user interface shell and service switcher. Next, the new design introduces the concept of workspaces which allows users to keep multiple tabs open within a cloud service. With this capability, users don’t lose the state of assets they are working on when they navigate from one screen to another or open multiple assets for additional context to complete their workflow. Finally, the Home Page provides actionable insights like runtime/job health, recent organization-wide activity as well as easy access to Marketplace and Community.

Productivity is a key theme for this release. As part of this theme, we added template driven development capability. Customers can now create a new integration asset either from scratch or by choosing a template from dozens of templates packaged as part of the Data Integration service. Templates include pre-built logic and cover data integration areas like data preparation, cleansing and data warehousing. In addition to providing templates to our customers, we want to continue to empower customers to create their own templates/solutions and share those within their organization and even publish to Informatica Marketplace. Towards that end, we expanded bundles capability to support mapping tasks in addition to mappings, Visio templates and mapplets. Templates and bundles together provide reusability and promote best practice design, thus boosting productivity and simplifying the development experience for organizations.

The advanced taskflow capability of this release enables users to design complex taskflows by orchestrating mapping tasks and synchronization tasks in a non-linear fashion. Users can define custom logic that involves actions like parallel tasks, loops, conditions, decisions, wait time, exception and error handling, thus achieving much more complex orchestrations than before. The advanced taskflow designer has a similar user interface as the mapping designer, and integrates seamlessly with the Monitor service.

The file mass ingestion capability of this release enables customers to transfer enterprise data assets in a flat file format from on-premise to Amazon S3 datastores and Amazon Redshift data warehouses in cloud using standard protocols – FTP, SFTP and FTPS. Developers can easily author mass ingestion tasks using a wizard-based approach and monitor task executions both at job and file granularity using the same Monitor service used for other data integration jobs. File mass Ingestion is robust and is designed to handle thousands of files a day in a single process.

As data complexity and the scope of integration work grows, asset management becomes a challenge for customers. Projects and folders in the Explore user interface help address this challenge and enable customers to organize their integration assets using taxonomy suitable for their business needs, applying proper security controls. 

Administrators can now manage project and folder structures and grant access to users through role-based security. Administrators also have flexibility to set fine grained access control at the individual project, folder or asset level on top of role based security. 

Once security is granted, developers can easily store, discover, search and manage their assets through actions exposed via Explore. As business requirements or team structures change, developers can also reorganize their assets using copy/move operations which ensure asset dependencies are taken care of. 

Design-time assets organized in projects and folders can continue to be easily attached to runtime assets like schedules, agents and connections. Through proper design of role based and instance based security for both design-time and runtime assets, enterprises can realize the right level of isolation for their organizations.

With the IICS platform, we are promoting DevOps practice that includes iterative development throughout the lifecycle of the project with close collaboration between developers and IT operations. To enable DevOps practices, we are surfacing project/folder/asset export and import APIs that facilitate continuous delivery through automation with external version control systems, release and deployment pipelines. In addition to these capabilities that enable continuous delivery, IICS provides automated monitoring capabilities that completes the agile team based development model between developers and operations.

Informatica provides extensive connectivity to on-premises and cloud applications and services. We have extended connectivity options in this release by adding several new connectors, most of which are co-engineered with our ecosystem partners. New connectors in this release include: Snowflake, AWS Redshift Spectrum, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage (version 2), Oracle HCM, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, MemSQL, CallidusCloud Badgeville, CallidusCloud Litmos. To see a complete list of available connectors, click here. 

Cloud data warehouse connectors such as Snowflake, AWS Redshift and Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse are optimized for efficient data loads and includes features such as pushdown optimization and partitioning. 

We have also made significant enhancements to over 40+ connectors across application and SaaS connectors such as NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce; analytics connectors such as Tableau and Cloud platforms such as Google, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. 

Support for popular data formats such as Avro, Parquet and JSON are being added to cloud object store connectors. Performance enhancements include leveraging the latest APIs, optimizing for bulk loads and adding additional partitioning options. Technology connector enhancements include a new connector for OData, support for additional Hadoop distributions, and enhancements to REST and file connectors. 

Informatica is committed to offering universal connectivity across the IICS Platform. This release enables Informatica to deliver new and enhanced connectors at more rapid pace by introducing a connectivity micro service in the platform. The connectivity micro service also enables Informatica to address any issues more seamlessly providing an overall superior experience. 

These are just some of the highlights of this release. There are also other useful capabilities in this release like custom roles support, self-service non-administrator user registration, in-service notifications, improved job monitoring to isolate job issues, PowerCenter to cloud conversion utility and more.