Why a Unified Data Ingestion, Replication and Integration Experience Matters

At different stages of the data management lifecycle, you have leveraged tools to help ingest, replicate, transform and orchestrate your data for a variety of analytics and business use cases.

Cloud data ingestion and replication (CDIR) and cloud data integration (CDI) from Informatica have been a part of your data management arsenal throughout that journey. CDIR is the advanced solution from Informatica for ingestion and replication, with a comprehensive set of connectivities to support more patterns and capabilities, such as cloud data capture and schema drift. CDI is our comprehensive, no-code data integration, transformation and orchestration solution. 

While both CDIR and CDI are intelligent and easy-to-use services within the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), both have had distinct user interfaces until now. This means the data ingestion and replication workflow has remained separate from the data transformation and orchestration workflow. Customers looking to drive use cases such as cloud data warehouse, cloud data lake or analytics have to first ingest data from a variety of sources into a lake, then transform it before making it available for downstream consumption.

The potential fracture in user experience caused by a separation of workflows and interfaces of two logically connected stages of data management has now been eliminated with Informatica’s latest innovation. This brings users one step closer to a seamless data management journey. 

To continually provide you with the most seamless end-to-end data integration solution, Informatica presents a simplified, unified, guided and customizable data integration experience that will take you from data ingestion and replication to transformation and orchestration in a single pane.

The powerful new wizard-driven unified interface ensures an intelligent data integration workflow from start to finish so you can move smoothly from one stage to the next in the same dashboard on a common homepage.

However, the new unified data integration homepage is not just a merging of two services for improved convenience. It also elevates your experience and creates more value by enhancing your data integration outcomes.

Here’s how.

#1 Unified: A Seamless and Simplified Experience

Go seamlessly from ingestion to replication to transformation and orchestration on a single homepage with a simplified wizard-driven experience to execute all your core data integration tasks without ever leaving the environment or writing any code.

#2 Guided: Step-by-Step Support

Wizard-driven prompts guide you to each next step, with video/doc snippets and bots to support you as you build your data pipelines. This happens right from setting up the secure agent for first-time users to configuring connections and optimizing transformations.

#3 Intelligent: The Best Recommendation at Each Step

The Informatica CLAIRE AI engine provides intelligent recommendations for the next best steps and helps optimize effort and time for any task at hand. Before, users had to make critical decisions at each step of the journey. For instance, which tool and solution to use and what transformations to prioritize, what kind of processing engine to use for a specific task, what infrastructure configuration would be best for a specific use case (i.e., does it need serverless or SQL ELT?), the best path to orchestrate data for a given use case, etc.

With CLAIRE, the complexity around decision-making is eliminated, and the best path forward is proactively suggested for each instance.

#4 Goal-driven: Customized for Use Case and Role

The new data integration user experience is not only optimized for the use case but also customized for each user's role and defined use case. In other words, CLAIRE not only provides appropriate recommendations but also adjusts the workflow based on inputs defined by the user.

As a result, each user sees a different screen optimized to deliver outcomes for their specific use case. Once the connection has been configured and inputs provided, the customized screen delivers relevant prompts to help the user move progressively through the workflow sequence. For example, if the primary destination is configured as Snowflake, the screen will automatically show the ingestion and transformation workflow specifically for Snowflake. Similarly, if you are using Azure or Databricks, it will give you a guided path within the native user interface of Azure or Databricks to help you at each step. Say goodbye to a one-size-fits-all approach. 

#5 Optimized: Baked-in FinOps

Streamlined processes and workflows are critical to FinOps goals. The unified homepage for data integration ensures that FinOps principles are baked into each step of the process. With the support of CLAIRE, each stage of the data integration workflow is optimized for cost and operational efficiency. Because pricing is consumption-based using Informatica Pricing Units (IPUs), billing is also streamlined and simplified with a single pricing structure to track. 

• Improved productivity: Improve overall productivity with step-by-step guidance, fewer manual errors, and greater speed for each task. A single pane to run two key data integration components (ingestion and replication plus transformation and orchestration) helps optimize IPUs and do more with less.
• Data democratization: Due to the built-in ease of use and automation, it is easy for non-technical users and diverse business personas to leverage the wizard-based workflows — from dynamic mapping tasks to data transfer tasks — easily and independently, without needing to write any code.
• Improved cost-effectiveness: By simplifying and shrinking overall design effort and development times, the CLAIRE engine offers intelligent recommendations for every backend decision to make your data projects more cost-effective. As a data engineer, this also frees up your time to focus on building business logic rather than on admin and infrastructure tasks and operational decision-making.
• Simplified modern data stack: IDMC customers get access to the full suite of data integration capabilities, from ingestion to transformation, governance, quality and security, all with a single currency — Informatica IPUs. By avoiding stand-alone point solutions for different elements of the data integration workflow, you minimize stack complexity, mitigate potential technical debt and streamline FinOps, even at scale.

IDMC users already have automatic and free access to all modules of our data management services, including the new data integration homepage, which unifies the data ingestion, replication, transformation and orchestration tasks.

Remove complexity from your data stack and enjoy the same simplicity, flexibility, modularity and consumption-based pricing using just one single intelligent interface.

Try out the unified data integration homepage on IDMC —  the first and most comprehensive data integration platform for simplified, cost-effective and intelligent AI-powered data management.