Anirban Ghoshal
Senior Writer

Informatica’s new data management clouds target health, finance services

News
May 24, 2022
Cloud ComputingData ManagementFinancial Services Industry

Informatica's new Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Health and Life Sciences, and the Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Financial Services, look to solve the challenges of unstructured and siloed data by combining machine learning capabilities with specific integrations.

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Credit: Blue Planet Studio

Just after launching a focused data management platform for retail customers in March, enterprise data management vendor Informatica has now released two more industry-specific versions of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) — one for financial services, and the other for health and life sciences.

The new, industry-targeted data management platforms — Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Health and Life Sciences and the Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Financial Services — were announced at the company’s Informatica World conference Tuesday. (Separately, the company also announced new applications within its SaaS 360 product range and IDMC features to help ease data management, data engineering and MLOps tasks.)

The industry-focused products look to solve the challenges of unstructured and siloed data by combining machine learning capabilities with specific integrations that the company calls  “accelerators,” while complying with a variety of regulations and data standards.

The launch of the new data management platforms is in line with the trend for cloud service and solution providers to offer vertical solutions with prebuilt capabilities to enable enterprises to adopt applications and realize their value faster.

“This trend that [Google Cloud CEO] Thomas Kurian set off in 2019 with Google Cloud releasing vertical solutions has become the norm with all major cloud solution providers looking to do the same,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst, Constellation Research.  “The value proposition for enterprises is clear — faster adoption and move to the cloud and better value once you are there due to prebuilt vertical capabilities.”

Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Health and Life Sciences

The new Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Health and Life Sciences is a version of Informatica’s suite of tailored machine learning tools to help healthcare and life sciences customers catalogue, ingest, integrate, and prepare data for analytics and AI-powered applications that are geared to drive positive health outcomes and efficient operations.

Some of the accelerators included as part of the new platform are integrations with Salesforce, NPI data, National Patient Account Services, Workday, Oracle Fusion HCM Cloud, Orange HRM, Salesforce Health Cloud, MedPro, healthcare-focused cloud company Veeva, and HR vendor UltiPro.

Analytics for faster decision making

These specific connectivity integrations are meant to allow healthcare providers to have a 360-degree view of all their important data and run analytics on them to take faster decisions and reduce time to market, Informatica said.

Connecting disparate and siloed data sources and collecting data in a privacy-conscious way is becoming an increasingly important task for healthcare companies, Mueller noted.

To this end, the new healthcare and life sciences platform also supports healthcare industry-specific extensions to support compliance with healthcare-related programs and regulations including HL7, Health Information Exchange (HIX), HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), and the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP).

In order to help maintain data privacy while validating and standardizing data for use, the IDMC platform offers a Data Quality Accelerator for Crisis Response.

The accelerator contains a specific set of rules that cleanse, standardize, and validate data, allowing customers to enable data-driven decision making that can help improve patient health, the company said.

Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Financial Services

The Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Financial Services, like Informatica’s other industry-focused platforms, combines vertical-based accelerators with the company’s suite of machine learning tools to help with challenges around unstructured data and quick data-based decision making.   

 The integrations that are part of the IDMC for Financial Services include support for data standards and services including ACORD, FIX, FpML, NACHA, SWIFT, LEI, DTCC, and Bloomberg.  

The platform also supports industry-specific extensions and data format support for UNIFI (ISO 20022), ACORD XML, FIXML, and MISMO, the company said, adding that the platform came equipped with “data quality rules” that can validate and ensure adherence to data standards.

The rules are part of what the company calls the Data Quality Accelerator for Financial Services and can be used to accelerate the deployment of a data project and enable data-driven decision making. 

The company said that IDMC for Financial Services has built-in metadata scanners that can help extract lineage, technical, business, operational, and usage metadata from over 50,000 systems (including data warehouses and data lakes) and applications including business intelligence, data science, CRM, and ERP software.