At the 20th annual Informatica World^® global user conference held in Las Vegas from May 20-23, 2019, Informatica^® announced multiple updates to its product portfolio and go-to-market strategy, including expanded partnerships with AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Tableau, and more. These developments reinforce Informatica’s ability to help the world’s leading organizations deploy AI-powered, enterprise-scale data management solutions to optimize value from data — regardless of where data resides.

AI Needs Data – and Data Needs AI
The skyrocketing volume and variety of data, coupled with a surge in the number of people accessing and using data as a strategic business asset, are driving global demand for AI-driven enterprise data management solutions that scale far beyond what humans are capable of handling.

It’s common knowledge that AI needs data; however, Informatica asserts that data needs AI too. This is the best way to provide organizations with the accurate, complete, and trusted data that AI needs to produce reliable insights and recommendations.

Informatica is addressing the growing need for AI-driven data management with enhanced solutions that automate data discovery, improve data migration to the cloud, and ensure data quality, security, and governance across all data sources, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

News Summary 
At Informatica World 2019, Informatica showed how it has enabled AI and machine learning across its entire product architecture via its CLAIRE engine, which provides unified, end-to-end metadata intelligence to accelerate and automate core data management and governance processes across the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform.

Additionally, Informatica announced:

• An expanded strategic partnership with Google Cloud that provides broader and deeper connectivity across the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform, enabling enterprises to accelerate data-driven digital transformation initiatives on the Google Cloud Platform.
• A free joint data discovery and cloud migration assessment in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help organizations assess the data they need to migrate to Amazon Redshift, thereby accelerating cloud modernization. Cognizant is available to provide a complete, advanced migration assessment package to help organizations systematically catalog and understand all of their enterprise data assets in order to develop a comprehensive, long-term migration plan.
• Support for the Microsoft Common Data Model (CDM) for self-service analytics at enterprise scale on Microsoft Azure. This enables organizations to bridge data silos across applications, modernize analytics at scale, and accelerate the transformation of raw data into trusted business intelligence.
• New Enterprise Data Catalog (EDC) integrations with Microsoft, Tableau, and Databricks to create a “catalog of catalogs” with AI-driven data discovery across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, providing broad metadata connectivity and better understanding of data across the enterprise for analytics modernization.
• The AI-powered, cloud-native, microservices-based Informatica MDM Reference 360 solution, which leverages Informatica’s CLAIRE engine to automate and simplify reference data management and speed the delivery of actionable insights to improve customer experience programs, marketing and sales operations, omnichannel retailing, supply chain optimization, and governance and compliance efforts.
• The industry’s most comprehensive hybrid integration platform (HIP) with Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services℠ (IICS), the first enterprise integration platform as a service (EiPaaS) that fulfills all critical requirements for successful data management across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
• Informatica’s end-to-end intelligent Data Governance and Privacy Solutions enable organizations to accelerate the shift from focusing on risk management to establishing digital trust and achieving business value from data governance and privacy initiatives.
• An elite group of industry innovators were honored via three award programs that recognized their achievements in leveraging the transformative power of data.
  • BP was named the Intelligent Disruptor of the Year for its holistic approach to digital transformation and data management, which includes a new enterprise approach to self-service analytics that provides the entire global business (74,000 employees operating across 78 countries) with capabilities to leverage data as an asset. BP has created a revolutionary marketplace and framework for big data environments that is a one-stop, user-friendly portal allowing the rapid discovery of datasets, reports, and analyses across multiple data lakes, cloud platforms, and locations. Informatica’s Big Data Management^® (BDM) solution was implemented to allow businesses across BP to ingest data into the data lake from a large number of source systems and technologies. BP believes that digital technology is at the core of revolutionizing the way it does business, to tackle the world’s need for more energy, delivered in more innovative ways for a low-carbon future.
  • Selected by conference attendees as their favorite innovation, GigaSpaces won Informatica’s inaugural AI and Cloud Innovation Zone competition. GigaSpaces showcased a digital integration hub using next-generation big data architecture allowing ingestion of any data type, combined with metadata management, and powered by the GigaSpaces platform for real-time analytics and speed. (video)
  • Capgemini won the Informatica EDC CLAIRE Hackathon with their Smart Data Onboarding solution, a recommender system that identifies data for onboarding new sources into master data management (MDM) models using Informatica EDC’s rich metadata context and relationships, to accelerate the design and implementation of MDM projects.

All of these announcements strengthen Informatica’s ability to help organizations achieve their data management objectives in four critical business areas:

1. Delivering next-generation analytics to accelerate time to insights by empowering data scientists with business self-service, intelligent cataloging, and streaming analytics.
2. Moving to the cloud to integrate, manage, and secure all data across hybrid, multi-cloud and on-premises environments.
3. Driving 360 engagement to transform customer experience, omnichannel commerce, and supplier visibility with trusted data and contextual insights.
4. Fueling data governance and privacy to stay compliant with global regulations, fuel customer initiatives with quality data, and protect customer data.

Supporting Quotes

• “The growing importance of data as a strategic asset is undeniable as organizations in every industry seek to leverage data for competitive advantage. Enormous demand for data-driven insights is pushing organizations to re-evaluate how they manage and create access to their enterprise data.” – Stewart Bond, Research Director, Data Integration and Data Integrity Software, IDC
• “Why has Informatica embedded AI in everything we do? Because AI needs data, and data needs AI. This reciprocity is critical for producing the complete, accurate, and trusted data that digital transformation requires to be effective at enterprise scale. That’s where Informatica’s AI-powered Intelligent Data Platform excels. With our latest developments, Informatica is making tremendous strides in democratizing data, enhancing data literacy, and elevating data as a strategic business asset. We are helping many of the world’s leading organizations use their knowledge of the past to resolve the uncertainty of the future.” – Amit Walia, President, Products and Marketing, Informatica

Tweet this: ICYMI: Data needs AI. Major news from #INFA19 includes multiple #AI-powered product @Informatica innovations and expanded partnerships with @AWSCloud, @GoogleCloud, @Microsoft, @Tableau. Top awards go to @BP_UK, @Capgemini, and @GigaSpaces. https://infa.media/pr190604a

Additional Resources:

• Fast facts about Informatica World 2019: 2,600 attendees, 1,200 customers, 460 partners, 44 countries represented, 1200+ sessions; https://www.informaticaworld.com/.
• View Informatica World 2019 general sessions and keynotes: https://www.informaticaworld.com/lp/live.html.
• Watch live video interviews with Informatica executives, customers, and partners on theCUBE: https://www.thecube.net/informatica-world-2019.
• Read an industry analyst’s perspective: Informatica Positions AI as the Tool To Tackle the New Data Landscape by Tom Pringle, Ovum, May 20, 2019.

SOURCE Informatica