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Informatica World 2022 Highlights

From Digital Enterprise to Intelligent Data Enterprise

On May 24-25, Informatica held its annual conference in Las Vegas – the first time “in-person” since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Conference halls were packed full. The company still generates quite an excitement with its new product developments and strategic partnerships.

CEO Amit Walia formulated the main news as the change from Digital Enterprise – which has already happened, in his opinion – to Intelligent Data Enterprise. The new product offerings seem to be well aligned with this direction. The new suite Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) – supported by strategic partnerships with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle – enables users to distribute data management across all cloud platforms and even seamlessly include on-prem capabilities, e.g. one can store “historical” data in AWS S3, run operational BI in Azure Power BI, and experiment with probabilistic analytics in GCP.

IDMC provides more than traditional API and data integration: it includes data cataloging, data lineage, master data management, data quality management, data governance and data sharing capabilities. Admittedly, some of the newly announced capabilities are still in “Private Preview.”

Source: Informatica ©

Once the whole suite becomes “Generally Available,” it would enable creation of a true Data Fabric spreading across multiple clouds and including on-prem capabilities. This roadmap, however, seems to have one gap: the lack of a fully integrated enterprise knowledge graph. CLAIRE (Informatica’s AI) already uses Sematic Web standard-based technology to manage its metadata – identified as "Knowledge Graph" on Informatica's conceptualization of Data Fabric below, but business process and business rules management capabilities are definitely missing.

Source: Informatica ©

Informatica has already started offering industry-specific solutions – “perspectives” – on top of the core platform capabilities, which is an interesting architectural approach. Creating such perspectives using knowledge graph would facilitate its customization and drastically shorten the time to market.

Our Take

Informatica seems to have the potential to strategically change the game:

• From the pain of accumulating all enterprise data in one place to on-demand data assembly and augmentation for just-in-time analytics.
• From the fear of making a wrong bet on the technology platform to the freedom of using the most optimal technology for a given use case.
• From the centralized monolithic enterprise model (which causes a lot of problems for merges and acquisitions) to the new composable enterprise model.

Would Informatica use this strategic opportunity?