This morning Informatica hit the wires with a press release about its major release, Spring 2018, fittingly timed with Informatica World, being held in Las Vegas from May 21st till 23rd in Las Vegas at the Sands Convention Center.
Redwood City, Calif., May 22, 2018 – Informatica®, the enterprise cloud data management leader, today announced the general availability of the Informatica 2018 Spring release during the 18th annual Informatica World® conference. This release of Informatica's hybrid data management solutions delivers innovative advances across all its core components, leveraging AI powered by the CLAIRE™ engine, to enable employees at every level to unleash the power of data.MyPOV – Good summary on what is important for customers at the moment, hybrid data and integration capabilities. As all vendors Informatica talks AI with CLAIRE, but will have to show the value of its offering, starting at the conference to convince CxOs.
The Spring 2018 release enables increased productivity by helping organizations manage the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities provided by multi-cloud and hybrid environments, new use cases, user types, data challenges, and compliance requirements.
MyPOV – Summary paragraph, but gets to the other key aspect – (public) cloud and hybrid environment support. New user types are also important, and in the week that GDPR regulation goes live, compliance gets a lot of attention.
The Informatica 2018 Spring release includes:
Big Data for Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)
• The industry's first big data management cloud solution for iPaaS increases productivity and agility, accelerates self-service analytics, and empowers data engineers, data analysts, and data scientists to automate and fast-track data management work. MyPOV – BigData is the first of the three drivers to infinite computing (the others are cheap cloud compute and deep neural networks (DLN). And BigData needs data movement and many working projects fail due to the fickle nature of the underlying open source platform as well as the shortage in experienced skills to build, extend and operate BigData solutions. Good to see a packaged offering.
Cloud Application Integration and Intelligent APIs
• New capabilities for Informatica's iPaaS – Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services℠ (IICS) – simplify multi-cloud and hybrid integration with API management and near real-time application integration.
MyPOV – The traditional DNA off Informatica that is moving to the public cloud, is moving from batch to real time. Real time, via APIs is crucial for many next generation applications that enterprises are building next generation applications for. And cheap compute in the cloud is taking out the human in tedious and repetitive integration work,
Enterprise Data Catalog with Intelligent Metadata APIs and Enhanced AI Algorithms
• New capabilities for Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog simplify democratization of data and provide faster, more relevant data discovery for self-service analytics.
MyPOV – Another offering that is from sometime ago, but still relevant for enterprises. Though in my view it needs a rebranding, the days of the venerable data catalogue are gone in the self-discovering, self-exploring and self-integrating era of microservices. That era needs platforms and Informatica is working hard to become a partner for these.
Intelligent, Automated Enterprise Data Governance Powered by AI
• The integration of Axon™ Data Governance with Informatica Data Quality, Enterprise Data Catalog and Secure@Source® powers a new, comprehensive enterprise data governance solution that fuels strategic business initiatives, drives privacy and protection, and supports regulatory compliance efforts.
MyPOV – Data Governance remains important, especially given the recent data breach news… but governance has to happen on a day to day, and in the era of the cloud, minute by minute basis. Not sure how well Axon can perform here, but it needs to very automated, ideally almost human free in the operational aspects, so it really empowers an enterprise and does not suffocate if with compliance and admin needs.
AI-driven Data Privacy and Protection
• Informatica's comprehensive data privacy and protection solution brings enhanced support for privacy and compliance initiatives across the enterprise.
MyPOV – A very thing paragraph, makes the analyst wonder why…. Will have to learn more at the conference.
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Tweet this: News: @Informatica announces 2018 Spring release general availability @infaworld http://infa.media/pr180522b #INFA18
MyPOV – A new best practice in the era of social media and news amplification – good to see Informatica practicing it.
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| The Future of Integration Source: Holger Mueller, Constellation Research |
Overall MyPOV
Informatica is pushing its product suite further in all directions. It will be interesting to follow the keynote and see the progress first hand on the show floor. And Informatica has no alternative than to push onwards, as it sits in the center of all key platforms challenges enterprises have when the move their application portfolio to the cloud and build a mesh of traditional and next generation applications, that application functionality and data mesh needs a modern integration platform and Informatica is en route to create this. We are between the 2nd and 3rd phase of the evolution of integration in the above chart (between the business User Empowerment and Self Identifying stages.
On the concern side, there are many areas that Informatica need to tackle, and resources, talent and budgets are limited. Informatica World will be a good change to check the pulse how substantial these offerings are from a functional richness, customer adoption and partner support.
But for now, stay tuned on more of the fundamental switch in the integration best practices and portfolio.