Informatica World 2016 – Day 2 Review

by | May 25, 2016

Introduction

The second day of Informatica World was much more product focused than Day 1. So while the theme of day 1 was the vision of the future, day 2 was dedicated to showing customers how they were going to get there. As such, the keynote presentations and demos were more dedicated to product announcements and feature enhancements. Throughout the presentations Informatica focused on how product enhancements were expected to deliver the following benefits to customers:

  • Enhanced Productivity
  • Reduced TCO
  • Greater Performance.

Neuralytix believes that these are the aspects that all technology vendors need to focus on in product development. So, that they are the common aspects that vendors discuss when introducing new products, does not diminish their importance.

Of all of the product enhancements that Informatica introduced, Neuralytix found the following the most interesting.

  • MDM Cloud Edition
  • Intelligent Data Streaming
  • Data Integration Platform

MDM Cloud Edition

Many of the customers Neuralytix talked to throughout the day mentioned how they were using MDM with a cloud application such as Salesforce.com. The discussion around moving applications to pure cloud or hybrid cloud solutions was very prevalent. The approach that Informatica has taken with MDM Cloud Edition is to provide its MDM solution as a hosted subscription service on Amazon’s AWS. With this subscription service, Informatica removes the expense of on-premise deployment (e.g., infrastructure costs) and eliminates the backend work (e.g., upgrades). This could be seen by the positive reaction of the crowd when the cloud edition was announced. The only drawback from our perspective was the anounment did not seem to garner the attention on the second day that it deserved. This is an important development and Neuralytix felt that it should have received more attention during the keynote address.

Intelligent data Streaming

Whether it is the evolution of IoT, social media feeds, or website click stream data, the amount of real time data organizations need to understand is and will continue to increase. Being able to capture and process this data to gain real time insight from it critical. Informatica introduced Intelligent Streaming. Intelligent Streaming captures data from a variety of data sources, including MDM, Hadoop, and internal data sources like marketing campaign data and combine it with real time IoT or sensor data. The data is then subjected to a variety of rules engines and alerts. This type of real time processing can help organizations that need to make real time business decisions.

Data Integration Platform

No review of Informatica product announcements would be complete without motioning the enhancements to the flagship data integration product PowerCenter. Informatica launched PowerCenter 10.1. Given the long history of Informatica in the data integration market, the enhancements around data integration were the most evolutionary. Neuralytix believes that this evolutionary approach is ideally suited for this product and market.  PowerCenter is a tried and true product that many customers rely on and as such, the best way to serve customers  is through steady innovation. So the enhancements to speed, mass ingestion of data, and scalability will be welcome by customers.