Informatica kicked off their main user conference, Informatica World, in Las Vegas on Tuesday May 12th. The conference focused on the emerging need to integrate data for a variety of different internal and external sources. In the coming years this type of integration is becoming more critical as data is becoming the life blood of most, if not all, enterprises. The challenge most customers face is the current data warehouses that were deployed to integrate disparate data sources, have not been able to keep up with the types of data generated due to their ridged structure and the changes in enterprise software architectures, specifically the implementation of cloud and IoT. This has resulted in data silos that are hard to integrate and as such do not lend themselves to the advanced analytics that will enable customers to gain insight from their data. On top of the problem of data integration, customers are faced with the challenge of an increasing supply of available date that is being generated by IoT, mobile apps, machine data, and social media.

Neuralytix believes that the three most interesting announcements from the conference were:

  • Project Atlantic: With project Atlantic, Informatica is focusing on finding context in unstructured data such as machine data and log files. It enables the integration of dark data, specifically machine captured by IoT, websites, and mobile apps by automatically sensing the structure of the data. The volume of this type of machine generated data is increasing in dramatically as IoT and mobile apps become even more pervasive throughout the world. Without a way to capture and automatically infer the data structure, much of the intelligence embedded in this data will be lost. Further, the way to capture and analyze this data need to be automatic as the type of data that will be captured is constantly evolving and so any static approach to capturing this data will be quickly outdated.
  • Project Sonoma: Project Sonoma is the Big Data integration project. This enables customers to adopt Hadoop based data lakes. While all data lakes do not have to be Hadoop based, Sonoma specifically enables Hadoop based data lakes. In combination with Project Atlantic, which focuses on machine data, the integration of unstructured data will enable customer to find and integrate a variety of data sources. Being able to include this data in analysis provides customers with the ability to better understand their customers using external sources.
  • Secure@Source: Secure@Source is Informatica’s security and data governance project. This product enable bridges the gap between traditional security and data governance. From a security perspective, Secure@Source will enable customer to mask selected data fields to ensure that data is not accessed by the wrong people. From a data governance perspective, Secure@Source helps customers to understand what the data represents and what other apps within the organization have access to that data. Simply put, the data masking helps customers to build walls around data, and the governance helps customers understand where those walls should be. The challenge Neuralytix believes that Informatica will have with this product is not the technical aspects. It is that the product naturally spans two groups within IT; security and governance. So gaining market traction will require Informatica to work with both groups. This can be challenging as selling to multiple groups often involves navigating internal politics and budget battles.

Overall, the first day of the conference showcased the evolution of Informatica’s approach to data management. Neuralytix believes that the evolutionary approach is the right path for Informatica to take as the customers at the show were not looking for a revolutionary approach to data management. By evolving the products the way that Informatica is, they are in the best position to capitalize on the growing need for MDM.