Editor’s note: With the hiring of Jim Davis, the executive vice president and chief marketing officer at SAS, last wek and through the recent acquisition of StrikeIron, data management firm Informatica has certainly raised its profile in the Triangle. So what’s going on at the company when it comes to big data? Analyst Meaghan McGrath of Technology Business Research offers her insight.
HAMPTON, N.H. – Informatica ensures the repeatable delivery of trusted, consumable information through Informatica Big Data Management
As businesses increasingly generate larger stores of data, administrators and business users face challenges in how to wrangle, integrate, govern and secure big data. Where Informatica excels beyond Hadoop implementations is where Hadoop adopters must still implement large amounts of nonreplicable manual work; Informatica helps users reuse and maintain code rather than redevelop solutions.
Informatica Big Data Management fills the gaps between acquiring massive amounts of data and consuming it by offering integration, governance and security. The service automates and secures data while still fostering developer productivity, self-service autonomy and operational agility.
Data Integration, Governance & Security
As there are not only increasing volumes of data but also a greater variety of code and platforms, an increasing number of data users and more silos of data need to be tied together; big data integration becomes a more monumental task, reducing the efficiency of manual aggregation and integration. Informatica’s solution leverages hundreds of prebuilt connectors, parsers and transformers to eliminate the need for manual aggregation and integration and broker-based data ingestion to orchestrate various flows.
Offering users templates and a simple interface ensures the integration can be done efficiently, while the new dynamic mapping feature enables mappings to be parameterized, optimized and agile, so that they can be modified as schemas and metadata change.
Controls around data governance and quality help users confidently consume data through rules around the profiling and applicability of data, a comprehensive view of data relationships, search catalogs, and timely anomaly detection that reduce improper assignment of data and vulnerabilities.
Supplementing these data assurance features with the ability to not only deidentify data but also track data’s derivation and lineage for auditing purposes enables users to easily abide by strict regulations and corporate policies. Risk assessment and data masking round further enable business analysts to work autonomously without risking data security or integrity.
Informatica v10
On a broader scale, Informatica’s primary focus has recently focused on its launch of Informatica v10, the newest version of its underlying data management platform. With this release, the Big Data Management solution gained the aforementioned dynamic mapping capabilities that enhance productivity thought parameterization and mass ingestion of data as well as smarter execution optimization, Blaze and live data map to supplement the data quality, lineage and masking features previously available.
These new services specifically give the Informatica product an integration speed advantage over other products due to its ability to process large volumes of data on a mostly automated basis and ultimately improve the insights from data consumption by empowered business users.
(C) TBR
