Editor’s note: Customers should understand that Informatica is not just a Master Data Management vendor, or just an extract, transform, load product vendor. Informatica’s portfolio of leading products across numerous data management market segments enables the company to provide an integrated suite of composable data management products, and layer intelligence and insight across the suite, says Technology Business Research Analyst Meaghan McGrath.
SAN FRANCISCO – While many vendors’ annual user events are flooded with new product launches, privately held Informatica had the luxury of utilizing its recent Informatica World 2017 event to prioritize a necessary corporate rebrand that better unifies the company’s products.
[Informatica, which is a competitor of Cary-based SAS, has an operation in the Triangle built around its acquisition of StrikeIron in 2014.]
While there were new capability launches and partner and customer highlights, Informatica spent the bulk of its conference introducing customers to its broader, more cohesive Enterprise Cloud Data Management strategy. The company’s rebranding challenges customers to change their perception of Informatica from a market-leading point-product vendor to a more comprehensive, strategic partner. Moreover, the refined messaging will motivate customers to think of the entire Informatica Intelligent Data Platform as a means of extracting greater value from their data in a more accurate and timely manner, and to call on Informatica to help them with a broader, data-led transformation effort.
[VIDEO: Watch a recap of the Informatic event at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMXCiajkQUE ]
Informatica leveraged its annual user conference as a platform for a broader rebranding and capability awareness effort. The 2,500 attendees were among the first to see Informatica’s new brand, including significant changes to the company’s logo, strategy and positioning. Ultimately, Informatica aims to reshape customers’ view of the company from a single capability-set provider to a strategic technology partner within data-driven transformations.
Bringing leading solutions together with more cohesive branding
The bulk of the conference highlighted Informatica’s strategic repositioning in the data management space, in particular focusing the company’s portfolio around the ever-nebulous digital transformation trend permeating the technology space. What is clear is that a solid data foundation plays a critical role in how nimbly enterprises navigate their industries amid cloud adoption, data proliferation and the implementation of more digital systems across lines of business, and that businesses are positioned to either disrupt or be disrupted. Regardless of their identification with IT modernization or transformation, enterprises will benefit from synchronizing their data management products and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)-backed data insights. This is the need Informatica is well-equipped to address and around which it is rallying its new branding.
While Informatica’s existing portfolio boasts market-leading technologies across numerous data management segments, the company often took a siloed approach when discussing the offerings. The new messaging emphasizes Informatica as the leader in Enterprise Cloud Data Management, as the company takes a modular, yet unified, approach to address all of customers’ data management needs across data integration, big data management, cloud data management, data quality, master data management and data security product areas. Ultimately, the greatest value for customers comes in Informatica’s ability to unify these products with the Intelligent Data Platform augmented with CLAIRE machine learning capabilities that use common metadata across the product modules.
CLAIRE stiches AI across the portfolio
To enhance value across the Intelligent Data Platform, Informatica unveiled its embedded AI engine, CLAIRE. Residing in what can be best described as a wrapper around the various Informatica products, CLAIRE applies machine learning to all of the business, operational, technical and usage metadata across Informatica’s products. This scope improves the insights available across a business’s data assets and allows for more informed recommendations and automation. CLAIRE will help Informatica customers find patterns and structure among unstructured data files, automatically classify data, and detect user behavior anomalies. Informatica will expand CLAIRE’s capabilities over time to execute proactive and automatic functions, such as integration of new data, data mapping, system resource allocation and data masking, among other possible intelligent actions.
Impact and opportunities
Informatica’s push toward being a partner in digital transformation and a customer success champion is further validated by customer testimony that Informatica’s teams are surprisingly tech savvy, even on the sales side, and ultimately the bright spot in the customer’s engagement. By deploying customer success managers and being increasingly involved in the implementation process, Informatica can ward off customer dissatisfaction that can arise where large systems integrators struggle to effectively execute on Informatica’s deployment plans, and ultimately help customers effectively execute on their transformational goals.
Coming out of the Informatica World 2017 event, customers should understand that Informatica is not just a Master Data Management vendor, or just an extract, transform, load product vendor. Informatica’s portfolio of leading products across numerous data management market segments enables the company to provide an integrated suite of composable data management products, and layer intelligence and insight across the suite. These leading capabilities will help customers proactively disrupt the way their organization utilizes and manages its data assets.
(C) TBR
