Informatica Extends AWS Alliance With Tighter Data Management Integration: Exclusive

Informatica is unveiling at this week’s Amazon re:Invent conference expanded links between the company’s data management services, including Informatica Data Loader and the Informatica Data marketplace, and the AWS platform.

Data management software developer Informatica is building on its already extensive alliance with cloud giant Amazon Web Services, unveiling at this week’s AWS re:Invent conference a number of cloud data management services integrated with the AWS cloud platform.

The new offerings include integration between Informatica Data Marketplace and the AWS Data Exchange, and the embedding of Informatica Data Loader into the AWS Redshift Console.

The extended links between the two companies’ data management portfolios come as companies are increasingly trying to “do more with less” in the current environment of economic uncertainty, said Rik Tamm-Daniels, Informatica strategic ISV and ecosystem partnership leader, in an exclusive interview with CRN.

[Related: Informatica Expands Microsoft, Google Cloud Partnerships For Data Management]

“These innovations really are delivering transformational value for our customers, as we bring them out to market,” Tamm-Daniels said. “And [in] context for what we‘re announcing, I think we’re all aware it‘s a challenging macroeconomic environment right now. Companies are increasingly being asked to do more with less.”

“And one element of that is we see that within organizations the business users, departmental users, are going to be asked to do the heavy lifting when it comes to leveraging data as a key component of transformations [that businesses] are going to have to undergo in the next couple of years to adapt to the current economic environment,” he said. “Their data is critical to being able to affect the change that companies are going to need to go through in the near term and even the long term to adapt to the new environment.”

The Informatica-AWS alliance has a lengthy history that includes product integrations between Informatica’s cloud-based software and AWS Redshift, S3 storage, the Amazon EMR big data platform, and AWS RDS, Aurora and Dynamo DB databases.

The latest integrations are focused on helping departmental and line-of-business users find, populate, govern and analyze data in the cloud, according to the companies.

“Access to the right data at the right time is fundamental to the overall success of any cloud analytics initiative,” said Rahul Pathak, AWS vice president of relational engines, in a statement. “With the new cloud data management integrations that Informatica is bringing in collaboration with AWS, customers will be able to access Informatica directly from Amazon Redshift, to achieve greater business value through data driven decisions.”

Topping the list of new offerings is the embedding of Informatica Data Loader directly into the AWS Redshift Console (see screenshot). Data Loader is Informatica’s tool for loading data from multiple sources into cloud data warehouse systems – including AWS Redshift. Adding data loader to the Redshift console will provide a more seamless experience for departmental and line-of-business managers, according to Informatica.

“They go from raw data to insights in minutes instead of it taking weeks or months,” Tamm-Daniels said. “That is a big part of democratizing access to organizational data and dramatically expanding the community who benefits from the power of IDMC,” he said, referring to Informatica’s flagship Intelligent Data Management Cloud platform.

Informatica also has integrated the company’s Informatica Data Marketplace, where business can offer data assets for sale, with the AWS Data Exchange and its wealth of third-party data publishers and their datasets. That, according to informatica, provides a unified self-service data marketplace and makes it easier for businesses to combine their internal data with third-party data for business analysis tasks.

“We‘re providing that single point of access for the internal data and the external data [so] those end users have the complete data context they need to transform their business and to analyze data to drive trusted insights,” Tamm-Daniels said.

The third component of the Informatica-AWS announcement is the integration of Informatica ModelServe and INFACore with Amazon SageMaker, the cloud giant’s machine learning platform, to simplify the development and management of complex data pipelines and help operationalize machine learning models. ModelServe is Informatica’s MLOps solution while INFACore, unveiled in May, is used by developers, data scientists and data engineers to build and maintain data pipelines.

The integration allows SageMaker users to access IDMC capabilities including data quality and data governance tools and pre-built data transformations.

“The core capabilities of the Informatica platform are available within SageMaker, directly to [SageMaker] users, so those users can take advantage of the power of IDMC without ever leaving their environment,” Tamm-Daniels said.

Informatica partners, including global systems integrators like Deloitte, Accenture and Capgemini, will realize benefits and opportunities from the improved Informatica-AWS integration, he said, noting that in today’s economic climate customers are asking them to do more with less and deliver business outcomes more quickly.

“We’re really bringing the power of trusted data to where the end-users really need it,” Tamm-Daniels said. Customers “can benefit from the power of IDMC to take raw data and turn it into trusted data and, ultimately, trusted insights. It’s a big step forward. We’re now able through the partnership with AWS to take those [IDMC] capabilities out to a much bigger user community than ever before.”