Informatica Launches Expanded ISV Program, Strengthens Alliances With Leading Hyperscalers

At this week’s Informatica World 2023, the company also unveiled expanded data engineering, data governance and MDM capabilities in its flagship enterprise data management cloud platform and boosted the system’s artificial intelligence engine with new generative AI functionality.

Informatica is offering early access to ISV Innovate, the big data company’s revamped channel program for ISV partners, in a bid to grow the roster of software vendors who develop products that run on – and connect with – the company’s flagship Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform.

The company already has recruited a number of ISVs to the program including database and data source software companies, data protection and security ISVs, developers of data-driven applications, and providers of data enrichment software.

Informatica, which is holding its Informatica World 2023 customer conference in Las Vegas this week, also unveiled expanded capabilities for IDMC at the event and announced extensions to its strategic alliances with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft.

[Related: The Big Data 100 2023]

“A lot of ISVs, the smaller ISVs, want to build on top of the IDMC platform,” Informatica CEO Amit Walia said in an interview with CRN following his keynote speech (pictured). “If you are a data consumer, data provider or any other of these ISVs, they want to allow a seamless integration to their end customers.

“So we have created the ISV program, creating open APIs and allowing the ISVs to develop connections to us by working on their own,” Walia said. “So that ISV program will be [not only] a significant accelerant for the ISVs but a significant value creation for our customers because they want to leverage those ISV capabilities. These ISVs are the most value-added software providers for the use-cases we serve.”

The ISV Innovate program provides ISV partners with self-service extension publishing and management and streamlined integration capabilities via the company’s INFAConnect technology. Informatica said those capabilities help reduce “customer friction” for third-party ISV extensions to IDMC or applications developed to run on the platform.

On the business side ISV Innovate provides ISV partners with monetization opportunities based on consumption. Walia said that in addition to helping recruit new ISV partners the program will provide standard programs and processes where before ISV relationships were managed on a more “ad hoc” basis.

“ISV ecosystems, and the talented partners they attract, are invaluable for cloud companies like ours to accelerate platform and revenue growth, scale demand, and bring the latest complementary innovations to our customers,” said Rik Tamm-Daniels, Informatica group VP, technology alliances, in a statement.

“Now, we are ready to build a vibrant ISV program on top of our foundational IDMC platform, one that’ll broaden the capabilities for our customers with new verticals, use cases, and solutions, and give our partners the chance to participate in the most diverse cloud data management ecosystem in the market today,” Tamm-Daniels said.

ISV partners that Informatica is already working with include database vendors Neo4J and SingleStore, data protection provider Anonos, data enrichment ISVs Dun & Bradstreet and Zoominfo, and data application developer Productsup.

“The ISV Innovate and INFAConnect programs provide us with the capabilities we need to integrate with Informatica’s cloud products, allowing Informatica’s cloud customers to connect easily to the SingleStore cloud ecosystem,” said Karl Hoffman, SingleStore’s technology ecosystem VP, in a statement.

Leveraging The Latest AI Developments

On the technology front, Informatica said it is developing CLAIRE GPT, the next generation of the company’s CLAIRE AI engine, for preview later this year as a native IDMC service. (General available is slated for 2024.)

CLAIRE is built into IDMC and other Informatica data management products. Leveraging the latest generative AI advancements, CLAIRE GPT will be a generative AI-powered version of CLAIRE that will provide a natural language interface to IDMC and dramatically simplify how businesses and organizations process, manage and analyze data, according to the company, and foster greater “data democratization” with expanded self-service capabilities.

In conjunction with CLAIRE GPT Informatica is also extending the capabilities of Claire Copilot to automate more data management tasks and processes and provide greater data observability. Those capabilities are expected later this year.

“What we’re doing is we’re dramatically simplifying the process of doing data management,” CEO Walia said of Informatica’s work with CLAIRE, GPT technology and large language models (LLMs). “Our goal is to take all of those LLMs and apply them to data management and make things easy. On the GPT side, we’ll take it to a whole new level.”

“AI is at such an early stage,” Walia said, and customers are just starting to try to figure out how they can use it to their benefit. “And that’s where partners and [Informatica] can work together.”

Expanding IDMC’s Capabilities

At Informatica World, the company debuted a number of significant enhancements to IDMC’s data engineering, master data management and data governance functionality.

New data engineering and application integration service capabilities, for example, allow reverse ETL using built-in wizards and change data capture with new and enhanced replication sources and targets including Google BigQuery, Databricks Delta, SAP, DB2 for z/OS, Salesforce, MongoDB, MongoDB Atlas, Oracle Fusion Cloud and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.

Improvements to IDMC’s Intelligent Master Data Management technology include error reporting and auto-generated mappings and an ESG extension to reduce risk associated with data compliance. The data governance and observability capabilities of IDMC get a boost from new CLAIRE-generated data classifications that reduce the time needed to curate and classify data by 70 percent, according to the company. And the platform provides several enhanced security features that help control access to data assets.

Informatica also announced at the conference that it is expanding its already extensive strategic alliances with cloud platform giants AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft.

Informatica is strengthening its ties to AWS with plans to augment product integrations across data, analytics and AI; boost collaborative go-to-market efforts; and jointly develop vertical industry applications and accelerate customer cloud transformation initiatives.

On the Microsoft Azure front Informatica plans to provide IDMC as an Azure native ISV service and the Informatica Cloud Data Governance and Catalog natively on Azure. And for Google Cloud, Informatica is launching its Intelligent Master Data Management software-as-a-service as a native offering on the Google Cloud Platform.