ABSTRACT

Informatica World 2019 was great, and seeing how technology keeps charging ahead was exciting. AI is definitely more mature compared to last year. Copying and moving data is easier than ever, as well as maintaining data lineage over all these copies. However, just because you can doesn’t always mean you should; before you let any technology loose, particularly for end-users, make sure you have thought out what it looks like at scale. I look forward to CLAIRE becoming more prevalent in suggesting when data should be copied and where it should be stored for optimal performance and cost.  

The Conference

• Informatica hosts their customers, partners and analysts once a year at a conference called Informatica World. This was their 20^th annual conference.
• Informatica is a software company founded in 1993 and headquartered in Redwood City, California. Informatica considers its core products to be Cloud Data Management and Data Integration. Since the company’s beginning, they have assisted over 9,000 customers.
• Informatica World 2019 had 2,600 attendees, 1,200 customers, 460 partners, 44 countries represented and 1200+ sessions.

Highlights

• Well-organized conference with an exciting vibe filled with possibilities. The attendees were engaged, and even the food was better than at standard conference gatherings.
• CLAIRE is a metadata-driven artificial intelligence software embedded in Informatica’s platform. CLAIRE was everywhere; Informatica is leveraging AI for data management engineering in all products.
• Data quality, data movement and the Enterprise Data Catalog (EDC) are areas where Informatica continues to shine and were on display throughout the conference.
• Informatica IPaaS (integration platform-as-a-service) native on the Google Cloud Platform is big news for enterprises with a multi-cloud environment.

Cautions

• Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Informatica provides powerful capabilities to move and copy data anywhere technical professionals desire, but don’t let the power to easily make endless copies of data loose in your organization at large unless you want to create the chaos of useless similar copies of data.
• There is a missed opportunity to leverage AI to help determine where best to store data. These capabilities would fit nicely in the Informatica Data Hub, IPaaS architecture or their data virtualization.
• AI should never be used to solve a problem that already has a known solution. Most organizations have at least one application with databases where the data model is known and used successfully. AI should never be used to infer a defined data model, only to infer for data sets without a known or defined model.

Conference Vibe

Informatica World 2019 was a fun and pleasant conference. Walking around it was obvious that the memo to wear Informatica orange was read by their employees—whether socks, ties, shirts or pocket squares, the Informatica Team came in orange to show their team pride. The keynote address opened with a local youth orchestra playing as everyone filed into their seats. Before the speakers stepped up onstage, Brian King Joseph, the sensational electric violinist from America’s Got Talent, charged onto the stage dancing around while playing his violin without missing a note. During this introduction the screens displayed notes about data, some of which insinuated that the harmony of the music represents the harmony you can achieve while using Informatica’s various products.  

Everything starts with data quality

Data technical professionals understand that garbage-in, garbage-out environments do not yield good answers, and Informatica’s data quality products are one way to start the journey towards better solutions. Various breakout sessions provided examples of business analysts who have cleaned their enterprise data to standardize it for analytics using Informatica. Data quality can be hindered by simple global cultural differences, such as how names are formed, how addresses are created and whether government IDs are public or private. These differences add additional strain on analysts seeking data quality. Audience members seemed pleasantly surprised that solutions for many complex global data quality issues are available off-the-shelf. Once standardized, data can then be combined to provide quality analytics and insights, and can even be used to create trustworthy machine learning models.

Cloud Migration

Whether your enterprise desired simply to move one data set to the cloud or to move all your data, there was an announcement at Informatica World 2019 for you. Currently, Informatica is involved in 8.0 trillion cloud transactions, 1 billion jobs and processes, 45 million continuous cloud security checks and adds 17,500 new endpoints per month. Informatica states that 58% of all companies have a hybrid strategy with data footprints both in-cloud and on-premise (Image 2). In fact, Informatica and Amazon Web Services (AWS) along with Cognizant, announced a free self-service assessment for your data regarding migrating to AWS. The tool specifically assists in creating an ROI business case for a technical professional to get management approval for funding to migrate to the cloud.

EDC

Data Lineage

Preserving data lineage was an exciting underlying theme of the conference. Using Informatica’s products to move and manage your data does not cost you visibility to your data lineage—quite the opposite. Throughout the major functions in the major products, data lineage is carefully preserved. This fact was demonstrated regularly on both the main and supporting stages. Business users and analysts want to make sure that they are using the correct data source, and the ability to verify the data’s source builds confidence in users. Thus, readily preserving lineage is great news.

Informatica IPaaS on GCP

Universal cloud access at scale is here! Informatica has the first official IPaaS solution that is native to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) is Informatica’s IPaaS powered by CLAIRE^tm. IICS can support microservice architectures across a great diversity of hybrid data locations. Enterprise clients, particularly those in retail, consumer packaging and logistics spaces, have been searching for public cloud alternatives. This announcement puts GCP within reach to all Informatica IPaaS clients and makes Informatica IPaaS a must-have for anyone who desires native connectivity to all three major public clouds.

Next Year’s Conference

Next year’s conference will once again be at the Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada. The event will occur Monday May 18 – Thursday May 21, 2020.

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