Informatica Big Data Management Platform Aims For Next-Level

Every CIO wants data in one place, controlled by one master app. Informatica is offering its answer to that desire this week with the release of Informatica Big Data Management, which combines integration, governance, and security in one package.

“We are looking at a world of data,” said acting CEO Anil Chakravarthy at a virtual event to roll out the new package. “Data powers business.”Citing a CapGemini survey, Chakravarthy explained that while two-thirds of surveyed customers see big data transforming their environment in the next three years, even more say they cannot effectively exploit big data.

“We have a clear mission to make big data a reality for our customers,” Chakravarthy added. The new release is designed to make it easier for customers to get value out of big data.

Integration can be a bottleneck, since hand-coding cannot scale to handle typical big data challenges, such as collecting data streams from many varied sources. The Big Data Management package offers users more than 200 pre-built connectors to route data from any source to commonly used big data platforms such as Hadoop, NoSQL, and massively parallel processing (MPP) appliances.

Another 100 pre-built transformations and parsers are available to run natively on Hadoop to help process large data sets. Dynamic mapping automates various data integration processes, while a visual and graphical development capability allows users to set up data pipelines about five times faster than they could by hand-coding.

The governance component relies on collaborative stewardship, where non-technical and expert users can collaborate and manage the data. Automation will flag data anomalies by using preset rules and alerts. Spark is used for at-scale graph creation as part of the system’s live data map. Relationships between data can also be searched across all big data environments.

Security relies more on depth than perimeter defense. The patterns of data usage are tracked and logged, and usage can be visualized and mapped. Risk is scored and administrators can be alerted in the

Chakravarthy said. “We will support any platform. We will support any analytic tool our customers want to deploy.”