SiliconANGLE Article by Jason Bloomberg
People have long regarded Informatica Inc. as a stodgy provider of extract, transform and load or ETL services, proficient at moving data from mainframes to data warehouses, but not much else.
Then in 2015, the company went private, entering its chrysalis for a six-year metamorphosis. The company emerged in the public markets in October 2021 as a beautiful cloud-native data management butterfly – a metamorphosis as remarkable as it was transformative.
Informatica’s cloud journey
I joined the sold-out crowd at Informatica World in Las Vegas this week, the company’s first in-person conference in three years. At the center of its remarkable transformation: its Intelligent Data Management Cloud or IDMC, a cloud-based platform as modern as its on-premises ETL tools are relics of the last century.
ETL is still an important part of the Informatica story, to be sure – but now it’s a component of the IDMC’s data integration module.
IDMC includes seven primary modules: data catalog; data integration; API and application integration; data quality; master data management and 360 applications (including Customer 360); governance and privacy; and the data marketplace.
These seven modules leverage Claire, Informatica’s AI-powered metadata intelligence and automation technology, as well as a common metadata system of record, as show in this IDMC marketecture diagram:
The Intelligent Data Management Cloud (Source: Informatica)
ETL, of course, doesn’t even appear in the figure above, since it’s buried within data integration. Today, Informatica is no longer (just) the ETL leader. ETL is only a part of the integration story, and integration is only a part of the Informatica story.
IDMC has been in the works for a while. One of the reasons for going private in 2015 was to facilitate the difficult transition from perpetual licensing to subscriptions, an important precursor to rolling out a cloud platform.
The advent of COVID in 2020 changed this timeline. Informatica accelerated its move to the cloud as customer preferences rapidly shifted. It took about a year to flesh out IDMC, and now it’s mostly complete. “We have been innovating maniacally,” said Jitesh Ghai, Informatica’s chief product officer.
Moving from an on-premises, perpetual licensing business model to a cloud-based subscription model is no easy feat, especially for an enterprise software vendor. The Innovator’s Dilemma risk of alienating existing customers can sink the entire company.
Informatica, however, was largely able to avoid this dilemma because of the nature of its legacy ETL tooling. What is integration, after all, if not technology for connecting things, including old to new?
Instead of cannibalizing its existing business, Informatica found that its customers have largely been excited to move to the cloud to take advantage of the company’s full data management suite of capabilities – even though some customers retain the on-premises technology as well. As Informatica Chief Executive Amit Walia points out, “Cloud is the new normal for the digital enterprise.”
In other words, the on-premises Informatica story is becoming a valuable component of customers’ hybrid multicloud strategies that are largely cloud-first but still retain on-premises technology whenever it continues to meet the business need.
