Often, there are data sources within businesses that are left widely untapped, or at least, not optimized to their fullest potential. These streams of data—whether it be database transactions, web server clickstreams, or geolocation data—can offer valuable insights that unlock the power of AI and automation, optimize costs, accelerate data delivery, and more.
Ajay Gollapalli, ecosystem solution director at Informatica, joined DBTA’s webinar, Unlock Automation and AI with Microsoft and Informatica, guiding viewers through how to tap into enterprise data sources to acquire real-time business insights, specifically by leveraging the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) and the Microsoft Fabric.
Informatica addresses the critical data management challenges in the cloud, Gollapalli began, where six ruling tenets guide Informatica’s mission: discover, govern, master, populate, cleanse, and democratize. By executing these principles, Informatica enables data-driven transformation, centered around data literacy, which spreads understanding, access, trust, protection, and automation of data throughout an organization.
IDMC, the method of delivering Informatica’s guiding tenets, connects, unifies, and democratizes data to advance business outcomes. As open source, cloud native, and API- and microservices-based, IDMC provides both a modern and comprehensive path toward reinvigorating the value of proprietary data.
IDMC centralizes the following features for a company’s data consumers:
- Data catalog
- Data integration and engineering
- API and app integration
- Data quality and observability
- MDM and 360 applications
- Governance and privacy
- Data marketplace
Though IDMC offers a wide breadth of capabilities to allow enterprises to derive greater value from their data, other solutions stand to push these features to their greatest potential.
CLAIRE, an AI offering from Informatica, uses unified metadata intelligence to provide AI copilot capabilities that automate different data management tasks, driving both efficiency and productivity throughout an organization.
The solution provides numerous advantages that can optimize the data underbelly of an enterprise, including source data discoverability, fast pipeline integration and automation, improved self-service, intelligent glossary associations, knowledge graphs, and more.
While powerful, CLAIRE is just one of the many technologies that can uniquely underpin the IDMC; lakehouse modernization with Microsoft Fabric, for example, can also enhance the productivity and quality of data in combination with IDMC.
The Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering, and data integration, all in one place. It solves the problem of, “How does all the data come together?” according to Gollapalli, offering a way to massively ingest data from customer endpoints like Salesforce, Adobe, Zendesk, as well as from apps, mobile devices, machine data, databases, and more.
From these endpoints, the data is written to Microsoft Fabric into Microsoft OneLake, which allows users to apply their data quality and profiling rules through an ETL-based mechanism through any of the endpoints.
This is achievable through Informatica’s prebuilt data transformations, where Informatica functions can be leveraged to easily write advanced transformation expressions. With over 100 SQL-like functions, numerous prebuilt transform, and prebuilt function components, Informatica can reach customers where they are in their unique environments.
Additionally, Informatica offers data quality accelerators, which through available bundles, can improve productivity and enhance data quality. These prebuilt transformations for hundreds of assets include address data cleansing, contact data cleansing, general data cleansing, and matching and deduplication.
For an in-depth look at and demo of Informatica’s data value optimization offerings, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.