Informatica made a big announcement last week that spans many of its data management products. I’ve always been impressed with their ability to keep pace with (and often lead) changes in the industry and the technology. From the early beginnings as an ETL tool, the Informatica product portfolio has grown to encompass big data, analytics, data pipeline management, data cataloging, and much more—and all of it built on a foundation of AI/ML combined with shared metadata. There was so much in this announcement that it is impractical to attempt to cover it all in a single short blog. I struggled to decide what to write about and finally zeroed in on two topics that I see as groundbreaking.

The first is the Axon Data Marketplace. This new addition to Axon Data Governance makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to find the data that they need, then get access to that data while working within the constraints of data governance policy. The convergence of data search, data governance, and data access offer a storefront experience for “data shoppers” similar to what I described in my forward-looking report The Rise of the Data Marketplace: Data as a Service. When I wrote that report in 2017 it was a vision of future capabilities for self-service data analysts. With Axon Data Marketplace, that future has arrived.

The second thing that impressed me as truly innovative is a data quality capability that is sure to be unique in the industry. Using a combination of AI and natural language processing (NLP), Informatica has the ability to process documented business rules, associate those rules with data, and automatically generate executable data quality rules. This is a really big thing! Data quality management is hard, and it becomes ever more critical as AI/ML drives automation, robotics, and other highly sophisticated uses of data. Business rules are abundant and sometimes volatile, and for most of us, only a few of the many business rules are mirrored with corresponding data quality rules. Although buried in the details of a much larger announcement, the ability to automate the connection of business rules with active data quality management leaps out at me as a breakthrough technology. (Actually, I see this as one big step in the journey to what I call self-driving data. Watch for a report on self-driving data to be published here at Eckerson Group before the year-end.

I have barely scratched the surface of the many things in Informatica’s big news. They announced advances in next-generation analytics, data pipeline management, data cataloging, cloud/multi-cloud/hybrid data management, 360 engagement, data governance, data privacy, and more—all driven by AI—for continued growth in their portfolio of intelligent data management technologies.