Two weeks ago, I attended Informatica World 2019 (IW19) in Las Vegas. It was a busy and well-attended event with opportunities to meet lots of people with data management interests and to observe the continuing evolution and innovation of Informatica products. Among the many sessions and keynotes, I enjoyed hearing the ideas and insights of Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO. The conference was rich with sessions and activities—so rich that it is impractical to cover them all in a single blog. Check out this press release for a broad look at IW19 activities and announcements.

Being a data management geek, I was mostly interested in the technological advances for managing data. Like a kid in a toy store, I had to see all the parts of CLAIRE, Informatica’s intelligent data management engine built on a foundation of AI, metadata, and a smart data catalog. CLAIRE covers many bases including data integration, big data management, cloud data management, master data management, data quality, and data security. Among all of the many data management “toys,” one that really caught my attention is the Customer 360 Insights solution for smart customer data management. 

360 Customer View

From the dawn of MDM, we heard about the importance of having a 360-degree view of customers. But in many ways, those early MDM solutions were an illusion. Their primary purpose was customer data integration—blending and harmonizing customer data from internal operational systems. How can you get a full view of customers using only your internal enterprise data? Every customer is much more than a composite of their transactions and interactions with your company. To fully understand customers, you need to know about their relationships with products, people, and places beyond the boundaries of your enterprise. You need data—big data—and the ability to see relationships in and draw insights from that data. 

Next Generation Customer Data Management

Internal data isn’t enough data for a 360-degree view, and integration isn’t enough processing to see all relationships and gain deep insights. With traditional MDM you can see some relationships and gain some insights, but they’re not sufficient to survive in today’s hyper-competitive business world. More data and the right technology are essential. Social data, CRM data, interaction and behavior data, and transaction data all work together to paint a full picture of the customer. Different processing is also needed to paint the picture. Traditional integration must be complemented with AI/ML based processing for contextual matching and relationship discovery. Analytics can be applied to further enrich the customer view and relationships can be viewed as graphs. The complete and robust customer profile can be viewed from many perspectives depending on user persona requirements and can be processed with a variety of analytics tools. The diagram below illustrates my understanding of how Customer 360 Insights makes it possible. 

The business benefits of true Customer 360 are clear—hyper-personalization, exceptional customer experience, increased customer value and share of wallet, increased customer retention and reduced churn, greater customer loyalty, and highly focused marketing campaigns with greater impact and return on marketing investment. Other use cases include next best action and experience, marketing transformation, personalized omnichannel experience, deep analytics & data science, managing risk and compliance, and improved & targeted sales.  A 360-degree view of a customer is an important contributor to business success. At last, that 360 view is possible. To get there, you’ll need the right data and the right technology. 

Informatica has invested heavily in 360 solutions, designed to make MDM implementations more value-driven, and has pre-built offerings for managing Customer, Product, and Supplier data. The company has significant investment in its products and continues to add more solutions to its portfolio. I also saw the announcement of Reference 360 – a solution designed for strategically managing reference data that will help organizations simplify external (regulatory compliance) and internal reporting. Reference 360 brings the power of CLAIRE to remove reference data inconsistencies in enterprise applications and the operational overhead involved in managing reference data.