The second day of Informatica’s annual customer and analyst conference on May 16, 2017 at Moscone center in San Francisco. Informatica used this day of the conference to reinforce the new branding and provide a deeper dive into product improvements.
Reinforcing the new Brand
Yesterday Informatica began the process of rolling out its new logo and branding message. The goal of its messaging is to move market perception of Informatica from a legacy “ETL” vendor to a forward-looking cloud data management vendor. At this conference, it unveiled its new tag line “Enterprise Cloud Data Management” to describe its product portfolio. Further, CEO Anil Chakravarthy’s keynote focused on stressing the importance of data to digital transformation. The transformation is being driven by the evolution of the use of data by most industries. Informatica believes that we are entering a generational shift in the use of data. This shift can be seen by the rise in the use and need for data.
Neuralytix agrees that the role of data is critical to almost all current companies. Data is being considered a critical asset for almost all companies. This trend shows no sign of stopping any time soon. Being able to unlock the value of that data will be critical for companies that want to disrupt their industry, or are at risk of being disrupted by a competitor. When it comes to Informatica’s rebranding effort, today’s keynotes were a good first step but will need to be expanded up in the coming months and years. Specifically, the link between the underlying data and the need to transform needs to be more forcefully established. For most companies the need to transform begins with either a business threat or opportunity. This generally leads to many activities that always include either a new type of analysis, better application integration, or process redesign. The hardest part of these activities, from an IT perspective, is often the data integration and management. Neuralytix believes that Informatica needs to spend some time establishing that and reminding the market of that fact. To successfully move beyond the perception of being a traditional “ETL” vendor it needs to repeatedly show it understands the link between the value that the Enterprise Cloud Data Management can bring to a customer.
Product Improvements
Today also featured the deep dive into the product improvements. Throughout several of the presentations, Informatica, highlighted the value of adding intelligence to the data management platform. One of the problems that many customers face today is that with the flood of data they are collecting and storing, finding the relevant data can be challenging. This is especially true in situations where a market disruption is taking place. In these cases, even knowing what relevant data is available can be difficult. To address this Informatica added an “Amazon” like feature where other relevant data sources are displayed when a user searches for data. Finally, and in maybe most importantly, Informatica introduced CLAIRE, a data management AI that will assist customers with data needs.
Nerualytix believes that Informatica has always had a strong product set. The main reason for this is there will always be a need for products that can connect desperate data sources. This need will only continue to grow. Informatica recognizes this and has developed a suite of products that do the essential work of connecting and managing this data. This capability is now being augmented with greater intelligence in the data management tools, including CLAIRE that should make the job of finding the right data and connecting all of the relevant data sources easier for end users. This will be critical as more business users demand greater access to data sources.
Conclusion
Neuralytix believes that Informatica has started down the right path with the new marketing messaging. There was a different feel to this year’s keynote presentations than in past years. We are encouraged by the progress and would like to see it continue and grow over the coming years.