Beefed-Up Informatica Cloud Solves Three Major AWS Data Integration Challenges

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This morning, Ronen Schwartz, vice president and general manager for Informatica Cloud, was on his way to AWS’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, where he was confident that the integration company would find new customers today.

He had good reason for his confidence: Informatica planned to announce expansions to its Informatica Cloud, including new pre-built data connectors for Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) and Amazon S3. Given that Informatica already offers connectors for Amazon Redshift and Amazon RDS, Informatica is now the only vendor to provide a complete data integration solution for AWS, he added.

“We’re actually telling the user you can build your integration on Amazon. You can bring data to Amazon. You can take data out of Amazon,” he said by telephone Tuesday. “It’s not just a local solution for one scenario. We’re really supporting Amazon in a very strategic way with multiple products and a variety of scenarios.”

For end-user companies, this means you can install an Informatica agent on your Amazon cloud and solve three major data problems:

1. Moving data from on-premise or cloud into Amazon
2. Moving data between different Amazon assets
3. Moving data from the cloud into another environment, including on-premise

That’s good news for end-user organizations. Companies often use AWS to experiment and develop quickly, without concerns about hardware or other barriers. As a result, they can quickly find that they’ve created a cloud-based data silo. Surveys show that many companies still see data integration as a significant barrier to cloud adoption.

“We’re making integration of these assets seamless on the platform,” Schwartz said.

The cloud offering is also designed to support a company’s cloud journey, he said. Informatica has adopted a pricing strategy similar to AWS’ own. Customers can evaluate the tools and then pay for the integration via a monthly subscription fee based on time frame and the type of usage, he said.

Of course, it’s also a win for Informatica, which is positioned to become the default integration tool for AWS. The cloud is good for integration business: Schwartz said that for multiple years, revenues from inside the cloud have doubled, with most of that growth coming from new use cases.

For example, Informatica and AWS client UBM Tech uses AWS across all its media brands. It’s used Informatica’s integration platform to pull data from each brand’s cloud and present customized recommendations that cut across any one media brand, he said.

That’s a new business that would not have existed without the cloud. Informatica anticipates more demand for cloud integration as the Internet of Things takes hold.

“My personal opinion is, it’s just started,” Schwartz added. “We’ll see more and more of that.”

In addition to beefing up its cloud integration solution, Informatica’s latest Informatica PowerCenter release for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) includes support for:

• PowerCenter Standard Edition and Data Quality Standard Edition
• Scaling options – Grid, high availability, pushdown optimization, partitioning
• Connectivity to Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift
• Domain and repository DB in Amazon RDS for current database PAM (policies and measures)

Loraine Lawson is a veteran technology reporter and blogger. She currently writes the Integration blog for IT Business Edge, which covers all aspects of integration technology, including data governance and best practices. She has also covered IT/Business Alignment and IT Security for IT Business Edge. Before becoming a freelance writer, Lawson worked at TechRepublic as a site editor and writer, covering mobile, IT management, IT security and other technology trends. Previously, she was a webmaster at the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet and a newspaper journalist. Follow Lawson at Google+ and on Twitter.