Informatica Brings Real-Time Integration to the Cloud

Data Center Applications and the Cloud: What You Need to Know

With the release of the spring 2014 edition of Informatica Cloud, users will have access to graphical tools to directly design and map data integration flows between applications.

According to Ajay Gandhi, vice president of product marketing for Informatica Cloud, the increased sophistication of so-called “citizen integrators” is creating demand for data integration frameworks in the cloud that end users can directly manipulate without the aid of a developer.

The Informatica Cloud Spring 2014 is based on the Vibe virtual data machine technology developed by Informatica. Gandhi says that as Informatica gets better at abstracting away the complexity associated with data integration, end users become more comfortable with using rules defined in the Informatica Cloud to dynamically link data. Those various integrations can then be captured within the Informatica Cloud, which Gandhi says makes it possible to reuse them across other parts of the organization.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that programmers won’t be needed to optimize those data flows later on. But Gandhi says it does mean that the initial data integration process can take advantage of application programming interfaces (APIs) and the metadata captured by Informatica Cloud to allow end users to create their own real-time workflows across disparate sets of data.

Ultimately, Gandhi says the ability for end users to map data integration themselves without the aid of developers should lead to orders of magnitude in productivity gains. After all, business users typically know what data needs to constitute a workflow; it’s just the process associated with integrating those data sets that has been too labor intensive from a programming perspective to allow the workflows to be dynamically created.