Informatica Launches Freemium AI-Powered Integrator
So there’s data, and there’s IT to process it for business purposes. A common missing link in enterprise systems is what’s in between: A setup app or service that sorts, categorizes, and preps the various forms of data — not to mention serving as a traffic cop to keep the streams moving efficiently and to the right production locations. It can get complicated, but a smooth and reliable workflow is what keeps companies competitive; data integration of the past was too often a sticky mess for anybody stuck with doing it.
Informatica makes an all-purpose cloud-based connector that unites data and IT, among other things. The enterprise cloud data management company this week launched what it describes as the industry’s first and only freemium, AI-powered integration platform for data practitioners: Cloud Data Integration-Free and PayGo. “Free” is always an enticing term, and it is especially relevant here.
Self Service
Providing self-service data integration to users across an organization in technical and business roles is becoming fundamental to a truly data-driven business, Informatica Chief Product Officer Jitesh Ghai told The New Stack. A freemium model is a good way to get a taste of how something works, and the user interface of this platform is designed to be used by employees technical and non-technical, Ghai said.
The key to a truly data-driven business is providing self-service data integration to users across the organization in technical and business roles. CDI-Free and PayGo defined:
- CDI-Free: A free service that allows users to process up to 20M rows for ELT or reach 10 processing hours for ETL, per month, whichever comes first.
- CDI-PayGo: All the capabilities of CDI-Free with no limit on processing rows or hours of usage. CDI-PayGo comes with essential customer support and SOC2 compliance. In addition, users only pay for what they use with a credit card.
Informatica only provides the data integration services and does not run a storage cloud; all data remains in the control of the owner.
The Redwood City, Calif.-based company claims to provide fast and intelligent data integration to load, transform, and integrate data in minutes, as opposed to hours or days with conventional tools, Ghai said. It targets data practitioners and non-technical users such as those in marketing, sales, and revenue operations teams so they can build and run data pipelines for their apps right away.
On the tech side, this new package provides operations teams with a “fast, free, and frictionless way to load, integrate, and analyze high-quality campaign, pipeline, forecast, and revenue data,” Ghai said. In theory, data analysts and data engineers benefit from increased productivity and rapid development by having less grunt work to do.
Making It Work
How this works in the real world:
“Say the SVP of revenue wants to do customer analytics on sales for the last three quarters,” Ghai said. “Using Informatica’s Data Loader (inside the platform), they can connect to Salesforce, or to Marketo, and they can pull the customer data into Snowflake, Redshift, Synapse, BigQuery, Databricks and others. Then the data can be loaded into analytics apps. Once in those analytics platforms, you can bring different tables within Salesforce and Marketo and potentially other applications and ETL and integrate them together.
“The SVP can do the necessary sorts, joins, filters, and advanced transformations to bring together a curated data set that you can use to run BI dashboards, reports, Tableau, etc. reports against the data set to help revenue ops and the CRO understand sales performance forecasting. This is very similar for the CMO and marketing ops, very similar for what HR ops can do. The difference here is we’re going directly to the line of business, and we’re making it as fast and frictionless and simple as possible for them,” Ghai said.
This new platform is the second in a series of releases that began with the Informatica Data Loader launch in May 2022. Together, Informatica Data Loader, Cloud Data Integration-Free (CDI-Free), and PayGo (CDI-PayGo) are the industry’s only free data loading and integration solutions, Ghai said.
The package has been beta tested by such companies as Paycor and Infoverity, the latter of which reported that “the tools are intuitive to use and easy to navigate,” CEO Matt Wienke said.