Trends and Innovations in the World of Data-Driven Digital Transformation

Let me share with you some insights from the Informatica World Tour event in Frankfurt which Striped Giraffe was one of the sponsors. This year’s edition was focused on the transformative power of data and included 4 sessions dedicated to market perspectives for cloud/hybrid, next generation analytics, data governance and privacy, and 360 engagement.

 

More than 200 business and technology professionals interested in data management and business intelligence met on 8 October in Frankfurt for the Informatica World Tour 2019. The attendees had an opportunity to learn about the latest market trends and inspiring ideas from industry analysts, thought leaders, Informatica customers, partners, and product experts — across cloud/hybrid data management, next generation analytics, data governance and privacy, and 360 engagement. Among the speakers there were representatives of the companies who — like Merck or Deutsche Leasing — shared their inspiring thoughts and experiences from successful projects they have recently completed, and discussed the business value they have achieved.

In his welcome keynote, Informatica CEO Anil Chakravarthy talked about the importance of artificial intelligence and machine learning and how — after so many years of progress — AI has started to deliver value to practical applications across all industries. According to Mr. Chakravarthy, artificial intelligence has finally become consumable but to achieve satisfactory results AI and machine learning need trusted data, while data management needs AI and machine learning to scale.

 

Anil Chakravarthy, Informatica CEO

 

Session “Market Perspectives for Data Governance & Privacy”

In order to better understand the challenge of data management, it is worth recalling a few numbers:

• 20,6 zeta-bytes of information is handled annually in global data centers
• The number of people with access to business data is globally estimated at more than 500 million — and it is also growing steadily
• More than 20 trillion devices are connected to the Internet
• It is estimated that more than 90% of all traffic is already processed in the cloud

Data on user behavior and preferences are also critically important:

• 69% of global consumers are prepared to boycott any company they believe doesn’t take data protection seriously
• 62% blame the company first in the event of a data breach, rather than the hacker.
• 83% of US consumers will stop spending for several months after a breach or serious incident
• 21% of US consumers will never return to a brand that has suffered a data breach.

 

From the left: Moritz Schlee — Senior Project Manager, Deutsche Leasing; Patric Dewald — Senior Director, Data Governance Strategy, Informatica; and Dominik Gigli — Senior Manager, Regulatory Information Management, Merck Healthcare KGaA

 

Achieving high quality data in life sciences

During the session on Data Governance and Privacy, a lot of attention was paid to various aspects of data quality in the pharmaceutical industry. This was a great opportunity to share experiences from two data quality projects carried out by Striped Giraffe for a global life science giant — Merck Healthcare KGaA, since both of them involved the data quality-related Informatica tools, including Informatica Data Quality, Informatica Analyst, and Informatica Developer.

The first project was aimed at improving the quality of regulatory data stored in the Regulatory Information Management System (RIMS) due to the planned migration to the new platform. The solution implemented makes it possible to constantly monitor and maintain the high quality of data with reusable data quality rules and automated workflows. The goal of the second project was to develop a solution for data quality checks between the European Medicines Agency’s IDMP-SPOR data management services and key Merck systems that store and process data required for compliance with the ISO IDMP standards.

One of the speakers in this session was Dominik Gigli, Senior Manager for Regulatory Information Management from Merck Healthcare KGaA. In the context of both projects implemented with Striped Giraffe, he said that the role of Data Governance has expanded recently. It is still about managing risks — for example to secure regulatory compliance and to enhance data quality, reliability, and accessibility. At the same time, business intelligence projects drives business value — e.g. by reducing time to market for products & offerings.

 

From the left: Moritz Schlee — Deutsche Leasing, Patric Dewald — Informatica, and Dominik Gigli — Merck Healthcare KGaA

 

Together with Mr. Gigli from Merck, we had an opportunity to answer a number of questions raised by the professionals from the pharma industry. To what extent was it possible to achieve the objectives of the project implemented by our team for Merck? What risks did you expect in the project and what surprised you? How did it happen that Merck entrusted us with such an important project? What are the next challenges that we and Merck face in the BI area?

 

Striped Giraffe’s booth in the exhibition hall

 

Session “Market Perspectives for Cloud / Hybrid”

Undoubtedly, the key topic here was the possibility of integrating Informatica systems with applications or services embedded in all key cloud solutions. Therefore, the second most frequently mentioned word here was “hybrid” (or Multi-Cloud Hybrid) supporting the vision “Any Integration pattern / Any user / Any data”.

Many Informatica on-premise products — which until recently had no equivalent in the cloud — now already have. It’s well illustrated by the following graphic — the first 4 grey rectangles are the existing products included in the Informatica cloud platform, the rest are the new systems available in the cloud.

An interesting source of information for people who want to deepen their knowledge in this area is the following page.

Another novelty is the availability of many trial versions for cloud products. More information can be found here.

 

Session “Market Perspectives for 360 Engagement”

According to “Consumer 2020: A progress report”, 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for personalized, contextual shopping experience. Therefore, the IWT 2019 did not lack a session on Informatica systems enabling the analysis of 360-degree customer data — from all channels of contact with the brand.

The audience could ask questions, which often in this session touched on topics such as:

• What is a definition of the “next best customer experience”?
• In the practice of day-to-day business operations — how deep analytics and data science can support personalized omni-channel experience?

 

Session “Next generation analytics”

At this session, the discussion focused around “Data Engineering Success Factors for AI & Analytics”. Among others, Informatica experts presented:

• Company Data Engineering Portfolio
• Understanding of the Cloud-Ready Reference Architecture
• Informatica solutions for Data Engineering for AI / Machine Learning

 

New products

As it was expected, during IWT 2019 Informatica presented its new products. There were many of them, so below we will focus on a few selected examples. Information about the entire new Informatica offering can be found here.

New possibilities of Cloud Data Integration tool were presented, e.g. Next Best Recommendation for developers. Informatica based on the experience of thousands of customers who have their code deployed in the repository in the Cloud is able to offer the developer recommendations on how to build mapping. The CLAIRE platform based on AI solutions is responsible for this.

Thanks to this, the developer does not have to invent the wheel from scratch, but is able to take advantage of the hints, and the result will be an efficient code that has already been used by other clients in similar use-cases.

The new MDM-Reference 360 solution has been made available too.

Some of the solutions — apart from new functions — have also been given new names. The tools that used to be part of the Informatica Big Data Management platform are now called Data Engineering.

 

New partnerships

A strategic partnership with SAP has been announced to ensure architecture integration between Informatica Data Integration and SAP HANA Cloud Services and to optimize communication between any application and data source and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

Informatica has also established a partnership with Databricks, whose software can be used as a “runtime” environment for Big Data processing.

Microsoft and Informatica also cooperate in the area of migration of existing data warehouses to Azure.

Informatica products also use the DataRobot tool.