Angus Loten reports in the Wall Street Journal:
Google Cloud, Alphabet Inc.’s cloud computing unit, is joining forces with data-management company Informatica LLC to help businesses draw more value from their data—part of a continuing push by Google into the enterprise information-technology market. The move will couple Informatica’s data-management and integration tools with Google Cloud services including data-storage platforms and market-analytics tools. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.
The goal is to enable commercial users to more easily leverage massive amounts of data for use in artificial intelligence, machine learning and other advanced digital capabilitiesGoogle Cloud, Alphabet Inc.’s cloud computing unit, is joining forces with data-management company Informatica LLC to help businesses draw more value from their data—part of a continuing push by Google into the enterprise information-technology market.
The move, announced Tuesday, will couple Informatica’s data-management and integration tools with Google Cloud services including data-storage platforms and market-analytics tools. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.
The goal is to enable commercial users to more easily leverage massive amounts of data for use in artificial intelligence, machine learning and other advanced digital capabilities designed to glean insights for better business decisions, the tech companies said.
Though the tools are already available in Google Cloud, gathering and prepping data to feed into them “has been a bottleneck” for many companies, Informatica Chief Executive Anil Chakravarthy told CIO Journal.
“The datasets you need are often all over your enterprise and sometimes in third-party providers,” Mr. Chakravarthy said. “And because enterprises didn’t automate all business functions at the same time, the systems and the datasets are not always the same,” he said.
Informatica, a 25-year-old company, offers cloud-based services for managing data across these diverse systems, which can include multiple cloud services. It was taken private four years ago in a $5.3 billion buyout deal. Mr. Chakravarthy, a former Symantec Corp. executive, was named chief executive in the months after the deal closed.
Since then, the company has sharpened its focus on data-integration software, which allows businesses to extract and process information stored in various programs running on premises or in the cloud—a service Mr. Chakravarthy describes as “data plumbing.” It also has shifted its business model from traditional software sales to recurring cloud-service subscriptions.
Mr. Chakravarthy said Informatica started working with Google about three years ago, when the search giant began to expand its outreach to business customers by investing in emerging digital enterprise capabilities, such as AI and machine learning.
Expanding its partnership with Informatica is in line with Google’s broader strategy of driving business to its cloud-based enterprise services, led by data and AI tools, in part by helping chief information officers tackle common digital business issues. Managing data ranks high on that list.
“What we hear a lot is customers talking about ‘Can you help us clean up our data as we move to cloud or use AI tools?” Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s chief executive, told CIO Journal.
Mark Beyer, a distinguished vice president at Gartner Inc., said for most companies “data integration is permanent and permanently difficult.”
In a survey last year by credit-reporting firm Experian PLC, roughly 80% of 1,000 workers involved in data management at companies said data has become an integral part of forming business strategies. Yet just over half said the increasing volumes of data are causing headaches, including with key issues like regulatory compliance, the survey found.
Francis Lobo, chief technology and product officer at Mr. Cooper, a real-estate lending firm with more than three million customers, said data in the mortgage industry is typically siloed across different teams, making it difficult to use advanced analytics or AI.
“We’ve experienced some instances where our business had to wait on insights from our analytics teams due to the difficulty of wrangling this siloed data and applying the right algorithms,” Mr. Lobo said.
To avoid costly delays, he said, the company has adopted a data strategy that relies on a centralized warehouse and data lake, capable of ingesting data quickly and reducing the time of running analytics by half.
Milind Wagle, chief information officer of data-center and colocation firm Equinix Inc.—and an Informatica customer—said turning over the task of cleaning up and preparing data to outside tech services frees up a company’s own analytics team to focus on generating higher-quality insights from that data.
“There is a lot of energy that enterprises spend on cleaning data, and massaging data, and data preparations,” Mr. Wagle said, adding that he welcomes a stronger partnership between Informatica and Google. “We want to have the well-paid analysts in our company delivering insights focused more on managing and building out the data structures,” he said.
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