Data Quality with Informatica

nformatica offers an integrated data management platform, from data access and integration to data governance and catalog, data quality, master data management and a data marketplace. These functional areas share a common AI-driven metadata layer called CLAIRE as well as connectivity to a wide range of data sources. In the data quality area, Informatica’s technology covers the full range of functionality that you would expect to see from a full-function data quality product. The technology carries out data profiling, anomaly detection and potential data duplicates, data validation and cleansing, merge matching and data enrichment. The product is cloud-native and runs on AWS, Azure and GCP, as well as, most recently, the Oracle Cloud.

Customer Quotes

“We’ve seen a lot of return since we’ve implemented the solution. The business is happy and the data is flowing.”
Fauzan Ahmed, IT Manager – Application Development and Support, Marathon Oil

“The vision I describe to my colleagues is that they’ll be able to implicitly trust the data that informs them, no matter where in our organization it comes from.”
Robin Miller, Group Data Manager, Lowell Group

Mutable Award: Gold 2024

The CLAIRE software engine can automate a wide range of data management tasks, including profiling of data. This software can identify anomalies in data, auto generate data quality rules, apply the data quality rules and suggest corrective actions. This goes beyond basic exception management and includes detecting unusual distributions of data – for example if a data load results in an unusual or surprising number of records. Business users are notified when anomalies are detected. A recent acquisition of a company called Privitar adds metadata-driven policy management.

The CLAIRE engine has been enhanced recently to go beyond the ability to identify potential data failures, generate data quality rules and classify data automatically. Data elements can be classified automatically, data schemas compared and data structures detected and catalogued. One logistics customer was able to use this to automatically associate business terms in 95% of cases in a file of over a million records, saving several months of effort.

A text interface now allows business users to discover and interact with data assets, explore metadata and the relationships between data and create data pipelines. An end user could pose a question in English like “Help me find the datasets needed for creating a customer churn report” or “Explain the lineage of the sales KPI report” or “What are the top viewed reports in our company”? This facility is currently in beta test with 150 customers.

Informatica can support both data fabric and data mesh architectures. They have a partnership with Microsoft to embed Informatica technology within the Microsoft Fabric product as a native application; for example, the profiling of a data table and its associated results appear as a native fabric asset with associated data quality rule definitions and executions.

mproving data quality should lead to improved quality of business decisions, and may also avoid regulatory and compliance problems. Recently, another imperative has appeared. The rise of interest in generative AI has led to many companies wishing to train large language models on their own corporate data. However, the success of implementing such AI models is heavily dependent on data quality since the AI model is only as good as the data that it is trained on. As a wise person said: “Everybody is ready for AI except your data”. Companies are finding that high data quality is a precursor to successful AI implementations.

The bottom line

Informatica has evolved from its ETL roots and now has a broad suite of data management capabilities, from data integration to master data management, from data quality to data governance and more. Its substantial investment in artificial intelligence, starting with the launch of CLAIRE in 2018, is paying off now, with significant new capabilities such as CLAIRE GPT. It competes with established broad-based data platform vendors like SAP, IBM and SAS as well as with pure-play data quality products. Informatica is clearly one of the leading players in the data quality market.