Google Cloud, Informatica Team Up to Tame Data
May 21 2019 - 12:46PM
Dow Jones News
By Angus Loten
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, 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. Charkravarthy, 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 serviceMr. 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 heachaches, 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.
Write to Angus Loten at angus.loten@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 21, 2019 12:31 ET (16:31 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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