Informatica

Last Updated: 11th June 2019
Analyst Coverage: Daniel Howard

Informatica was founded in 1993 as a services company specialising in helping its customers to migrate to a client/server environment. It was not until 1996 that it introduced its first product, Informatica PowerMart, which was followed by Informatica PowerCenter in 1998. The following year the company floated on NASDAQ but in 2015 the company went through a leveraged buyout whereby Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board acquired Informatica for a price of $5.3bn. Microsoft and Salesforce were also investors. In the year prior to the acquisition the company had revenues in excess of $1bn and net income of over $100m.

Since going private Informatica has not only been aggressive in introducing new products but has also been transitioning away from an on-premises, traditional licensing model to a more cloud-based subscription-oriented approach. In a number of the markets it serves, Informatica is also having to evolve from a company that traditionally marketed itself to IT and technical departments, to one that is more involved at business levels. This is arguably more difficult to do than a transition to the cloud.

Axon Data Governance became part of the Informatica portfolio when the company acquired the original developer, Diaku, in early 2017. In the time since, Informatica has worked diligently to integrate it with other Informatica products, particularly Informatica Data Quality, Enterprise Data Catalog and Secure@Source.

Company Info

Headquarters: 2100 Seaport Blvd, Redwood City, California, USA, 94063
Telephone: 1-650-385-5000

Informatica Axon Data Governance

Last Updated: 7th November 2018
Mutable Award: Gold 2018

What is it?

Figure 1 – The data quality dashboard in Informatica Axon

Axon Data Governance is a data governance product that supports, among other things, data stewardship, data quality and data monitoring. In support of data governance, it provides a collaborative business environment for both business and IT, as well as the capability to support and monitor compliance with specified regulations.

One of Axon’s primary goals is to facilitate understanding of the data within your organisation. To this end, it provides data quality and compliance dashboards (one of which is demonstrated in Figure 1) that monitor all of your governed assets, as well as more detailed assessments that are contextualised to each individual asset. Business lineage data is available, and workflow driven change requests and policy design and creation are supported.

More broadly, Axon Data Governance is positioned as the core of the Informatica Enterprise Data Governance Solution, a complete data governance solution. It’s supported by (and integrates with) other products in the platform, including Informatica Data Quality, Enterprise Data Catalog, and Secure@Source. These products provide additional functionality – such as data cataloguing, data privacy, and, of course, the company’s well-known data profiling and cleansing capabilities – that combine with Axon to form a complete data governance solution that enables data-driven digital transformation and collaboration.

Customer Quotes

“Choosing Axon is more about the functionality than the cost and, in any case, the costs are dwarfed by the benefits (or words to that effect).”
Interviews conducted by Bloor Research with a major publisher, a major pharmaceutical and a major payment provider

“In comparison to other tools, we chose Axon for its data governance management capabilities. Anyone can use it to focus on the business impact of data. You’ll be able to get a business driven, global vision that’s defined in partnership with technology and enforced via the data governance team. All of that lends itself to removing the silos and increasing collaboration between business units and the IT department.”
McGraw-Hill Education

What does it do?

Axon Data Governance provides access to the data in your system via the aforementioned data quality dashboard. The same dashboard exposes metadata attributes, business terms, processes, and so on, with an emphasis on modelling your data specifically as it relates to your business. Furthermore, it is easy to access any underlying physical data via integration with Enterprise Data Catalog, and this access is provided via a multi-dimensional search across your entire system, either globally or for a particular type of asset. In addition to the dashboard, a detailed data quality assessment is available for each data asset, complete with business lineage data that is displayed visually. You can also make change requests through this interface. If your request is approved, a workflow is triggered to coordinate relevant stakeholders to implement the necessary changes, as well as documenting any changes made.

Another view within Axon Data Governance is related to data privacy and compliance, which allows you to view privacy information on data assets in more detail. It lets you see precisely how your data has been used, accessed and reported on. As with many tools of this nature, this means that you can both ensure that you are complying to a regulation and prove that you are doing so.

Figure 2 – A process map of policies in Informatica Axon

Axon Data Governance also provides a significant level of support for the creation and implementation of policies, particularly those oriented around data quality and data privacy. Specifically, it allows you to design and build a policy hierarchy, as illustrated in Figure 2, beginning with an abstract description of your policy, and ending with concrete business rules that can be executed on your data assets. Policies will typically be organised by project although, of course, reuse is possible. Projects may be purely internal or they may be related to regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Axon also has significant graphical capabilities (backed by a graph database) in this area, so that you can visually explore relationships both across policies and between policies and projects.

Why should you care?

Axon Data Governance models data assets as they relate to the business, making both your data, and the relationships between it, much easier to understand and utilise, particularly for non-technical users. This enables self-service, data discovery and collaboration, which in turn allows everyone in your organisation to effectively contribute to data governance. In our opinion, collaboration on this scale is necessary to achieve effective data governance at the enterprise level. In turn, data governance is increasingly becoming a necessity to promote data quality and ensure regulatory compliance. To wit, the 2016 Big Data Maturity Survey concluded that “accessibility, security and governance have become the fastest growing areas of concern year-over-year, with governance growing most at 21%.” More generally, the issues that surround poor data quality are well known, and the Gartner Group estimates that bad data can cost large organisations up to 14.2 million dollars per year.

The Bottom Line

Axon Data Governance provides data quality, data privacy and data governance capabilities within a single solution. By itself, it is very capable. However, combined with other products in the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform, it forms the crux of an extremely thorough, well-integrated, and complete data governance solution.

Mutable Award: Gold 2018

Informatica MDM

Last Updated: 25th September 2014

What it does

Informatica, a leader in data integration, has strong offerings for master data management. Its flagship product was originally based on the Siperian customer data integration technology, but is now a full multi-domain MDM product. Informatica has strengthened its product data capability through the acquisition of Heiler, a specialist in the mastering of product data.

Informatica MDM is noted for its high performance and scalability for high volume customer data implementations in particular, but it has a broad range of functionality, including support for data governance. It has for, some years, had some of the leading data quality technology on the market, a key element of any successful master data implementation. The company offers a broad platform, covering data integration and data quality as well as MDM.

Markets and channels

Informatica focuses on large enterprises and public sector bodies. Known for its strong penetration for MDM in the pharmaceutical market, it now has a wide range of master data implementations across a range of industries. Its strong US presence is now complemented by growing customer deployments in Europe and Asia.

Users

Informatica has some very large master data implementations, with customers including Thomson Reuters, UBS and Harrods. It has a large presence in the healthcare industry, particularly in North America, with customers such as Blue Shield.

Technology

The Informatica MDM technology has three distinct editions. Its flagship product has a high performance master data hub that is based on relational database technology. Its product data hub currently has a separate database but able to share data with the core product, and there is another technology for their cloud offering, which focuses on Salesforce CRM. These products can co-exist and work together.

Informatica has its own, highly functional, data quality technology. This allows master data records to be validated at source, enriched where needed and avoid data duplication between different customer source systems. Their technology has support for data governance, providing workflow and reports for data stewards. The flagship MDM technology is noted for its high scalability, and has some of the largest production implementations in the market of high-volume customer master data.

Services

Informatica has a substantial services organisation, which for example has an offering to assist customers with building a quantified business case for MDM. They also partner with a wide range of systems integrators, both global and local, in order to ensure that customer implementations are successful.

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Informatica

Company Info

Informatica Axon Data Governance

What is it?

What does it do?

Why should you care?

Informatica MDM

What it does

Markets and channels

Users

Technology

Services

Downloads

Commentary

Solutions

Data Masking 2017

Informatica Axon Data Governance

Self-service data preparation & cataloguing

Comparative costs and uses for Data Integration Platforms 4th Edition

Streaming Analytics 2016

The Sensitive Data Lifecycle: IBM vs Informatica vs MENTIS

Test Data Management

Managing Data Lakes