microsoft-names-informatica-2020-data-analytics-partner-of-the-year
I’m excited to share that Informatica has been recognized as the Microsoft Data Analytics Partner of the Year at Microsoft Inspire, this year's digital partner conference. With over 3,300 nominations from more than 100 countries, the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards are a competitive, worldwide recognition of excellence among Microsoft partners who truly stand out in a distinguished field. Informatica is proud to be recognized for such a prestigious award.
Every industry and business needs analytics as they transform their data into intelligence. Analytics is fundamental to any digital transformation. And digital transformation has never been more important. Most of us are looking to increase productivity, automation, flexibility, and agility. After talking to many of our customers over the last few months, I have realized that we have entered a true paradigm shift to a world of Data 4.0. The key distinguishing factor of Data 4.0 is the recognition that the scale, automation, and trust required can only be achieved with AI/ML capabilities. These capabilities will likely be the difference between the success and failure of your digital transformation. In fact, Data 4.0 is the soul of digital transformation: the intelligent and automated data fabric that will ensure you meet the outcomes and innovations required for your digital transformation.
Informatica, as the leader in enterprise cloud data management, is in a unique position, where we understand the power of data and how AI and cloud accelerate digital transformation and customer value. We have gone through this evolution ourselves, from on-premises to big data to being cloud-native. Our bet on AI (our AI is called CLAIRE) has further helped our customers accelerate their analytics modernization in the cloud.
Accelerating Agility With Cloud & Partners
Key partnerships with companies like Microsoft help accelerate the benefits of this cloud-native world to our customers. During Inspire, I had the pleasure of chatting with Julia White, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, about the Data Analytics award and our partnership. Informatica bet big on Microsoft Azure years ago, and we are thrilled to see the growth of our partnership over the years.
Informatica and Microsoft work with many customers jointly to help them quickly realize benefits and succeed. We have seen huge momentum in more than a thousand joint accounts, where data volume is massive, data is varied, and data quality and data governance are paramount, from departments in the federal government to healthcare. Companies like Unilever, Ford, AXA XL, and Chubb are just a few that come to mind.
A recent example of a joint customer success is with a multinational medical devices and healthcare company that focuses on science-based nutrition products. Data surrounding core nutrition projects, from ingredients to resellers, was previously housed on-premises. They were using an eight-year old, on-premises data warehouse appliance to store data from multiple sources that required personnel to focus on data curation. They desperately needed a way to inject more agility into their business.
This was both a migration and an analytics story. That’s how it usually plays out with most of our joint customers. It was important to build modernization into the migration process to maximize the long-term value of the company’s cloud investment. This was truly us selling with Microsoft, leveraging Azure Synapse Analytics and our cloud-native integration platform as a service, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services on Azure. Azure Synapse now serves as their cloud-based data warehouse, and our platform connects multiple sources of data to Azure Synapse, dramatically increasing their analytics capacity and agility.
Getting data centralized is table stakes for today’s market—and migration is a key entry point. Every piece of information a company has is data in some form. Organizations that pre-date the cloud often still have large pockets of legacy data on-premises that needs optimizing. Getting that data into the cloud is step one.
Accelerating Modernization to Azure
Many of our customers are migrating data to Azure Synapse or Azure Data Lake Storage. To help accelerate modernization to Azure, we’ve made sure our customers can take an incremental approach. Building a foundation of trusted data with intelligence and automation is critical for any cloud modernization effort and is pivotal to the success of the business. Our Enterprise Data Catalog becomes a critical starting point for customers to do this intelligently and cost effectively.
But the ultimate pay-off for customers comes when we can optimize business processes and drive agility and support decision-making with analytics.
Over the past year, we’re seeing a massive acceleration in digital transformation and an increase in workloads in the cloud. The customers who are transforming successfully have a cloud-native strategy and are data-led. And those customers are migrating and modernizing their on-premises workloads to the cloud or driving net new workloads in the cloud.
Together, Informatica and Microsoft have aggressive plans to build new AI-driven solutions that accelerate modernization to help customers drive cloud-scale analytics and innovate successfully. Our product teams have partnered closely for years now to build joint solutions and support Azure services. And our sales teams have partnered quite well to make sure we can show up together and solve our customer problems jointly and effectively.
Next Steps
Find out more about Informatica and Microsoft on our partner page. And be sure to watch my fireside chat video with Julia White, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, at Microsoft Inspire.
