Informatica Partners with Google Cloud to Provide AI-Driven Integration

As cloud computing adoption continues to grow, so  the need for modern and more efficient business and data integration capabilities.

And while many aspects of business and data integration are being simplified and automated, the increasing sophistication of business needs and the requirement of capabilities for performing highly efficient integration continuously are forcing organizations to make continuous calls for new and ongoing digital transformation efforts.

In this vein, an interesting news came in just a couple of weeks ago when a partnership between Informatica, a big player in the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and tech giant Google was announced.

Of course, the mere fact that two major players in the software industry decide to partner is already something worth to listen to, but the partnership is also particularly interesting because it involves the provision of artificial intelligence(AI)-driven integration services, in an enormous effort from both companies to bring integration services to a new level.   

The Details

The announcement specifically describes a new relation between Informatica and Google Cloud’s Apigee product group —the company’s group devoted to help organizations design, secure and scale application programming interfaces (APIs)— to enable customers to rapidly leverage data and applications, deployed within hybrid and multi-cloud environments through innovative AI-driven integrations and APIs.

According to both companies' communique, customers now can develop APIs that can easily enable access to applications, data and metadata and make use of AI-driven predictive analysis and recommendations powered by the Informatica CLAIRE engine, Informatica’s enterprise unified metadata intelligence engine.

The new Informatica Integration Cloud for Apigee, aims to provide “zero-code” API development and management capabilities. According to the announcement:

“Developers, integrators, and analysts will be able to point to any data or application, turn it into a secure, managed API with the click of a button, and then integrate and orchestrate business processes with a simple, wizard-driven drag and drop.”

Other relevant aspects of the Informatica-Google partnership include product-level integrations, enabling organizations to take business integration processes built in Informatica and publish them as managed and secure APIs to the Apigee Edge API Platform. Secure API proxies can be quickly built by automatically discovering Informatica business integration data and processes.

From Apigee’s side, the platform will provide customers with Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services that are an integrated edition within the Apigee Edge API Platform.

So What?

Well...while perhaps not flashy, this new partnership announcement news carries in my view a relevant message to the data management market, signaling on one hand, the increasing importance of seamless integration of enterprise software services and a new approach to designing, developing and deploying intelligent, universally embeddable and easy to use processes and data management tasks. And on the other, the continuous effort from software providers to enhance their ability to simplify business and function integration through APIs, including efforts made by other companies including Microsoft, Oracle and others.

To this point, Ed Anuff, director of product management, Google Cloud mentioned:

“Modern business isn’t just about adopting a mobile strategy or using the cloud to generate efficiency savings. Enterprises are leveraging new integrations for seamless workflows that allow them to use data and applications to create remarkable experiences for their customers, employees and partners. With the product-level integrations between Apigee Edge and Informatica's Integration Cloud, we can deliver end-to-end API life cycle management and integration capabilities to help enterprises accelerate their journey to become modern, connected digital businesses.”

Personally, I think this news keeps signaling what will a next stage in enterprise software where integration will be developed under new paradigms to enable low-code, increased device and platform portability as well as neater third party integration.

Finally, you can either take a moment to read a good piece on the Google Cloud Platform Blog introducing these and more new capabilities being introduced within the new version of the Apigee platform or throw me a comment in the lines below.