Informatica Cloud Data Marketplace lets business users share AI data sets

Informatica is expanding its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform with Cloud Data Marketplace, designed to allow employees within an organization to share ready-to-use data sets for use with AI and analytics models.

The marketplace aims to let users contribute to and more easily find data sets that may be spread across different clouds or data warehouses, according to David Corrigan, general manager of data governance, quality and privacy at Informatica.

“As data proliferates and data complexity rises with more companies wanting to be data-driven, one of the pressing problems or bottlenecks for data scientists in several enterprises is simply to find data sets within an organization and sometimes associated AI and analytics models,”  Corrigan said.

How Informatica’s data marketplace works

Informatica’s new data marketplace is not to be confused with other marketplaces that deal in third-party data sources such as the Snowflake Data Marketplace, the Oracle Data Marketplace and the AWS Data Exchange platform. While the other marketplaces deal in third-party data, Corrigan said that Informatica’s Cloud Data Marketplace is aimed at sharing data and other AI assets within an organization.

“It’s not as if people are putting it up for sale within an enterprise, but it’s a marketplace type of concept where it’s a place to go and find data and to also share data,” Corrigan said.

The Cloud Data Marketplace targets business users, in contrast with Informatica’s Enterprise Data Catalog (EDC), a similar data marketplace that works with the company’s Axon data governance platform and targets more technical users within an organization, explained IDC research director of data integration software Stewart Bond.

As enterprises build increasingly complex analytics applications and AI models, data governance is a big issue. Use of improperly formatted data, for example, can have high costs for companies.  A joint report, released by analytics platform Alteryx and IDC in 2019, showed that data workers globally spend a full 44% of their workday on unsuccessful data activities.

Cloud Data Marketplace will feature a dynamic sharing agreement with terms and conditions to ensure that the organization’s data assets are used responsibly, with full auditability over compliant use, Corrigan said. The software will also offer insights and transparency on levels of consumption, where data is being used and for what purposes.

Informatica is taking advantage of its large installed base and adding this data marketplace as an add-on feature to its Intelligent Data Management Cloud, said Doug Henschen, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “Informatica stands to gain consumption-based usage fees, and there’s also the hope that large Informatica customers will encourage partners and data suppliers to transact through the Marketplace, potentially bringing more customers to Informatica,” he said.

Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud, announced in April, features more than 250 AI-driven cloud services designed to help enterprises catalog, ingest, integrate, and prep data for use in analytics and AI applications.