Every few years in our industry, we hear proclamations about how the latest technology shift is going to be the one that fundamentally reshapes IT, says Ashutosh Kulkarni, Senior Vice-President and General Manager, Informatica Cloud.
For the last few years, cloud computing has looked like a secular movement that would result in all applications eventually moving out of private data centres to software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings.
However, although it was easy to see applications and development platforms moving to the cloud, it was difficult to conceive how analytics could possibly move to the cloud. Relational databases were simply not designed for that scale. It was difficult to imagine being able to access, integrate, and analyse the scale of data created by organisations as a managed service in the cloud. So the conventional wisdom was that analytics would be the main reason IT organisations would be forced to deal with hybrid IT architectures for decades to come.
Well, so much for conventional wisdom! The scalability of Hadoop, and the emergence of highly elastic cloud analytic services like AWS EMR and Redshift, Microsoft Azure, and Salesforce Wave Analytics have invalidated the last argument against moving all IT infrastructure to the cloud. So here's my own proclamation - cloud analytics is the killer application that will accelerate the coming of a cloud-only world within the next decade.
Informatica is in the business of data - of ensuring that businesses are able to integrate, relate, manage, and secure their data. In my 10 years at Informatica, I have seen the evolution of different analytics platforms - specialised OLAP databases, columnar databases, analytics appliances, Hadoop, and agile BI applications.
However, I am convinced that cloud analytics is the end state of analytics for the coming decades - the omega of analytics so to speak. The infinite scalability, the unbeatable price performance, and the simplicity of offering domain-specific and user-specific capabilities through the cloud makes it an unbeatable choice. Cloud analytics has not just arrived, it has made an amazing splash and proven it is here to dominate.
Informatica has built a cloud integration-PaaS that is designed from the ground up to support the scalability, reliability and security required for cloud analytics.
Informatica customers process over 6 billion transactions every day using the Informatica Cloud; to integrate data into AWS Redshift, Azure, and Salesforce Wave. Use cases range from sales analytics to analysis of IOT data. It's exciting to see how Informatica Cloud is fast becoming the cloud to connect all clouds to each other (and even to on-premises applications). It will be interesting to see how iPaaS leaders like Informatica partner with cloud analytics vendors to move the industry from a "cloud-first" landscape to a "cloud-only" future.
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Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq: INFA) is the world's number one independent provider of data integration software. Organisations around the world rely on Informatica to realise their information potential and drive top business imperatives. Informatica Vibe, the industry's first and only embeddable virtual data machine (VDM), powers the unique "Map Once. Deploy Anywhere." capabilities of the Informatica Platform. Worldwide, over 5 500 enterprises depend on Informatica to fully leverage their information assets from devices to mobile to social to big data residing on-premises, in the Cloud and across social networks. For more information, call +1 650-385-5000 (1-800-653-3871 in the US), or visit www.informatica.com. Connect with Informatica at http://www.facebook.com/InformaticaCorporation, http://www.linkedin.com/company/informatica and http://twitter.com/InformaticaCorp.
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