Informatica World 2024: Your data ready for AI

The creation of a tagline for a major conference or branding campaign can take weeks of research and discussion, yet the organizers of Informatica World 2024 didn’t have to do much for this year’s slogan, “Everyone’s ready for AI except your data.”

Customers delivered it for them, according to Amit Walia (pictured), chief executive officer of Informatica Inc.

Amit Walia, CEO of Informatica, talks with theCUBE at Informatica World 2024.

“The funny thing about this tagline is we didn’t come up with it,” he said. “I’ve been talking with hundreds of customers, and that’s exactly what they’ve been saying. That’s what our customers have been telling us, so let’s just tell it back to them.”

Walia spoke with theCUBE Research’s Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight at Informatica World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Informatica leverages its cloud platform for data management and governance as customers increasingly deploy generative AI workloads. (* Disclosure below.)

Informatica supplies AI models with holistic data

Behind Informatica’s conference tagline is the other half of the message, which is that the company is in a position to get a customer’s data ready for the era of artificial intelligence.

“An AI model by itself is not intelligent, but you’ve got to give it complete holistic data,” Walia said. “You want to give it good quality data; you want to have governance on top of that data. All of that stuff is data management. At the end of the day, that’s what we do as a living.”

On Tuesday, the company kicked off its annual gathering with the news that it would infuse generative AI into every facet of its product line. This included Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud, a centralized platform for providing cloud-native and AI-powered data management services.

“The first pivot the company did a couple of years ago was pivoting to all-cloud,” Walia said. “We built a whole new Informatica under the covers, brand new products … all on one platform. To give you a sense of scale, that platform is running at 92 trillion transactions a month. What that has allowed us to do is, in the world of generative AI, provide those capabilities for customers to use that platform, to run their generative AI workloads.”

Walia was careful to note that Informatica had not chosen sides in support of any particular data format, opting instead to take a neutral “Switzerland-like” approach.

“The one thing that is very unique for us is that we’ve always been the Switzerland of data,” Walia said. “We support any data format, support any cloud, any database, any application. And in the world of generative AI, we are going to be the Switzerland of generative AI, any large language model, any vector database.”

While Walia acknowledged that non-generative AI transformation was still very much underway and would likely continue for the next five years. He expects that generative AI use cases will expand and play a significant role in customer initiatives going forward.

“The reality is that generative AI is an exponential driver and customers have to start somewhere,” Walia said. “Enterprises are not necessarily in operational mode yet. I fully expect that when we come back next year onstage, there will be two customers who will be talking about their operational generative AI benefits.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Informatica World:

(* Disclosure: Informatica Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Informatica nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE