Informatica ANZ welcomes Alan and Michael to the team

This week, we am very excited to welcome and introduce you to our new team members, Alan Yves and Michael Lyons to our growing team at Informatica!

Alan joins us as a Principal Sales Consultant after working as an AWS Lead Data Engineer for an AWS consulting partner.

Michael is our new Senior Data Management Consultant, and was previously a Principal Consultant in data architecture where he ran data management workshops, developed data strategies, and implemented data platforms for clients.

Our Pre-Sales Director, Brad Starr, sat down with Alan and Michael to find out what attracted them to Informatica, what they are most excited to learn here, and how they see data management changing in the future…

Why did you choose Informatica?

Alan: I had been working with data warehousing and data integration for about 20 years and was quite familiar with Informatica because I had previously worked with PowerCenter.

However, some of my colleagues were surprised when we discussed Informatica’s leadership in data domains other than data integration such as MDM, Data Governance, Catalog, and so on.

Michael: Before joining Informatica, I knew the company was one of the best data management platforms in the market and exceeded in data transformation, data quality, and master data management.

I knew Informatica to be true to its beliefs in how data management should work to enable organisations.

What’s been the biggest surprise since coming on board?

Alan: Aside from the company's technical capabilities and the people I've met here, what drew my attention was the culture that the leadership team fosters and the inspiring and encouraging leadership Informatica has internally. This translates into a very positive cycle, where every employee goes above and beyond with passion and customer obsession, and this results in amazing outcomes for our customers as reflected in Gartner's key data management quadrants.

In addition, I was really surprised about the market's regard for its leadership and how this influences prospects and clients to seek our solutions and assistance in their digital transformation and platform modernization journey.

Another factor that stands out is the degree of investment in modernization that Informatica has made over the last 10 years, as well as the level of investment the company makes in continual innovation.

Michael: The first aspect you notice is the huge welcome you receive. The amount of people who reached out to say g’day and offer assistance was a pretty good feeling.

Thereafter it became very apparent that team work is built in to the Informatica way of working. Creating a customer enablement experience is very real.?

What are you most excited to learn at Informatica?

Alan: I am passionate about big data ecosystems, cloud solutions and the elasticity and value they provide. But because all of these ecosystems are complicated, it has traditionally taken a long time for businesses to benefit from innovative solutions. Data professionals are constantly struggling with inconsistent data that does not arrive in the right format at the right time.?

What interests me most about Informatica is how the platform addresses these complex challenges to help organizations and data professionals be productive and accelerate time-to-value. This is critical when feeding data to decision makers so they can make fact-based business decisions with a high level of confidence using data in a structured manner.

A good example is the variety scenario where data engineers are presented with a complex hierarchical format such as Avro, Parquet, XML and Json. Usually these come from NoSQL databases internally or from third parties, or from machine logs, webpages, sensors, and so on. A typical data engineering task is to treat these files by removing characters and then cleaning and adding structure to bring the datasets from an unstructured to a structured format before making them available for consumption.

Recently, I worked with a client where manual data activities were consuming huge amounts of their time. As a consultant, the only solution I could use was python and it took weeks to develop and was highly complex. Informatica offers an instant and automated solution to the exact problem this client was facing via one of my favorite components called Intelligent Structure Model. It’s a cutting-edge solution based on AI and ML called CLAIRE and allows anyone to perform “data engineering over clicks”.

Informatica’s value lies in the fact that it is agnostic in abstracting the complexity of cloud and data platforms in various ecosystems. This supports clients in their multi-cloud strategy (which is an increasing trend as companies don’t want to be locked in by hyperscalers), and in moving from one platform to another very easily without re-writing their data integration logic – minimizing disruption and saving time and money.

Ease of use also enables companies to democratize data to end users for a self-service marketplace, so less technical users can be part of the entire data integration and data governance process.

Michael: I’m a data architect, and data governance is a big part of that role. I am very excited to learn more about the Cloud Data Governance and Catalog functionality that is within Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud platform.

In addition, Informatica’s Cloud Application Integration is also very exciting – particularly to see and learn how all the micro services such as Customer Data Quality can be used in parallel.

Looking back at the past 2 years, would you change any of the tools you used to migrate data to the cloud and why?

Alan: Yes. In the last few years I've used AWS Glue, Talend, and ADF which are all code-based and lack functionality. I worked with a customer who spent millions implementing Talend and had to hire several specialist contractors with very high daily rates.

The impact of high coding is precious time spent to deliver value to the business which translates into cost. If I had Informatica’s File Mass Ingestion, Database Mass Ingestion and Cloud Data Integration, the digital transformation projects I’ve been part of would have been faster and easier to implement resulting in faster value to the businesses.

Michael: Where I’m located, cloud is still a topic that generates a lot of debate surrounding its security and sovereignty. Organisations are only starting to embrace cloud due to its ability to scale and create faster insights from data.

Given Informatica’s incredible ability to connect to on-premise systems, applications, databases and SaaS offerings, I have always promoted Informatica as the tool to migrate data to the cloud. What I see now is that those who have chosen differently are considering replacing the platforms they did choose as their functionality is limited. I would still recommend they choose informatica to get the job done!

How do you see data management changing in the next 2, 5 and 8 years?

Alan: With the explosion of data volumes, data formats, and the velocity of data consumption, real-time data exchange is now possible not only for individuals but also for businesses. Enterprises now have access to an enormous amount of data, for which they recognize there is a lot of value, but traditional methods of data consumption are not scalable.

As a result, there is a greater need for scalability, productivity, speed to value, and ease of use solutions. This screams for automation, seamless integration across systems, and data quality automation. All of this requires innovation, and AI & ML are a crucial facilitator of that. ML will also learn from data in near real-time, processing new information from multiple sources and adapting accordingly with a crucial level of accuracy.

Michael: Data management will become a lot easier in the next 5 to 6 years as organisations adopt internal data governance programs and use data governance tools like Informatica to enable their programs.

For so long, data governance within data management has been largely a documentation exercise that saw low buy in and often died a slow death. Informatica’s data governance solutions will enable organisations to achieve data democratization at a faster rate, while still holding the principles of their data governance framework. It creates a layer where both business and IT can interact together – exposing roles, accountabilities and ownership across datasets.?