Large data products are more than just it tools

For the business staff, especially the data scientists, Informatica's intelligent data platform is not only an intelligent large data preprocessing tool, but also can bring direct value to the enterprise as the business system.

Internet companies often emphasize the details and micro-innovation, the product of a certain function to the extreme, so as to firmly attract a large number of users. But enterprise-class vendors are different, preferring to platform their products. The advantage of the platform is that you can integrate as many functions as possible to facilitate deployment and management, and you can use the platform to shield the complexity of the underlying architecture. Software vendors Yu Xi platform, such as data protection vendors have data protection and unified management platform, large data products manufacturers have a large number of general information processing platform.

This May, Informatica, an independent enterprise data integration software provider, released intelligent data Platform in the annual Informatica world. As a next-generation data platform, intelligent data platform can provide the right information at the right time, and by laying a virtual data highway, people, locations, equipment in a more intelligent way closely linked to provide better support for large data applications.

Improve the level of intelligence

The Intelligent Data platform contains three core: first, Informatica vibe virtual data machine. Vibe is an embedded data processing engine that provides universal access to data in any location, format, or source, and supports customer "one mapping, multiple deployments"; second, data infrastructure. The data infrastructure layer can systematically and continuously deliver clean, secure, interconnected data in any size environment, from departmental to enterprise level, from transactional data to large data, from internal to cloud, and third, data intelligence. Informatica's original data intelligence layer will reposition the metadata created by the data infrastructure layer for the customer, improving the visibility of the data, improving the decision-making process, and improving the intelligence level of the operation.

The Intelligent data platform is able to deliver the right information to the appropriate person or to the correct location in the right way. Informatica Company China chief product Advisor but bin sums up the main functions of the Intelligent Data platform: Informatica can provide the highest quality correct data at the right time; Nformatica can deliver data to the right place, including within the enterprise or in the cloud; Informatica can deliver data to the right people, whether it, analyst, Data Administrator, or business user, Informatica can deliver the data to the right device, Includes networked devices or automated decision systems; Informatica delivers data in the right way and ensures that data is secure, authorized, and protected.

Intelligent Data Platform was released at the Informatica World 2014 conference, which was widely welcomed by the Informatica users attending the meeting. Informatica presented a series of intelligent data platform applications in the General Assembly, including self-service integration (Springbok project), data-oriented security management (Secure@source project), and 360 Full-scale business entity (MDM 10). At present, intelligent Data platform is not fully commercialized. The reason why intelligent data Platform,informatica in Informatica World 2014 is to listen to user feedback before the product is officially released, and then to further intelligent data based on user feedback platform to improve, and then timing release of the commercial version. This communication with the customer prior to the formal release of the product has become a practice for Informatica to develop new products.

Service for data scientists

Some insiders point out that large data has been developed to a new stage, still in accordance with traditional business intelligence (BI) ideas and methods to solve the problem of large data is outdated. Traditional BI adopts vertical data processing methods including data acquisition, storage, processing, analysis and presentation, and new data processing and utilization are distributed and flattened.

Traditional data processing methods are modeled, what users need, and what solutions vendors offer, but these solutions are usually fixed and inflexible to extend. If the user put forward new requirements, want to add new features or modify the original system will be very troublesome. The Intelligent data platform solves this problem because it is an intelligent platform that can establish dependencies for the various types of data that are concentrated in the "Data Lake" and then provide to business applications or interface with analysis tools.

are traditional database and analytics techniques still useful for large data processing? But Bin said that the traditional technology and new technologies are not the problem of who is wrong, but for different applications to choose the appropriate technology. For example, the common business behavior analysis of banks can still use the database technology, and some large predictive data mining projects should adopt new data processing technology to show the correlation between data.

"The biggest change that intelligent Data platform brings to users is liberating IT staff." The original IT staff must do business also to engage in technology. In the future, we want the IT staff to focus on development and system integration, and business people can describe the business more clearly based on intelligent Data platform, and can generate some rules automatically. "But Bin said.

The underlying technology supporting intelligent data platform is the Informatica Vibe virtual data machine, which is also the base engine for all Informatica products. On top of this engine, Informatica can help customers with data integration and improve data quality. Intelligent Data Platform is an integrated platform, and there are certain challenges to its implementation from an IT perspective, but it does bring more value to the business. "It staff can perform data extraction and storage, and then submit data for analysis." But the company's business people or data scientists can mark the quality of the data, find problems, and find more valuable things from the data, "bin told reporters. So, we want business people to be able to use the Intelligent data platform to make more contact with and leverage the information, not just the IT staff. ”

In the launch of Intelligent data platform, Informatica also proposed the "Data Lake" concept. The so-called data lake, which is to store different sources of data together, but not the raw data is simply stacked together, but to the data to be processed in advance to establish the relationship between the data, which is more conducive to the future of large data processing.

Large data is a business system

Traditional data processing and analysis is IT staff, so IT staff must have a wealth of mathematical knowledge and computer technology. However, the ultimate goal of large data is for enterprise business and application services, while IT staff often do not understand the business, which creates a disconnect between large data technology and applications. However, bin said that the most ideal user of intelligent data platform is business personnel or data scientists, because they understand the business requirements, can use intelligent data platform better interpretation of large data analysis results.

is a large data processing system an IT tool or a business system? Different positioning determines the different "fates" of large data processing systems. "Many customers in China often use large data processing systems as an IT tool," he said. From the perspective of IT operations, IT staff is only responsible for ensuring the normal operation of the system, switches, although occasionally write some code, but after all, not from the business perspective of the full use of large data processing systems. In this case, the large data processing system is only an IT support and security system, and can not directly bring business value to the enterprise. But Bin said, "If the large data processing system as a business system to treat, then business people can use this platform to better mining data, to bring direct value to the business." ”

According to the reporter understand, a single function of large data products may need hundreds of thousands of yuan, and a relatively perfect large data overall solution price may reach tens of millions of dollars. If you can't give full play to the value of large data products, it is a huge waste for enterprises. But Bin said: "If the enterprise only large data products as an IT tool, then may not continue to upgrade the product, and will not buy the professional services of vendors, once encountered problems can not solve, it may easily give up." ”

Informatica once brought technical staff from a bank in the country to communicate with Informatica customers in the United States. To his surprise, American customers are all business people in the company, and it's all about how the business system works. The Chinese customers who are involved in the exchange are all technicians, and want to know how the American enterprise constructs a large data system, and does not care much about how the system works and how it brings value to the enterprise. Such a strong contrast to the Chinese user to mention a wake up: First, the deployment of large data applications should be business-centric and starting point; second, the Enterprise is best to lead the deployment of large data systems and applications, because enterprises understand their own business needs, can more fully utilize the large data platform, improve the efficiency of data analysis.