Market Milestone: Informatica and Google Cloud Partner to Open Up Data, Metadata, Processes, and Applications as Managed APIs

[This Research Note was co-written by Hyoun Park and Research Fellow Tom Petrocelli]

Key Stakeholders: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technical Officers, Chief Digital Officers, Data Management Managers, Data Integration Managers, Application Development Managers

Why It Matters: his partnership demonstrates how Informatica’s integration Platform as a Service brings Google Cloud Platform’s Apigee products and Informatica’s machine-learning-driven connectivity into a single solution.

Key Takeaway: This joint Informatica-Google API management solution provides customers with a single solution that provides data, process, and application integration as well as API management. As data challenges evolve into workflow and service management challenges, this solution bridges key gaps for data and application managers and demonstrates how Informatica can partner with other vendors as a neutral third-party to open up enterprise data and support next-generation data challenges.

Informatica partners with Google Cloud Platform Apigee

On July 12, 2018, Informatica announced a partnership with Google Cloud Platform’s Apigee products to create a unified API management and integration solution. This solution will combine Informatica’s considerable ecosystem of data, process, and application integration capabilities with Apigee’s strengths in exposing, publishing, and managing APIs. As a result, Informatica customers will be able to access their Informatica iPaaS data and processes as APIs on the Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) Apigee service.

With this partnership, Informatica and Google customers will be able to turn any data, process or application API into a managed API defined with a drag-and-drop, wizard-driven designer. Informatica customers will be able to publish these APIs to the Apigee Edge API Platform. On the flip side, Google Cloud customers will have access to Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services integrated within the Apigee Edge API Platform. As a result, both sides will have access to this value chain that quickly translates business and data integrations into app-friendly APIs.

Amalgam’s current knowledge of this partnership suggests a real benefit to Informatica customers on using GCP services. The upshot of this partnership is to accelerate the reusability of Informatica’s current integration capabilities by opening up every integration process as an accessible API. With this announcement, joint Informatica and GCP customers will now be able to build APIs specific to their Informatica iPaaS data and access them within Apigee. By easing barriers to entry in accessing Informatica’s Information Platform as a Service, this partnership will enable better data delivery to end users.

Understanding Informatica Integration Platform as a Service

Informatica is a market leader in a variety of data integration, management, and security markets. The most relevant of these capabilities in scope of this announcement is Informatica’s Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) offering, a cloud-based platform designed to support hybrid application and data integration challenges.

Understanding Apigee

Google Cloud Platform Apigee is a service that helps developers to set up and manage APIs for services on the Google Cloud. This products comes from Google’s acquisition of Apigee in September 2016 for $625 million, in large part to enhance Google Cloud’s enterprise capabilities and DNA.

Bringing Apigee and Informatica together

In considering the strengths that both Google and Informatica bring to this partnerships, Amalgam identified multiple concrete advantages for enterprise data and application development managers:

1. Making information in GCP applications and storage more accessible to customers. Developers would accomplish this by integrating various GCP data stores using Informatica’s IPaaS capabilities and creating externally available APIs to access it. These integration APIs will effectively deliver data for analytics applications or API consuming applications.

2. Accelerating application development within the GCP by providing the same integration, data cleansing, and data conditioning features that Informatica customers use on-premises or in the cloud easily accessible from within the GCP platform.

3. Enabling the building of hybrid Informatica applications by exposing APIs needed to manage interactions between on-prem and (any) cloud available on Apigee Edge. This would help create a secure border between the data held in Informatica in the GCP and that held on-premises. And by creating and supporting Informatica iPaaS-based data and application APIs, this partnership greatly reduces the barrier to entry in taking full advantage of Informatica integration capabilities.

4. Introducing Informatica users to the Google Cloud Platform. Google is currently a contender in the public cloud wars, but well behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. However, Google’s market share is mainly limited by a lack of visibility rather than a lack of technical capability. By supporting this partnership, Google stands to gain by introducing its cloud platform to a population of savvy enterprise data management and data integration teams.

This partnership provides a true win-win situation for both vendors. In working with Apigee, Informatica continues to expand access to its integration platform and to provide more agile services based on its iPaaS. And Google increases its enterprise credibility and gains access to a broad set of data sources and applications that can be further integrated into business process acceleration and automation efforts.

Given both Informatica and Google’s deep work in artificial intelligence, Amalgam believes that this partnership could potentially blossom into an even more interesting entity over time. Given the combination of integrations, processes, and services brought together through this partnership, it would not be surprising to see this partnership expand into multiple directions, such as providing API marketplaces, vertical-specific packages of APIs, or custom API packages for software developers to access over time.

Conclusion

Overall, Amalgam Insights expects that this partnership will be especially helpful to Informatica customers whose platform of choice is Google Cloud Platform and who run highly fragmented systems, such as those typical of microservices architectures. Given the ease of adoption for new cloud platforms in general, Amalgam also believes that this partnership provides Informatica customers with the opportunity to both dabble in the Google Cloud Platform and to provide application developers with APIs that reflect the breadth of data integration and management that Informatica provides while reducing barriers to entry to support the development and reuse of these APIs. The utility of this partnership should encourage clients of either Informatica or Google Cloud Platform to try this integration, as the ease of creating managed APIs supports data-driven and digital enterprises.