Though the promise of both generative and agentic AI have captured the imaginations of the vast majority of executive teams, businesses that have taken on substantial AI projects or proofs of concept have quickly found that AI is only as good as the data used to train models and agents as well as the data used to augment generative workloads and tools. In contrast to the past decade of Big Data where quality often took a backseat to the volumes and variety of data owned by the enterprise, the new era of AI forces companies to look at data quality, metadata at a holistic and universal level, and the ability to delete or modify outdated metadata and data relationships to support models and modern AI approaches. In addition, the constant research coming out monthly on the state of AI from every major consulting firm (Accenture, Deloitte, BCG, KPMG, etc…) keeps showing that the biggest reason for AI failure is that companies consistently spend too much money trying to do it themselves and not enough time doing their due diligence on the out-of-box or easily-configured solutions that are already in the market.
In this light, this research brief is intended to provide highlights of the new Informatica Spring 2025 release that Amalgam Insights believes will provide the greatest business value to the IT audience. This note is not intended to be a fully comprehensive overview of the release, but rather focused on the key features that will provide the greatest new sources of business value for Informatica customers.
From a data integration perspective, Informatica has created a CLAIRE-based Copilot for data integration that can generate ingestion, replication, and integration pipelines that are accompanied by the automation of business and technical logic associated with the pipeline. It is no secret that logic documentation is the bane of many an integration engineer as this task massively slows down the productivity of an integration team in creating and editing pipelines. But in an agile technology world where data integration to support timely and contextually shared versions of the truth is increasingly more important than simply creating a hardcoded single version of truth, the ability to quickly interpret, modify, and remove pipelines as needed is a vital capability that will likely save a minimum of one-to-two engineers of work in the first year for the average enterprise moving toward an organization-wide AI deployment.
Strategically, the most important new capability Informatica is bringing to market is the use of CLAIRE Intelligent Structure Discovery (ISD) to find patterns in unstructured data. For the past 15 years, businesses have been collecting data with the expectation that there are hidden gems. But the dirty honest truth is that most companies have lacked the tools or approach or visibility to even detect the patterns that would lead to value. And, true to Informatica’s long-held status as a neutral third-party in data, CLAIRE ISD is designed to allow users to bring their own preferred large language model, which makes sense in a world where everyone from OpenAI to Anthropic to Cohere to Tencent to Alibaba to Meta to DeepSeek are all providing new and better models on a seemingly daily basis.
On the integration platform as a service side of Informatica, there are some interesting announcements on hyperscaler connectors and a high-performance application integration runtime that will be vital for cloud-based companies seeking greater agility and more flexible API usage. And there is a Copilot to support the generation of in-app insights and app-to-app integrations that will be useful for more casual users seeking to create basic integrations, find new data, and summarize data environments. But as an analyst, I will demandingly state that I expected Informatica to provide this as an integration leader in the Era of GenAI.
But Amalgam Insights’ perspective is that the GenAI recipes announced are going to be the most interesting new capability for businesses in iPaaS as they enable process integration with hyperscalers, key enterprise applications, and vertical-specific use cases in areas including patient care and insurance claims. It is interesting to see integration players, including Informatica being asked to coordinate supply chain, commerce, and customer service processes while orchestrating data movement and integration, as this is often assumed to be more aligned to ServiceNow’s role in the enterprise. Not to say that Informatica and ServiceNow will directly compete against each other, but there are more similarities on the process automation side than some may assume.
Informatica has also provided updates to master data management in this new release, including the use of CLAIRE GPT for exploring and documenting master data while matching external data to golden records. To be philosophical for a moment, truth can sometimes feel more ephemeral as time goes by, data changes, and our environmental scenarios change. The ability to quickly update golden records of data is increasingly important to provide more potential context for each individual accessing these records for their own use cases. In an AI world, companies must augment data quickly, they must access golden records of truth quickly, and they must be able to expand the value and context of those golden records across all other relevant data and relevant models to maximize the value of their data.
This Spring Release provides upgrades for Data Governance and Privacy (DGP) as well and the capability that Amalgam Insights finds most interesting is actually not the generative AI functionality. Informatica has included CLAIRE-generated glossary definitions to make data more consistently well described and this does matter. But the most interesting functionality here is the integration of data access management with data governance and catalog to get more granular and individually defined data controls. To make customer experience, user experience, employee experience, and perhaps even agentic experience better over time, each human user or AI agent or hybrid skill capacity needs to be provided with appropriate data access that may be broader or more narrow than someone else with a nominally similar role. This integration has the potential to make data ecosystems and governance more human, which is a bit of a trend in the generative AI world where we are starting to make computers think more like humans rather than forcing us to place the correct bits into the correct bucket of memory to access the appropriate workflow based on predefined computing resources.
On a final note, there have been multiple platform improvements as well, but the one that caught Amalgam Insights’ attention the most was the improvement to the Informatica Platform Units (IPU) consumption by supporting tagging for chargeback use cases. The open-ended tagging is a valuable starting point, but Informatica’s additional capabilities and the data sources it is typically connected to make it trivial to tag IPU consumption with general ledger-based financial categories that the business cares most about, whether it be cost center, profit center, geography, or strategic initiative. And for those in IT who still have to do actual work, integration with GitLab will be welcomed as the tasks of data integration and governance come closer and closer to the rest of the software development lifecycle and need similar versioning and configuration controls.
Key Recommendation: Amalgam Insights’ analysts understand as well as anyone that a vendor like Informatica can often be taken for granted as a core vendor that excels at data integration and governance. And there is nothing wrong with being consistent and reliable for core IT. But Amalgam Insights recommends that Informatica customers take a closer look at the Spring 2025 release as the significant CLAIRE AI augmentations across every major Informatica category, the ability to discover new truths in unstructured data, and the ability to further augment the truth quickly are all important abilities that AI-ready companies will need to support.