Informatica extends MDM support to Microsoft Azure, Oracle

Informatica is partnering with Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce to extend support of its Master Data Management (MDM) service and extensions and help enterprises build applications for agentic and other generative use cases based on more accurate data.

Analysts see Informatica’s efforts to extend MDM to cloud service providers as a boon for enterprises because hyperscalers have not been focusing on building or improving MDM as a capability despite building data intelligence and integration capabilities.

“MDM is a critical element in supporting agentic AI. It promotes creation of a trusted dataset or single source of truth for the people, places, and things that enterprises care about, which will be critical in providing the right data in the right context to autonomous agents,” said Stewart Bond, research vice president at IDC.

Informatica’s partnership with Oracle will allow enterprises to use Informatica’s MDM service and other components of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) natively within OCI, the enterprise data management software provider said.

The native usage of MDM in OCI could provide benefits such as the ability to adopt a multi-domain MDM approach to manage critical data entities across multiple domains, resulting in improvement of data consistency and governance, both necessary for agentic and generative AI use cases, Informatica said.Bond said that Oracle’s partnership with Informatica for MDM will give enterprises more options to consider for conducting MDM-related processes, as Oracle has its own MDM, data intelligence, and data integration capabilities.

The partnership with Oracle will also see Informatica providing connectors for streamlined use of IDMC with Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Object Storage, making data from these Oracle sources available to be accessed.

MDM via Informatica’s IDMC for OCI will become available to enterprise customers in the month of October this year, Informatica said.

MDM extensions for consolidating data in Microsoft Fabric

As part of its strategy to extend MDM support across major data analytics and database providers, Informatica has now added support for MDM extensions in Microsoft Fabric to help enterprises consolidate data.

These extensions, often termed as MDM360 extensions, according to Informatica, are preconfigured assets that are expected to streamline implementations. Currently, the company offers two types of extensions — integration and industry-focused.

The integration-focused extensions help enterprises set up MDM for common data sources, such as SAP and Salesforce.

The support for MDM in Microsoft Fabric is a combination of these integration-focused extensions, which will allow enterprises to consolidate data from multiple sources in Fabric before setting out to build AI-based applications.

“Users can now leverage pre-built integration assets to expedite data onboarding and effortlessly replicate comprehensive master data models, including customer, product, supplier, location, and more, into Microsoft Fabric,” the company said, adding that MDM extensions support for Microsoft Fabric has been made generally available.

IDC’s Bond sees Informatica’s integration with Fabric as the former’s strategy to incorporate its MDM services more natively across all major cloud service providers, such as Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft.

“IDMC is available on all of the public clouds, and so theoretically, Informatica MDM is available to be used on all public clouds, but as a separate application and domain — not integrated with the data intelligence and integration offerings available on the same clouds,” Bond said, adding that these integrations will help deliver more value for enterprises.

In addition, Informatica said that it was introducing a data quality native application in Fabric in public preview to help enterprises clean data from inside the Fabric environment.

More partnerships for expanding MDM integrations

Informatica has similar MDM integrations with enterprise software vendors, such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, and is now executing its strategy to expand them.

“The first cloud-resident MDM offering from Informatica was a partnership with Salesforce, but that was with a previous generation of product,” Bond said.

As part of its expanded partnership with Salesforce, the company is integrating its IDMC platform in Agentforce in order to enhance agents built on the CRM platform with real-time data.

This planned integration with Agentforce, according to Bond, reinforces the need for master data in agentic architectures. While Salesforce uses its Data Cloud as the primary customer data platform in order to collect manage sales and marketing data along with external signals to help understand customer experience and sentiment, Informatica’s MDM integration will provide Agentforce users with mastered customer data from enterprise systems — account data, order data, returns data, interaction data and so on, Bond explained.