Informatica Teams with Tableau to Bridge the Business and IT Divide

Self-service analytics has revolutionized business decision making, empowering business users with new levels of speed and convenience. This is especially important in this day and age of big data, where organizations are required to support more users, who need more data from more sources, and want to do so more easily than ever before. Yet, decisions are only as valid as the data that supports them. How can business professionals trust their insights unless they are assured they are based on meaningful and trusted data? How can IT confidently open the flood gates to critical data unless it has governance oversight?

Informatica, the world’s No. 1 provider of data management solutions, has expanded its partnership with Tableau Software (NYSE: DATA), a global leader in rapid-fire, easy-to-use business analytics software. Together, the two organizations are delivering insights and understanding for business users at the speed they require, while ensuring IT controls are in place. Uniting Tableau’s self-service analytics with Informatica’s clean, trusted data and rich metadata enables business users to make even faster and smarter decisions with the support and blessings of IT. Together, the companies are providing the industry’s first end-to-end architecture and framework for agile business intelligence.

Combining Business Intelligence and Best-in-Class Data for Agility and Self-Service

Business users and IT alike are frustrated with data that results from traditional waterfall processes and lengthy cycles. Business users are further aggravated by lack of easy access to key data sources and the inability to easily combine data across sources. Meanwhile, IT is naturally concerned over the use and proliferation of potentially poor quality data.

To overcome these challenges, the architecture and framework leverages a suite of Informatica solutions for accessing, integrating and preparing data from disparate sources that can be easily analyzed by anyone in Tableau, including:

Informatica PowerExchange for Tableau, which enables IT to integrate, transform and operationalize data from an immense variety of on-premise applications and databases, and files, into Tableau Server or Tableau Online.
Informatica Cloud for Tableau, which allows business users and data heroes to connect to cloud data sources, such as NetSuite, Workday and Marketo, as well as on-premise sources, such as SAP. Beyond self-service to Tableau Desktop and Tableau Cloud, once in place, the business user can provide that integration back to IT for operationalization into Tableau Server and Tableau Online.

Informatica Data Prep 4Tableau, which enables Tableau users that have an Excel-like view without VLookups and automatically cleanse and prep data for accurate visualizations in Tableau Desktop, Server or Online.
MetaData Manager for Tableau, which provides IT the ability to govern the data in a Tableau report and trace the data back to source tables, column and data types along with the ability to furnish information about the data last update, times accessed, etc.

Informatica Marketing Data Lake, which is built on Informatica Big Data Management and Intelligent Data Lake, with pre-packaged connectors, data model, reference architecture, business rules and optimized for Tableau. Tableau is used as the visualization front end, providing real-time dashboard views of data integrated from across every customer touch point.

“People want fast, agile, visual analytics that let them ask and answer their own questions, while providing IT with the governance, performance, security and reliability they need,” said Christian Chabot, chief executive officer and co-founder, Tableau. “Timely, authoritative data and rich metadata are keys to effective BI. By working together, Tableau and Informatica are providing the trusted data – no matter where it lies – to help people quickly analyze, visualize and share information.”

“Tableau and Informatica is a marriage made in heaven, satisfying the requirements of business users and IT in equal measure,” said Anil Chakravarthy, chief executive officer, Informatica. “Together our companies are able to deliver on the promise of ‘great data in, great self-service analytics out,’ which is the goal of every business and IT user. Business users can leverage self-service Informatica solutions to easily access and integrate data across any cloud or on-premise source, and quickly cleanse and prepare the data for use in Tableau. At the same time, IT is able to govern the data without compromising the agility of self-service analytic users.”

According to Gartner, “The increased need for governance will serve as the catalyst for renewed IT engagement as business-user-led deployments expand. When the market shift first began, business users felt empowered to circumvent IT and autonomously purchase and begin using any product that addressed the gaps in their enterprise BI program. Over time, as deployments have grown — both in terms of number of users and in complexity of use cases — business users are re-engaging with IT to collaborate and develop agile processes that support self-service requirements, with appropriate controls in place to ensure appropriate and responsible use. This will bolster the business case for self-service data preparation products to be combined with data discovery products, offering an agile and cohesive alternative to traditional approaches that lack agility and do not support collaborative development between IT and business users. This is consistent with the ‘pendulum swing’ that has occurred at various points in this market — where end-user experimentation has eventually swung to the opposite extreme of IT-centralized control. The need for governance over the rapidly expanding universe of business-user-generated content is now swinging the pendulum back toward the more collaborative middle ground.”