Informatica Now Private; Releases First Data Security Solution

Informatica has released two major pieces of news this week. The world’s largest data integration (DI) company and number-one provider of independent software has been acquired for a whopping 5.3 billion dollars ($48.75 per share) by Permira, a private equity firm, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, a strange investing tandem to be sure. The company still plans to be a key cog in the “data-ready” enterprise, but one has to wonder what this will mean for DI solution-seekers in the near term. This comes on the heels of Dell and TIBCO also going private over the last two years. Informatica’s annual surpassed 1 billion in 2014.

Sohaib Abbasi, Informatica’s Chief Executive explains: “While delivering immediate compelling value to our shareholders, we remain committed to the long-term success of our customers, partners, and employees. Permira and C.P.P.I.B. share both our vision for Informatica to power the data-ready enterprise and our conviction in sustained long-term growth.” Informatica plans to continue its growth via master data management, integration analytics, cloud integration, and security.

Their speedy entrance into the data security space shows us just how willing Informatica is to branch out into different areas of tech. On April 8th, one day after news broke about their acquisition, Informatica introduced the world’s first data security intelligence software. Informatica Secure@Source is a subscription solution that delivers a new approach to keeping enterprise data safe in the “age of data breaches and global privacy.”

Informatica’s new offering enables companies in the enterprise to take a data-centric approach to data security by allowing businesses to recognize and physically see important information whether it lives inside or outside of the corporate boundary. With this solution, enterprises can vastly improve their resiliency to data breaches while achieving success in initiatives revolving around privacy and auditing. Understanding where different applications create sensitive data in databases and how that data is reproduced to other storage areas for use by applications, cloud services and mobile apps is key.

Unique features of Informatica Secure@Source include:

• Enterprise-wide assessment of sensitive data risks
• Sensitive data classification and discovery
• Sensitive data proliferation analysis
• Policy-based alerting

Secure@Source is powered by the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform, which helps businesses easily integrate, consume, and analyze all kinds of data. The solution works by acquiring insights from the context of data and metadata to power highly accurate risk analytics.

Amit Walia, Senior VP and GM of Informatica’s Data Security Group talks more about the company’s plans regarding data security: “Data security represents a fast-growing market opportunity, projected by analysts to grow by 17 percent a year and reach $1.2 billion by 2018. The growing societal demand for strengthened data privacy and anticipated legislation around cyber-security, including notification of data breaches and data residency laws, are just two reasons why data-centric security is becoming so important a tool. We are leveraging our investments in data-centric security and our Intelligent Data Platform to continue to build innovative solutions such as Secure@Source to meet evolving data security needs.”

There is sure to be much more news surrounding Informatica and their move to more subscription-sentric offerings in the future. Conversely, it is not known how the new owners of the company plan to handle the DI giant moving forward. Solutions Review is entrenched in the DI space, and we will cover any and all important news pertaining to Informatica in the future.

Informatica Secure@Source will be generally available by the end of April.

To view Informatica’s official Secure@Source announcement, click here. For their acquisition press release, click here.

+ Download our free 2015 Data Integration Buyers Guide.