Gartner's predicted technology trends for 2021 and how a market leader in cloud data management is responding to them

Year in and year out, the major IT analyst firms, such as Gartner, Forrester, and IDC, look at the most important emerging technology trends and make their predictions about which of these trends and in what timeframe will occupy companies around the world. Gartner, one of these analyst firms, focused on three areas at the end of 2020 with its prediction of technology trends for 2021 (read here). At that time, Gartner predicted that the three most important areas for 2021 would be about people centricity (Internet of Behaviors, Total experience strategy, Privacy-enhancing computing), location independence (Distributed cloud, Anywhere operations, Cybersecurity mesh), and resilient delivery (Intelligent composable business, AI engineering, Hyperautomation).

• People centricity - The way many people work and interact with organizations has changed over the past year, but people are still at the center of a business relationship. To maintain the business relationship, therefore, digital, people-focused processes are required.
• Location independence - As the way we interact has changed, so have the touchpoints. Employees, customers, suppliers, and organizational ecosystems have reoriented and adapted to the changing situation. If the focus is on people centricity and location independence should be possible, then companies will need to offer the protagonists the appropriate basis for this.
• Resilient delivery - In a world and society that is constantly changing, volatility is part of the agenda. Those organizations prepared to respond flexibly and adapt to new situations quickly but in a governed, and organized manner will master and successfully exploit all types of change.

Looking at all these trends more closely, one thing stands out very clearly. The basis of all these trends is always flexible, trustworthy, consistent, and secure handling of the data needed to enable them. This is why we asked a market leader in (cloud) data management how they support and enable these predicted trends.

Tobias Wrobel: As one of the market leaders in cloud data management, you are close to what is happening in the market. What trends do you see? And how are these trends shaping the future?

Prash Chandramohan: True transformation of an enterprise involves data, cloud, and AI. Digital transformation of an enterprise begins with a strategic mindset, from the CEO down. You need cloud nativity so you can go fast. Second, you need a data-led and AI-centric approach. Let data and AI work for you to accelerate your initiatives and drive business value.

Informatica has always been at the forefront of data innovation, consistently predicting what the industry needs, in advance. During our annual customer event—Informatica World 2021—we unveiled one of the most exciting innovations in our company’s history. We launched Intelligent Data Management Cloud, designed to help businesses innovate with their data on any platform, any cloud of their choice. This complete cloud-native and AI-powered platform is the critical missing piece for businesses to move from simply modernizing to truly transforming for a digital world.

Informatica has led the data evolution from Data 1.0 to Data 4.0. It’s in this Data 4.0 world where we see that data is truly the soul of digital transformation. For businesses to thrive in this new world, we need a cloud dedicated to data management. Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud brings cloud, data, and AI together.

Tobias Wrobel: So, you introduced a cloud-native data management platform in response to Gartner's predictions and the market's need. Now, what exactly is the benefit for your customers? Why should they use your solution and why in the cloud?

Prash Chandramohan: Businesses have made progress transitioning toward digital modernization in the last ten years. They have moved their infrastructure to the cloud. They have modernized applications, analytics, databases, data warehouses, and data lakes in the cloud. All to take advantage of the cloud’s innate benefits – flexibility, agility, scale, and cost. our customers benefit big from our innovative approach. They can do all the data management capabilities using one single platform.

Discover and understand – A metadata-driven approach for complete understanding. We are powering discovery and understanding through our catalog service, through our data similarity service, through our profiling service, discovery and classification powered by AI, and many other services.

Access and ingest – We are providing you access to trusted data by leveraging our 10,000+ metadata-aware connectors. You can easily access the data where you find it and ingest it to where you need it.

Curate and prepare – Curate, prepare, and integrate your data using our Spark-based elastic engine that can process terabytes of data in minutes. You can save 70% of your data engineers’ time as we offer automatic schema drift support, and easy drag-and-drop design experience with 100+ prebuilt functions and templates.

Cleanse and trust – You can leverage our data quality, our address, email, and phone verification services, and our rule building services. We automatically generate data quality logic from business rules and process at petabyte scale and automatically apply the data quality rules across your data estate.

Single source of truth and 360 views – Create an intelligent 360-degree view across your entire business to improve business process efficiency, analytics and decision making, and cross-functional collaboration throughout your enterprise.

Share and deliver – We share and deliver data through partner B2B portals, through API portals, through our data marketplace service, through our shopping cart and fulfillment service. Sharing and delivering enables users across lines of business to discover the great work that’s typically held in silos.

Govern and protect – We offer the only comprehensive, integrated, intelligent data governance solution that spans definition, discovery, quality, privacy and data democratization.

The foundation of all of this technology is our AI and ML engine, CLAIRE. Built on a modern, cloud-native, elastic, serverless microservices stack, CLAIRE connects data consumers to the data sources that they need. In that way, our Intelligent Data Management Cloud truly democratizes data — and then unifies your data to form an authoritative, single source of truth to create authentic data-driven organizations.

Tobias Wrobel: Now that we understand how people can benefit from intelligent data management cloud today, I'm excited about what's to come. What changes and trends do you see coming for data & analytics in the next five years? What do you think companies should look out for?

Prash Chandramohan: There are three big changes happening in the market that you should pay attention to over the next five years:

First the new normal is a cloud-first and multi-hybrid world. Cloud-first of course means that if something can be done in the Cloud, then you should choose the Cloud. A multi-hybrid environment spans any cloud, with multiple clouds as the standard.

Second, this is a world where data-first experiences matter. You don’t own infrastructure anymore. You don’t own applications. What you own is data. That is your data. It’s your organization’s most critical asset, and you will use it to create new and differentiated experiences for customers, suppliers, employees, and partners.

And third, the trust and privacy of data is critical. Data governance is no longer an afterthought, but a strategic requirement.

Interested in learning more about how you can leverage data to ensure success of your intiatives? Register for our webinar with Martin Treder about the “Principles of a data-driven Organisation”.

Informatica

Prash Chandramohan
Senior Director of Product Marketing

Prash Chandramohan is a customer-focused product marketer, responsible for Informatica’s master data management (MDM) and 360-solutions. Passionate about MDM, Prash brings a breadth of knowledge and experience working with customers around the world. As an industry thought leader in master data management, data quality, and data governance, he shares best practices, expertise, and guidance in his award-winning blog http://www.mdmgeek.com/. Recognized as a top Big Data, Analytics, and MDM social media influencer, he can be found data-tweeting with the Twitter community as @MDMGeek.

Parsionate

Tobias Wrobel
Marketing Manager

After several years in Data & Analytics software sales, Tobias Wrobel has changed his focus and joined the marketing team at parsionate in 2018. Tobias is the connecting link between sales and marketing and is focused on providing comprehensible and value-added communication in the field of Data & Analytics as well as being responsible for giving voice to customer experiences. With his passion for Data & Analytics trends and developments in the market and within companies, he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience from working with customers and their experiences.