Informatica launches its first industry-specific Intelligent Data Management Cloud for retail

Enterprise data management vendor Informatica has released the first industry-specific version of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) for retail customers.

Called the Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Retail, the data management platform customizes Informatica’s suite of machine learning-powered tools to help retail customers catalog, ingest, integrate, and prepare data for use in analytics and AI-powered applications.

Customized to augment data and analytics for retail

IDMC for Retail has been built off the back of Informatica’s experiences working with existing retail and consumer goods customers, such as Kroger, The Hershey Company, Unilever and Discount Tire.

“We have built industry-specific workflows, connectors, extensions, and data models for retail to help these organizations drive better customer experiences, publish their product catalogs, drive e-commerce initiatives, power omnichannel experiences and help them manage their supply chains in the wake of new challenges in the form of changing consumer behavior due to the pandemic,” said Jitesh Ghai, chief product officer at Informatica.

Informatica is focusing on helping customers to integrate their data from across various point-of-sale, payment processing, inventory, and other business applications, regardless of if those systems are homegrown or supplied by Oracle, GS1, Salesforce, Magento, and others.

“Other functionalities include out-of-the-box retail accelerators that significantly reduce time-to-value, including connectivity to GDSN data pools, commerce platforms such as Adobe Experience Manager, and procurement networks like Coupa, all while maintaining the privacy and security of the datasets,” Ghai said.

Connecting to these disparate and siloed data sources and collecting data in a privacy-conscious way is becoming an increasingly important task for retail organizations, according to Doug Heschen, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

More out-of-the-box data tools

IDMC for Retail also comes with out-of-the-box data models for customer data management, the ability to extend data models to support product, supplier, and location data, and enriching customer loyalty and rewards programs. The product also comes with pre-built dashboards that allows enterprises to search, view, and manage customer information, along with their transactions and interactions data.

The product also offers automated product classification, syndication, supplier, product, and customer onboarding interfaces powered by its proprietary CLAIRE AI engine.

“One of the many examples of what CLAIRE can do is to help predict inventory demands in real-time and optimize routes for delivery,” Ghai said. “The AI engine connects to data sources, understands it, interprets it, and cleanses it to build a trusted, authoritative, single source of truth and democratizes it for data science initiatives through our AI powered data marketplace.”

Being able to take these kinds of retail-specific capabilities off the shelf “will obviously save time and speed time-to-value,” Constellation’s Heschen said.