How Informatica Reinvented Itself for the Cloud and AI Era
Analytics India Magazine (Ankush Das)
With cloud and AI rewriting the rules of enterprise software, reinvention has become a necessity for survival. The companies thriving today are the ones that were brave enough to rebuild themselves before the evolving technology forced them to do so.
Informatica is one such firm that once defined on-premise data management, but is now moving its way to lead conversations around AI agents and intelligent data platforms.
For a 30-year-old firm, the transformation wasn’t easy. The journey demanded a re-engineering of everything, from how its products were built to how its teams thought about the future.
“AI can only happen in the cloud,” Informatica CEO Amit Walia told AIM in an exclusive conversation.
Betting the Company on Cloud
By 2016, Informatica was still selling only on-premise software, but its leadership saw the digital tide turning. Walia, then heading product strategy, envisioned a single cloud-native data platform that could do it all—integration, governance, quality, cataloguing, and later, AI.
That vision took shape as the Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), the company’s unified platform where all products now reside.
“We wanted enterprise customers to have one platform, not 20 stitched together,” said Walia.
The pivot required retraining developers, rebuilding products, and reshaping the sales organisation for a subscription-driven world.
Walia said that he never believed in the concept of having a separate team to build cloud. “We’ve moved the same people because they knew the domain very well to build cloud.”
This year, he mentioned that Informatica will be crossing $1 billion in cloud revenue, up from zero in 2016.
From Machine Learning to AI Agents
Long before the “AI agent” buzz, Informatica was experimenting with machine learning. Its AI engine, CLAIRE AI, launched in 2018, powered recommendations and tagging across enterprise datasets. When generative AI arrived, CLAIRE was already embedded across Informatica’s products, a head start that few traditional players had, claimed Walia.
In 2024, the company unveiled CLAIRE GPT and an AI co-pilot for data tasks. This year, it went further, introducing its own AI agents, purpose-built for data ingestion, quality, and discovery. These are designed to help enterprises maintain clean, reliable data pipelines for the agentic architectures of the future.
“We’re the only ones in our industry with agents out there,” said Walia.
To orchestrate the growing ecosystem of agents, Informatica also launched Agent Engineering, a tool to manage data workflows across multiple agents, ensuring they “talk” to each other seamlessly.
India’s iLabs: The Hidden Engine
Much of this innovation can be traced back to iLabs, Informatica’s engineering and innovation hub in India. What began as a development centre two decades ago is now the company’s largest facility and core R&D base.
“Core engineering is done out of India, and the leader for CLAIRE AI sits in iLabs,” said Walia. The hub now houses engineering, customer support, HR, finance, and sales enablement, a full-fledged extension of Informatica’s global headquarters.
Several of the company’s successful products, including the data catalogue, were built entirely at iLabs.
The Future With Salesforce
Competition is a factor, but in their experience, it isn’t the sole determinant of success. Walia claimed they were able to surpass their competitors through strategic advantage.
Informatica competes with platforms like Talend, Fivetran, Azure Data Factory, Boomi by Dell Technologies and SnapLogic. These companies serve similar data integration and management needs, with some focused on cloud-native pipelines or rapid deployment, while others offer tools for governance, analytics and hybrid environments. Each provider has its own strengths, depending on organisational priorities.
Informatica’s enterprise customers include Axis Bank, Aditya Birla Capital, Tata Sky, Unilever, Takeda, Royal Caribbean, and Dr Reddy’s Laboratories. At Dr Reddy’s, the company’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) powers clinical AI use cases, enabling 50% faster data pipeline development, zero failures, and a 95% benchmark in AI data quality.
As the company prepares to join Salesforce following its $8 billion acquisition, Walia believes the partnership will only expand opportunities in the “agentic” world. Every enterprise needs data. Together, the company thinks they can build what comes next.
Informatica’s journey shows that reinvention is not about abandoning the past, but rebuilding it, one cloud, one dataset, one agent at a time.
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