Informatica & Databricks bring GenAI to data platforms

Informatica has announced advancements in its ongoing collaboration with Databricks, focusing on enhancing the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform with native Generative AI (GenAI) capabilities via Informatica's Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC).

The announcement marks a deeper integration between the two companies, aiming to assist clients in deploying AI-ready data and conducting Generative AI analytics more effectively.

Informatica now supports AI Functions on Databricks in its Native SQL Extract, Load, Transform (ELT), allowing users to manage no-code data pipelines, operating directly on the Databricks platform.

Amit Walia, Chief Executive Officer at Informatica, emphasised the success stemming from the partnership with Databricks. "We are seeing phenomenal success with our Databricks-related business, with rapid growth and delivering impactful business outcomes for customers such as Takeda, KPMG and Point72 to name just a few," he stated. "One of our key priorities while partnering with Databricks is empowering customers to build enterprise-grade GenAI applications. These applications leverage high-quality, trusted enterprise data to provide high-impact Gen AI applications with rich business context and deep industry semantic understanding while adhering to enterprise data governance policies."

Adam Conway, Senior Vice President of Products at Databricks, added insights into the partnership's value, saying, "As demand for data intelligence increases, we want to help our customers build and deploy high-quality AI applications that deliver accurate, domain-specific outputs."

"As a leader in cloud-native, AI-powered data management, Informatica is a key partner of ours, supporting everything from data integration and transformation to data quality, governance and protection."

On the new product developments, Informatica has introduced support for Databricks AI Functions in its Native SQL ELT.

This development allows organisations leveraging Databricks to rapidly integrate GenAI capabilities, with functionalities including sentiment analysis, similarity matching, summary generation, translation, and grammar correction being accessible directly from SQL. The no-code option presents users with consistency, maintainability, and optimal performance in data pipeline execution natively on Databricks.

The enhancements also include Informatica's Native SQL ELT for Databricks, permitting "push down" of data pipelines with over 50 pre-set transformations and supporting more than 250 native Databricks SQL functions.

This functionality simplifies the process for users to construct data pipeline flows in Databricks by utilising Informatica's no-code/low-code SQL ELT capabilities.

Informatica's enhancements build on their previously announced GenAI Blueprint for Databricks and other capabilities such as support for Databricks' Unity Catalog within the IDMC.

Key features in the platform optimised for Databricks include over 300 data connectors, capabilities for creating low-code/no-code data pipelines, data ingestion and replication, and GenAI-driven automation facilitated by Informatica's CLAIRE GPT and CLAIRE Co-pilot.

Recognition for Informatica's contributions came with Databricks naming the company as its 2024 Data Integration Partner of the Year at the Data + AI Summit. This recognition underscores the close collaboration between Informatica and Databricks over recent years, aimed at delivering transformative data management and analytics solutions to enterprise clients.