Informatica Announces $1 Million Big Data Ready Challenge to Help Organizations Succeed in Big Data Projects

By: GlobalNewswire News | Published: Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Booth #337, Strata + Hadoop World, New York City, NY, Sept. 29, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Informatica, the world's number one independent software provider focused on delivering transformative innovation for the future of all things data, today announced its $1 Million Software and Services Big Data Ready Challenge to help organizations overcome the challenges of taking their big data projects from pilot to production. Through the contest, Informatica will award a total of at least US$1 million in software and services to help qualifying organizations in North America deliver clear business value from their big data initiatives. Six finalists and two winners each quarter will be selected during the next 12 months, and a grand prize winner will be picked at the Big Data Ready Fall Summit in December 2016.

Entries are being accepted now through November 1, 2016 here.
The contest is subject to rules that may be found here.

The judges for the Contest include:

Professor Tom Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College.
Dr. Claudia Imhoff, President and Founder of the Boulder BI Brain Trust and Intelligent Solutions, Inc. A thought leader, visionary, and practitioner in the rapidly growing fields of business intelligence and advanced analytics.
David S. Linthicum is a consultant at Cloud Technology Partners and an internationally recognized industry expert and thought leader.
Mark Smith, CEO and Executive Chief Research Officer, Ventana Research.
Amit Walia, EVP and Chief Product Officer, Informatica.
Ray Wang, Principal Analyst, Founder and Chairman, Constellation Research.

Additionally, Informatica introduced the Informatica Big Data Management framework, the most comprehensive hybrid data management approach to manage all things big data. Informatica Big Data Management framework is a holistic approach to managing big data, which includes a comprehensive view focused on three pillars required for big data management solutions.

Data Integration

Big data integration must deliver high-throughput data ingestion and at-scale processing so business analysts can make better decisions using next-generation analytics tools. Big data integration helps businesses gain better insights from big data because it:

Speeds up development, leverages existing IT skills, and simplifies maintenance through the use of a simple visual interface supported by easy-to-use templates.
Increases performance and resource utilization by optimizing data processing execution and providing flexible, hybrid deployment across a variety of platforms.
Handles a wide variety of data sources though hundreds of pre-built transformations and connectors, and orchestrates data flows by using broker-based data ingestion.

Data Governance and Data Quality

End-to-end big data governance and quality means business and IT users can be confident with the data they are using. Comprehensive data governance includes:

Formal data quality assessments to detect data anomalies sooner.
Pre-built data quality rules to ensure data is "fit-for-purpose."
Universal metadata catalog to facilitate search and automate data processing.
Entity matching and linking to enrich master data, such as for customers.
End-to-end data lineage for data provenance, traceability and compliance audits.

Data Security

Risk-centric big data security analyzes all data to quickly detect and act upon risks and vulnerabilities. This requires a 360-degree view of sensitive data, supported by risk analytics and policy-based protection of data at risk. Additionally, data preparation is required to ensure that big data is consistent and of high quality. Big data security should de-identify information controlled by corporate policies and industry regulations. Risk-centric big data security and data preparation must enable:

"Single pane of glass" monitoring of sensitive data stores to provide visibility into the locations of sensitive data.
Sensitive data discovery and classification for a comprehensive 360-degree view of sensitive data.
Usage and proliferation analysis for a precise understanding of data risk.
The integration of disparate applications to easily process and analyze data, leading to insights that help organizations make better decisions.
Risk assessment to help prioritize investments in security programs.
Non-intrusive persistent and dynamic data masking to protect sensitive data in development and production environments to help minimize the risk of a security breach.

Supporting Quotes:

"During my discussions with organizations worldwide, they have highlighted their big data management challenges, and one of the greatest challenges they face is successfully capitalizing on the true potential of big data in their enterprises," said Amit Walia, executive vice president and chief product officer, Informatica. "Informatica is key to making that happen, particularly now that we are offering more than $1 million in software and services to help selected companies overcome their big data challenges. We want to partner with customers who want to harness big data to deliver significant business results, to eradicate cancer, to solve world hunger issues, to aid in space exploration, to further connect the citizens of the planet and beyond. We invite organizations that have North American data centers to bring us their biggest big data management challenges so we can solve it together to make the world a better place."

"Cox Automotive is comprised of over two dozen companies, including AutoTrader, Manheim and Kelley Blue Book. Each of these companies produces and consumes a massive amount of data that is even more valuable when shared among them," said Ben Garrett, director, Enterprise Data Services Architecture and Operations, Cox Automotive. "Big Data Management helps us consolidate, integrate, govern and secure all data at scale in what we've called an "Analytics Hub" and make it available for everyone to use, to help build out new and better products."

According to research directors, Eric Thoo and Lakshmi Randall, in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools report, published July 29, 2015, "Data acquisition for business intelligence (BI), analytics and data warehousing --Extracting data from operational systems, transforming and merging that data, and delivering it to integrated data structures for analytics purposes. The variety of data and context for analytics is expanding as emergent environments -- such as NoSQL and Hadoop distributions for supporting big data, in-memory DBMSs, logical data warehouse architectures and end-user capability to integrate data (as part of data preparation) -- increasingly become parts of the information infrastructure."

The Informatica ecosystem has expressed its support for Informatica Big Data Management. For more on what customers Cox Automotive, Jones Lang LaSalle, Kaiser Permanente, KPN and Symphony Health Solutions, and partners Cisco, Cloudera, Cognizant, Hortonworks, MapR Technologies and Teradata have said, read the "Informatica Customers and Partners Support Informatica Big Data Management" quote sheet here.

Additional Information

Informatica Big Data Management will be showcased at the Informatica booth (#337) at Strata + Hadoop World, September 29 - October 1, 2015, at the Javits Center, New York City, NY.
Murthy Mathiprakasam, principal product marketing manager for Informatica's big data products, will join with Vishal Bamba, vice president of strategy and architecture at Transamerica Technology, in highlighting big data architecture and management in a session titled, "Delivering Trusted Data for Analyst Autonomy and Operational Agility With a Unified Big Data Fabric" on Wednesday, September 30, at 2:05 p.m., in 1 E14.
Amit Walia will speak with Wikibon analysts on theCUBE on October 1, at 11:00 am ET. #BigDataNYC

Tweet this: News: @Informatica announces $1 million #BigData Ready #contest details here http://infa.media/BigDataReadyPage

About Informatica

Informatica is a leading independent software provider focused on delivering transformative innovation for the future of all things data. Organizations around the world rely on Informatica to realize their information potential and drive top business imperatives. More than 5,800 enterprises depend on Informatica to fully leverage their information assets residing on-premise, in the Cloud and on the internet, including social networks. For more information, call +1 650-385-5000 (1-800-653-3871 in the U.S.), or visit www.informatica.com. Connect with Informatica at https://www.linkedin.com/company/Informatica, https://twitter.com/Informatica and https://www.facebook.com/InformaticaLLC.

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Note: Informatica and Informatica Big Data Management are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.

CONTACT: Debbie O'Brien Informatica +1 650 385 5735 - office +1 650 995 6736 - mobile dobrien@informatica.com Shira Frantzich Informatica +1 650 385 5674 - office sfrantzich@informatica.com

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