Informatica deepens Databricks dealings

Data integration and management supplier Informatica has strengthened the integration of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) with Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform, including support for AI Functions.

Databricks supplies an intelligent data warehouse and is growing its business at a furious rate as the generative AI boom pulls in more and more data to be processed. It raised $10 billion in funding late last year and has just augmented that with another $5 billion in debt financing loans, bringing its total funding to $19 billion. Informatica’s Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) and data management and governance offerings help get high-quality data ingested into Databricks for AI training and inference.

Amit Walia, Informatica
Amit Walia

Informatica CEO Amit Walia stated: “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 said: “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 GenAI applications with rich business context and deep industry semantic understanding while adhering to enterprise data governance policies.” 

Adam Conway, Databricks SVP of Products, added: “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.” 

Databricks AI Functions are built-in SQL operations that allow customers to apply AI directly to their data. Informatica’s Native SQL ELT supports Databricks AI Functions through no-code data pipelines, opening Databricks GenAI capabilities to no-code users. Databricks’ AI Functions enable customers to use GenAI capabilities, including sentiment analysis, similarity matching, summary generation, translation and grammar correction on customer data directly from SQL.

The new Informatica Native SQL ELT for Databricks makes it possible to “push down” data pipelines with 50-plus out-of-the-box transformations and support for more than 250 native Databricks SQL functions.

Informatica graphic

In June last year, Informatica integrated its AI-powered IDMC into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Informatica’s GenAI Solution Blueprint for Databricks DBRX provided a roadmap for customers to develop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) GenAI applications using Databricks DBRX. Native Databricks SQL ELT enables joint customers to perform in-database transformations with full push-down capabilities on Databricks SQL.

Informatica’s CDI-Free offering on Databricks Partner Connect gives customers access to Informatica’s cloud data ingestion and transformation capabilities. Its IDMC platform was validated with the Databricks Unity Catalog.

Altogether, the Informatica IDMC platform includes multiple Databricks-optimized features, such as 300-plus data connectors, the ability to create low-code/no-code data pipelines, data ingestion and replication, and GenAI-driven automation via Informatica’s CLAIRE GPT and CLAIRE copilot offerings.

In Informatica’s third fiscal quarter of 2025, revenues increased 3.4 percent year-over-year to $422.5 million. It surpassed 101 trillion processed cloud transactions per month, with Walia saying: “This accomplishment reflects our commitment to product innovation, customer-centricity, and our goal of being the Switzerland of data and AI. We see great momentum in AI-powered data management use cases.”