The new ISV partner program differs from its predecessor in that it is consumption aligned, and also minimizes barriers to entry.

Today, at their Informatica World 2023 customer event in Las Vegas. enterprise cloud data management vendor Informatica is announcing early access for its next generation Independent Software Vendor [ISV] partner program. This program, ISV Innovate, is a consumption-driven ecosystem program designed to empower the ISV ecosystem, allowing partners to create and integrate solutions on the Informatica data management platform.

Informatica has run an ISV partner program for years, as well as programs for major strategic partners, resellers, and other partner groups. The focus of what Informatica is calling this next-generation program, has changed considerably, however.

“My role covers all ISV and ecosystem partnerships and strategic cloud relationships,” said Rik Tamm-Daniels, Informatica’s Group VP of Strategic Ecosystems and Technology. “This is focused on ISVs who want to be part of our ecosystem. The focus has also changed in that today we are 100% cloud focused, whereas the old program covered on-prem, and data lakes as well as cloud. While we are a cloud service, our platform can still manage on-prem as well as multi cloud.”

Tamm-Daniels said that given the extent of Informatica’s own evolution, the time had come to extend it to their ISV ecosystem.

“We were owned by private equity for about six years, which is what allowed us to make the move to subscriptions and a cloud-native perspective,” he stated. “All this is now in the platform, and the time is ripe to bring the ISV ecosystem into the IDMC ecosystem.”

The major advantage of the program is letting partners build solutions on top of the IDMC.

“It builds key capabilities that extends capabilities of IDMC,” Tamm-Daniels indicated. “It is for application providers who want to build on a trusted foundation. We are also the only different management system that sits on top of the four big hyperscalers. In addition to the three largest, we also announced Oracle last year.”

Tamm-Daniels said that integration with Informatica’s data connectors is central to how it all works.

“Integration is the bread and butter, but the ecosystems themselves are also important,” he said. “Customers need to make sure the latest and greatest all work together. We have hundreds of data connectors, and we let our customers use our platform to do this with our rich set of data management capabilities, and become data-driven application providers.

“There are a lot of industry-specific data repositories, optimized for things like health care,” Tamm-Daniels added. “We can’t build every connector ourselves. This program is next-gen in terms of being consumption-aligned and minimizing barriers to entry, with ecosystems that allow delivering solutions.”

Six ISV partners are being announced at launch as being in the early access program.

“Others are in the pipeline right now,” Tamm-Daniels noted. “How many companies are out there, and all of them need access to data. At the highest level,  Snowflake or Databricks are the kind of scale we can expect, and we have strong partnerships with both. They are not in the ISV Innovate program though, but in our strategic ecosystem program for very high touch partner relationships.”

What type of company is in the ISV Innovate program? It includes data source providers like Neo4J and SingleStore, which lets customers seamlessly connect to and read and write data from these sources.

Anonos is in the program to provide data protection and security to customers, who get the end-to-end, multi-mode data protection for IDMC so users have access to only the data they should

“They are a customer-managed cloud technology, with whom we are able to operate seamlessly,” Tamm-Daniels said.

Data Enrichment ISVs like Dun & Bradstreet and ZoomInfo can enrich their customers’ Business360 and Customer360 data with pivotal data from these providers.

Finally, data-driven applications ISVs like Productsup customers can join their product catalogue management solution with Informatica’s Product360 for a complete Product Information Management solution.

Informatica is making several other partnership announcements with large hyperscalers at the event. The one that is going live today is with Microsoft, which is a long-standing partnership.

“Microsoft goes way back with us as a partner,” Tamm-Daniels stated.  “This one is about deepening product integration and engineering aligning, we become an Azure Native ISV service. As an Azure Native service, we will our own console in the Azure management console.”

The other announcements are being made tomorrow, and the story will be updated at that time.