Earlier this month, Informatica announced 60 day free trials of Informatica Big Data Edition for Cloudera QuickStart VM and the Hortonworks Sandbox. The 60 day trial means that the Informatica Big Data Edition will be pre-installed in the sandbox environments of two of the leading Hadoop distributions in the Big Data marketplace today. Developers using the Cloudera QuickStart VM and Hortwonworks Sandbox now have streamlined access to Informatica’s renowned big data cleansing, data integration, master data management and data visualization tools. The code-free, graphical user interface-based Informatica Big Data Edition allows customers to create ETL and data integration workflows as well as take advantage of the hundreds of pre-installed parsers, transformations, connectors and data quality rules for Hadoop data processing and analytics. The Informatica Big Data platform specializes in Hadoop profiling, parsing, cleansing, loading, enrichment, transformation, integration, analysis and visualization and reportedly improves developer productivity five-fold by means of its automation and visual interface built on the Vibe virtual data machine.
Although the Informatica Big Data Edition supports MapR and Pivotal Hadoop distributions, the free 60 day trial is currently available only for Cloudera and Hortonworks. Informatica’s success in seeding its Big Data Edition with Cloudera and Hortonworks increases the likelihood that developers will explore and subsequently use its Big Data Edition platform as a means of discovering and manipulating Big Data sets. As such, Informatica’s Big Data Edition competes with products like Trifacta that similarly facilitate the manipulation, cleansing and visualization of Big Data by means of a code free user interface that increases analyst productivity and accelerates the derivation of actionable business intelligence. On one hand, the recent proliferation of Big Data products that allow users to explore Big Data without learning the intricacies of MapReduce democratizes access to Hadoop–based datasets. That said, the ability of graphical user interface-driven Big Data discovery and manipulation platforms to enable the granular identification of data anomalies, exceptions and eccentricities that may otherwise become obscured by large-scale trend analysis remains to be seen.
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