In time for summer, Informatica opens its Marketing Data Lake

Perhaps there have been times when you’ve become so frustrated with marketing data, you just want to throw it all into a lake.

If so, Informatica now offers one just for that purpose.

The data management provider has announced its new Marketing Data Lake, which it describes as the first such repository specifically for the needs of marketers.

As Informatica explains in a recent e-book on the subject, a data lake is “a data repository that lets you store and process all your data, from multiple sources, in its native format without having to pre-structure it.”

It complements data warehouses, the company notes, in that generates data schemas “on read,” or when the data is exported and used, instead of “schema-on-write” when it goes into the repository, as with warehouses. A schema is a blueprint for data organization.

Warehouses, senior vice president of marketing Franz Aman told me, are better solutions for financial operations that require “penny-perfect” and secure processing. But, he noted, they also require IT personnel to maintain them, and they are more expensive to set up and run than lakes.

By contrast, Informatica said, data lakes are better for analytics and decision-making support, and the data can be accessed via queries and reports by marketers themselves.

“You don’t worry about how you’re going to organize it” when you are collecting the data, Aman said, adding that the new Marketing Data Lake offers more of a “self-service model.”

This new solution is the first industry-specific version of the company’s Intelligent Data Lakes, which it says turns big data into “fit-to-purpose data sets.” The Marketing Lake provides templates and functions that are tuned to marketer’s needs, and integrates with Salesforce, Marketo, Adobe Analytics, Lattice, Demandbase, Tableau, and other platforms.

The data is ingested in native format from such sources as Salesforce customer relationship management text fields, tweets or other social media posts, web site traffic, or email responses. Aman also pointed out that the data could come from products, as the Internet of Things begins to take hold.

The idea is that the lake becomes the integration point for all data through metadata rather than structure, which Informatica says allow more fluid and rapid queries and reports that cover all channels.

Marketers can then track accounts across channels, use heat maps to visually depict Web site spikes in traffic and compare the spikes to possible causes, find prospects from multiple sources, or segment users according to multi-channel behavior. In addition to this product being geared for marketers, Aman said Informatica’s data lakes are distinguished by the breadth of its integrations with other systems.

Here’s a sample screenshot of the dashboard: