Informatica has announced the launch of its Cloud Data Marketplace, designed to deliver data democratisation at enterprise scale.

The new marketplace is designed to intuitively increase data sharing, improve productivity and enable organisations to make more informed decisions, the company states.

According to Informatica, data-driven decision making requires data to be in the hands of decision-makers. The Cloud Data Marketplace enables business users to shop for both data and AI models, ensuring that they can spend less time looking for data and more time making better decisions with trusted data.

With Informatica's Cloud Data Marketplace, customers receive automated data curation and delivery at scale with a ‘data shopping' interface.

Informatica's Cloud Data Marketplace allows onboarding of curated data assets from any source, across multi-cloud and hybrid clouds, addressing enterprise business needs.

According to the company, key business benefits that the new Cloud Data Marketplace brings to Informatica customers include the following.

The ability to meet increased data demand with automated data operations: As organisations continue with their digital transformations, the number of internal data consumers is growing faster than the organisations' ability to supply data to them, Informatica states.

The Cloud Data Marketplace addresses this challenge and safely democratises data access with an eCommerce-like user experience, helping data consumers find data sets, analytics and AI models that match their needs and meet governance requirements for their specific use cases.

The ability to encourage data, analytics and AI-model re-use: The Cloud Data Marketplace acts as a clearing house where data scientists and business users can search, consume and publish data sets and analytic or AI models.

This means less time is spent finding and sorting data as data consumers can pick 'off the shelf' models and data sets that have been used elsewhere in the business and modify for their purposes.

Productivity is significantly increased and, with more time available, data scientists can refine models leading to a higher overall quality.

As it allows consumers to shop both AI models and data-sets, the Cloud Data Marketplace helps organisations achieve AI-explainability as the lineage and use of all data, AI and analytic models is auditable.

The ability to rapidly leverage existing curated data sets and make them instantly findable: The Cloud Data Marketplace can onboard data not just from internal systems but from any cloud, source or third-party tool.

Users are able to leverage existing curated data sets immediately, without the need for additional governance before it is available for use.

This vastly expands the pool of data consumers being supported, vastly accelerates time to value and gives valuable time back to data scientists and business users who can find, understand and begin using trusted data without delay.

The ability to safely democratise data with a dynamic sharing agreement: Data is an organisation's most valuable asset and governing it is vital.

With the Cloud Data Marketplace, data stewards can confidently share data sets, analytics and AI models with business users and help ensure it is fit for their purposes.

Through automated workflows, the dynamic sharing agreement discloses all terms and conditions to ensure that the organisation's data assets are used responsibly, with full auditability over compliant use.

Additional insight and transparency is provided to understand levels of consumption, where data is being used and for what purposes.

Informatica general manager data governance, quality and privacy, David Corrigan, says, “AI and Analytics are supposed to drive innovation, but they can't do so when they are starved of data.

"Data scientists and other data consumers are still spending the bulk of their time searching, sorting and cleaning data. It's clear that the practices of the past won't scale to the needs of the future.

“Informatica's Cloud Data Marketplace addresses this business need with a cloud-native solution, enabling organisations to meet their internal data consumers where they are, with a self-service model tailored to their needs and technical skill level to drive data-led decisions and continued innovation.

The Cloud Data Marketplace is available via consumption-based pricing on the Intelligent Data Management Cloud, designed to help businesses innovate with their data on any platform, any cloud, multi-cloud or multi-hybrid environment and for all users across the enterprise.