Data Integration by the Hour

Data Integration by the Hour

Flexing its newfound freedom as a private company, Informatica recently announced hourly pricing for the first time.

Ranging from $.50 to $2 an hour, the new pricing enables customers to experiment with Informatica Cloud software or run simple production integration jobs without buying a monthly subscription license, which ranges in price from $1,000 to $9,000 a month.

The new pricing is available in five quick starter packages that Informatica recently released on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace, one for each Amazon data service: Amazon Redshift, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3. Informatica expects to make hourly pricing available for other databases and systems on AWS and other cloud platforms.

“We are on the cusp of a revolution in the way people procure and use data integration and analytics software. Hourly pricing reduces the friction in purchasing enterprise software and minimizes the risk. This opens the market for enterprise software to a much broader base of organizations and developers,” says Wayne Eckerson, founder and principal consultant of Eckerson Group. 

Eckerson adds that other BI and analytics vendors, such as Zoomdata, Tibco Jaspersoft, and Snowflake, have already begun offering per hour subscriptions. But Informatica is the first data integration vendor to do so. 

Motivations

A Play for Redshift.  Although Informatica has historically sold on-premises software for six figures and higher, it expects the new offerings will generate significant revenue.  Informatica went private last year in part to migrate its core business model from on-premises software to cloud services without the pressure of meeting quarterly Wall Street expectations. 

“Amazon Redshift alone is growing to about a $1 billion business and integration services should make up 30 percent of that. We’ll do it two dollars at a time,” says Ronen Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Operations at Informatica.

Upsell Strategy.  Another motivation for the new pricing is that Informatica expects a certain percentage of hourly customers to upgrade to a full Informatica Cloud subscription. The hourly packages limit customers to 1TB of data and two data connectors and don’t support advanced features, such as data cleansing and enrichment.

In many ways, the new Informatica services are like a freemium model except the “free” portion is actually a low-cost hourly subscription. “We’ve discovered that our customers prefer to move quickly and pay for production services rather than use trial software,” says Schwartz. “They don’t see it as evaluation software; they want to put it into production and get support.”

With hourly pricing, customers can start with a small pilot, proof of concept, or prototype to prove out the capabilities and then upgrade as needed. For example, this is what the Weather Channel did when it implemented its data warehouse in Amazon Redshift, says Schwartz.

According to Schwartz, there are three use cases for the new hourly cloud services. Most customers will use the services for traditional data warehouse projects, while a smaller portion will use them for application integration or advanced analytics tasks.

Informatica Cloud for Amazon Redshift is $2/hr, Informatica Cloud for Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon RDS is $1/hr, and Informatica Cloud for Amazon S3 is $0.50/hr. Click here for pricing details.

Henry H. Eckerson

Henry Eckerson covers business intelligence and analytics at Eckerson Group and has a keen interest in artificial intelligence, deep learning, predictive analytics, and cloud data warehousing. When not researching and...

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