>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Informatica World 2018, brought to you by Informatica. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is live coverage of The Cube here at the Venetian in Las Vegas for Informatica World 2018, and I'm John Furrier, the co-host of The Cube, with Peter Burris, my co-host for the next two days of wall-to-wall coverage of all the action here at Informatica World. The next guest is Ansa Sekharan, who's Executive Vice President Chief Customer Success Officer at Informatica. Great to see you, welcome back. >> Good afternoon. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Glad to be back on The Cube. >> The fist pumps all around, lot of love going on. Data is, data's hot. Data's not just a, you know, an industry segment. It's horizontally cutting across all of the action. You're in charge of a lot of the customer success stories, but more importantly, the transformation. A lot of the customers we're hearing, one came on earlier, said, "I love Informatica. Product rocks. It's kick ass." He didn't say that, that's my words. "It's rock solid, but it allows me to bring in the new and do new things." Talk about the customer dynamics that you guys are seeing. Now more than ever, intelligent data, these are the themes. Next generation analytics, GDPR's on the horizon. So you've got some tactical and strategic things going on. Your thoughts? >> You know, these are exciting times, you know. As we look at our customer base on how they are embracing Informatica to drive description, and realize business value being as part of the services arc. Indeed, exciting to see how we can play a critical role in transforming their business. You know, as we transform our business at Informatica to be a subscription company, to be a cloud-hosted company, we have dubbed 2018 as the Year of Adoption. >> Peter: The Year of Adoption? >> Year of Adoption. In my capacity as Chief Customer Success Officer to ensure that the company as a whole is aligned towards driving adoption; so that customers can realize value from our business. You hinted on customers transforming from the legacy mainframe world to cloud, big data. We cover the entire gamut. You name it, we have products. Everywhere we have data or citing to integrate them so the customers can realize value. This morning I was speaking to a customer, you know, you heard us say, many years ago, "Right data at the right time." You know, he said, "We are trying to push petabytes to the customer everyday." You know, we have gone through a huge transformation in my 22 years to now. It could not be any more exciting to be at Informatica. >> So I'm really happy to hear you say that, Ansa, because the industry broadly, but especially in more complex software domains, forgets that there's a difference between inventing something, which is an engineering act, and innovation, which fundamentally is a social act. Customers who do a lot of these more complex things we're talking about, need knowledge and expertise, not just represented in the products that they buy, the services, the cloud-based services they carry, but also, other ways of thinking about getting access to knowledge and smarts, a lot of which, you guys have. Talk about, as in the role of customer success, how you regard Informatica's participation in that journey to innovation, to adoption, to making that change real. >> I think Informatica was one of the pioneers to realize, you know, great products are just the beginning. We got to make sure you come up with offerings which can connect those products to customer's business value. Our strategies, you know, we have a three-prong strategy. We look at our products that, you know, first thing we want to do is, "What is the experience we want to offer to our customers?" And then we look at what products and service offerings we need to put in place to deliver on that experience. And the third, where, I think, we are a trendsetter, is how do we innovate, and I would say, reinvent ways on process and technology to deliver on that vision. I think every four years we've been relaunching our success offerings. I'm pretty excited to talk about what we have in store in 2018. >> We heard that you're revamping the customer, Informatica's customer success program. You guys have been iterating. What's the new iteration? What's coming? Can you, can you share a little bit about where it's going? What's happening next? >> I touched upon the fact that Informatica is transforming itself to be a subscription company offering all our products on the cloud, and we have, you know, as the sign points to behind me, 25 years of data innovation. Thousands of customers, we can't forget the past. We're going to take the lessons we learned from the past and how do you apply for the present and the future. We are, want to offer a simplistic model where we want to offer a success platform. Not position offerings for customers, professional services, educational services, support services. We want to build an abstraction layer, a simplified layer, where we call it "Success Offerings." The functions underneath will plug-and-play, and to the customer, it'll be just one offering, which will be a seamless end-to-end experience. These days, with the advent of web and all the omni channel, realistic customer, we are in all of the customer's lifecycle even before they are a customer. >> So one of the best services you can provide to your ecosystem is to transfer some of that knowledge. Is to show a way for a lot of your partners to, that notion of an offering, is a combination of the product, the channel, as well as the service know-how about making sure how, that things actually work. Are you participating in that process of moving customer success subscription, but also trying to bring along the ecosystem to show them how you can catalyze what will be best for them? >> Absolutely. I mean as part of the support offerings, we are also coming up with the, what we call is the Informatica Network where it brings in the assets from all we have gathered from customers, and disseminating this back to the customer base so that they'll be able to leverage best practices, build customer communities, and you know, our goal in support, our mission is pretty simple. Our charter all along, the best service, they say, is no service, right? In what ways can we push the knowledge to customers so that they don't have a need to reach Informatica? So we are very active participants in building communities by product lines, by solutions and to the very intent here, how do we push it back to the customers? And you know, we have sessions at Informatica World where we bring customers from different protocols to see what we can learn and what we can connect to other customers Right, I mean, customer's under tremendous pressure to do more, resource-wise, they have the same but less, so I think they look to Informatica to partner with, to realize business value. >> Well, I also think and this is the test, I also think a lot of your non-technology customers are also looking at ways that data is going to improve their products, improve their engagement, improve their operations. And they themselves are starting to imagine themselves as providing SAS-like capabilities. So, just as you are helping your traditional technology partners envision a different way of engagement, a different way of improving how they improve the productivity of their engagement, are you also helping your customers, you know, see that other route using Informatica products, using Informatica know-how, to becoming a better digital supplier themselves? >> Absolutely. I touched upon how we are leveraging technology. You know, we have products like Discovery IQ, a lot of solutions built on machine learning. When we host our customer's products, we have a window into what they're doing, you know. To the extent privacy laws allow, we can track every click. It's all about mining that information so that we can provided personalized, real-time engagement to the customers That, at times, we can see a problem going to happen before it happens. And the beauty of being on a host of solution is, you know, we can push solutions to the customer to recommend ways they can deliver better value. All about customer experience, right? In one of the the key elements of customer experience is how do you reduce their effort? So, technology, we've been able to bring up a number of ways to do it. >> That's a great point. Got to use the data. You can extract data, insights from that data. This brings up the question of we're hearing, and I'm not a believer of it, by the way, "Oh, automation's going to kill my job." I'm mean, automation is going to help. We believe that. That's my, our position, but yet, automation will shift the value up the stack, or wherever the value opportunity is. So, what is Informatica doing with things like AI as things get automated with the cloud that's going to create success. So mining the data, you can provide insights. What other things do you see with automation in an AI from a customer success standpoint that's going to be harvested for the customer's benefit? >> I think what is really working in our favor, personally I've been a Support Engineer myself, doing a repetitive task was not my cup of tea, you know. The job is interesting only if you find new learnings and see how we can help the customer. We have a great framework to automate a repetitive task. You know, chad marks, you have heard of them? Today they are applicable a lot in the consumer world. We are looking at ways how we can leverage that technology in the enterprise space. We can predict, based on semantic analysis, just the language, the words customers use to communicate with us. You know, what is their tone? When should we interfere? When should we raise the priority of the case before the customer asks for it? You know, it's, the team is pretty excited because it has opened up doors for the team to do more initiatives to deliver better value to the customer. It's also, there's the good and the bad element of it, right The automation also puts us, the center of everything we do, it brings support right to the forefront of the customer; so you have to be careful. Impressions, you know, leave a lasting thing with the customer. >> You've got a lot of customers here, at Informatica World. What's the plan? You going to wine and dine them, sit down, do briefings, do road maps? What do you do when you're here at Informatica World with customers? Celebrate, but also you do some innovating? >> Right, we're going to be talking about the new offerings coming out in July, you know, Q3, we're going to be launching the new support offerings. I think our landscape of the industry, you know, I'm very excited to say we're kind of industry first, you know, bringing everything under one umbrella. And what's even more exciting, I said 2018 is the Year of Adoption, we are bundling in what we call Adoption Services delivered by a professional services team at no margin to our customers. >> John: That's awesome. >> You know we're embracing the layer model, land, adopt. If you truly mean adoption, you got to bootstrap them and get them off to a good start because that is key. You know, you asked about, "How are you leveraging and pushing knowledge?" So, you know, when we bootstrap them, we share the best practices which we could have learned from other customers. >> It's a merger. So you can help them take the first very steps? >> Ansa: Correct, and lay the foundation in the right place. You realize that if the foundation's right, then we can >> Get them to embed in their business. >> Exactly. >> And horizontally scale that data for intelligent data, trusted insights, next generation analytics; it's all there. >> Absolutely. >> Ansa, thanks for coming on The Cube. We really appreciate it. Live coverage here from Las Vegas at the Venetian. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. More live coverage after this short break. >> Ansa: Thank you.