(funky music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Informatica World 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Rebecca Knight who's on the floor getting some data, getting some reports. She's my co-host here this week. Next guest is Bruce Chizen, board member of Informatica, OG, original gangster of the tech scene. Been there, done that. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you, John. >> Big alumni. I love having you on because you're kind of, you're a historian through experience, still active in the industry, obviously, Informatica. Four years private. >> Historian, that's scary. >> You've been around the block. You've seen more waves than I have, and that's a lot. But, you know, you've done a lot of things and you've seen the waves. You've run companies, you've been on boards. You've been on Informatica board. Four years private, a lot of great things can go on. Michael Dell proved that. He took Dell Computer, which is now Dell Technologies, he took it private, and I asked him. He wanted to retool and didn't want to do the shot clock of being a public company. Filing, and sour beans and all those regulations, 'cause he knew what was coming, the wave was coming. Informatica did the same thing, so I'm expecting an IPO, or MNA big deal happening. But four years, with great product people, you're on the board. Data, our original conversation four years ago on theCUBE, hasn't changed. >> No. It's the same wave, and now everyone's jumping on the wave. >> The good thing for Informatica is, as a private company, we got to do things that we could not have done as a public company. The level of investment we made in R&D, the transition from perpetual, or on-premise, to subscription. The investment in the sales organization. Couldn't have done that as a public company 'cause the shareholders tend to be too short term focused. >> And also I will add, just to get your reaction to, is that, my observation, looking at these situations when you have smart people, the board, like yourself, and the product team. Which I've been complimentary of Informatica's, as you know. Some other critical analysis, but that's different. But, great product engineering people. When you don't have the pressure of time, you could watch things gestate and when you're early, you have an advantage. Talk about that, because that's a strategic thing, most people aren't talking about, but you an early lead on data. You've had product engineering leadership, and you had time. >> It's not as easy as you make it sound. Keep in mind, Informatica is owned by financial sponsors. Private equity. >> Yeah, there's some pressure. >> CPP. And it's up to people like myself on the board, the other independent board member, the management team, to continue to remind the investors that if we make early investments and they pay off the company will be worth more and they'll ultimately make more money and their partners will make more money. >> I made it sound like you're on the beach drinking wine. >> A great example is what Informatica did with the data catalog. That was an early investment. No one really knew whether it would pan out. Sounded good, but it required a significant investment, that came out of the pockets of our investors and we were able to convince them to do that. Another great example is CLAIRE. You know, AI is hot. Well had we not invested in CLAIRE, three, three and a half years ago, CLAIRE would not be in existence today. Couldn't have done that as a public company. >> And it gives you a little bit of a lead, again, there's just no shot clock on public. But yeah, the private executives, they're not going to let you sit around and hit the beach and clip coupons. You got to work hard. But I got to ask >> The other thing you've seen the company has gone from a great point product company, great products, to really developing a platform, and architecting a platform. Which requires a significant amount of engineering. >> I was going to ask you about that, I'm glad you jumped the gun on that. Platform is the key. Speaking of platforms, I was just at Adobe, a company you're very familiar with, they're rolling out a new platform. Platforms are now back in vogue but it's not the old way. The old way was build a platform, have a competitive advantage, lock in your nested solution in imitability. Now it's platform open, different twist. How is that different? 'Cause you've seen the platform where you got to own it, barest entry, proprietary technology, to platform that's open extensible. >> Yeah, customers have gotten smart. No customer wants to be held hostage to one individual platform. SAP being a great example. Microsoft Windows being another example. They want to make sure that if they choose one platform, they could easily migrate to another. It's one of the reasons why Informatica is in such a sweet spot, because we allow our customers to choose which Cloud infrastructure providers they want to put their workloads on. And they can use multiple Cloud infrastructure. >> I got to ask about the competition now. Not competition but co-opetition, just marketplace in general. Everybody's jumping on the same wave that you guys have been on. You go to YouTube.com/Siliconangle look up Informatica videos I've done here with the team and you four years ago. Look up some of the things we were talking about, not a lot of many people talk about data driven, hardcore analytics, next-gen. These are the kind of topics that in AI machine learning, now everyone's talking about them. What's different about Informatica as the noise level increases around some of these things? Certainly, it's pretty obvious AI is going to be hot. Multi-generational Cloud, multi-generational things can happen. Operations, AI automation. >> Yeah. >> But what's different about Informatica? What should people know about Informatica that might be unique that you can lend some insight into? >> So when I think about the competition, or the co-opetition, I put those competitors in two buckets. There's a whole slew of smaller players that have some really good point products. Fortunately for Informatica, they don't have the scale to compete. And when I say scale to compete, not just on the go to market side, but they can't afford to invest two hundred million dollars a year in research and development building a complete platform. So, even though they're kind of ankle biters and occasionally I feel like the company has to slap them around, and they're annoyances, I don't think they're a big threat. The Cloud infrastructure players, the platform guys, Google, AWS, Azure, will continue to provide data tools that are developed for their stack. They will do some things that will be good enough. The good news is Informatica does great as it relates to enterprise Cloud management. So, if an enterprise really cares about their data, and they really care about having choice in the future, and they don't want to be held hostage to any one platform, Informatica is the only game in town. >> You're one of the best at doing theCUBE. This is our tenth year, and I remember telling some NetApp people because they invested in Cloud early, too, they don't get the credit. This is another example of Informatica invested early on in Cloud. I talked to Emmett and Anil years ago, they were well down that Cloud path. So Johnny-come-lately's going to jump on the Cloud 'cause there's an advantage so props to Informatica. >> And plus it's not Cloud only. Most of the large enterprises are hybrid, they will be hybrid for many years to come. In fact, if you look at workloads today, they majority of the workloads are still on-premise. >> Scales come up a lot. You know my commentary and theCUBE, everyone who watches me knows I like to rap about I was the first to call Amazon the trillion dollar opportunity because of the scale. Scale is the new competitive advantage, I've said that. I've said open is the new lock in. Value is the new lock in is what I said. So now you've got scales. The question is how does a startup compete if scale is table stakes? Is it race for funding? Snowflakes got to three billion dollar evaluation. Are they worth three billion? We're going to analyze that in theCUBE later. But they raise almost a billion dollars in cash. Do you scale up with cash and grow? >> Great technology. It starts out with really great technology. An organization like Snowflake, great technology. Look at Databricks, great technology. So, I look at the great new startups, what makes them great is that they have an innovative technological solution that's hard to replicate. Then they get the funding, and they're able to scale. That's what it takes to be a startup. >> And that's almost the OG, original gangster, Vectra Capital model. >> That's correct. >> Agile, iterate your way to success. No craft, no scale. Just speed. Is the world going back to the old formula? >> It's going back to innovation. To technical innovation. Especially given that you have so many scale players. You can no longer just come in there as a startup. Money alone is not going to enable you to be successful. >> All right I want you to pay it forward for all the young people graduating. I just was at my daughter's Cal, Berkeley graduation yesterday. Although she wasn't in this class. Cal just graduated their inaugural first-generation class of data science. Databricks was involved in that, they donated a lot of software. They're very Cal oriented. People who graduate high school, elementary school, this is a new field. Not enough jobs. Berkeley, a leading institution, first class ever in data science. What skill gaps are out there that need to be filled that people could learn now to get ahead and get an advantage in the workforce? >> My view, John, it starts in middle school with math. If we could help our kids who are in middle school to get through algebra, studies have shown they will move on to undergrad and then many of them will move to graduate work. We've got to start early. Yeah, there's some simple fixes. Help people become coders, help people do other things. But the reality is >> If you can't get the algebra done you're not going to code. >> We have to solve the longer term problems. So when I think about jobs of the future, we've got to create people who are creative, but at the same time understand the basics. >> Math, stats, great stuff. Final question. Are you going to run a company again soon? >> So I get that question quite often. First of all, I love doing what I do today, which is kind of a lot of little stuff. I do miss running a company. But, as I've told a whole bunch of people, I have no desire to ever report to a board again. So unless I own 51% of that company, I will not be running a company. >> Well now you know the deal terms, anyone who's watching for an investment from Bruce partnering with them. Great stuff. What's missing? What's around the corner? What are people missing in the news these days in the trends? What's coming that's exciting that nobody's talking about? >> I think what's happening, and this happens each wave, there's been so much excitement about the movement from On-Premises to Cloud, about AI and machine learning, I don't think people really appreciate how early it is. That we're this much in to it and we've got a long ways to go. And the old workflows that are on-premise, the amount of advancement in artificial intelligence and machine learning has so far to go, that people need to be patient and continue to invest aggressively in what's going to transpire ten years from now, not six months from now. And then you add things like 5G, faster speed WiFi, that also is going to have this huge impact. >> Great insight, Bruce. Thanks for sharing that insight. Get the kids learning math in middle school, gateway to coding, gateway to graduate work. Next ten waves, lot of waves coming. Bruce, thanks for sharing the insight. Good to see you again. >> Thanks, John. It's a pleasure. >> CUBE coverage here in Informatica World 2019. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll be back with more after this short break. (funky music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2018, brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone, this is theCube, exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2018, live in Las Vegas at the Venetian Ball Room here. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, analyst here at theCUBE, with Peter Burris, analyst and also my co-host these past two days. Our next guest is Bruce Chizen, who is the executive chairman of Informatica, one of the leaders of the company. Great to have you back, good to see you. >> Good, great to be here, guys. >> It's like an annual pilgrimage. We get together here, and hear the perspective. Also, we had Jerry Held on yesterday, board member, very senior in the industry. You guys are legends. You've been there, done that. You've seen how many waves, how many waves have you seen? >> Yeah, I was just sharing with somebody, I was at Microsoft in 1983, so I guess I go back a little while. >> You've seen a lot of waves. Okay, so this wave is interesting, because we were talking about the keynote and talking about the timing of how data, super important, there's no debate on the role of data, but timing in the industry, you got cloud, multi-cloud, you've got things like containerization, Kubernetes, you're starting to see that microservices model appear. The role of virtualization is not as prominent as it once was, given what's happening in the stack, but certainly, data is super-strategic. GDPR, this Friday, goes into action. So, shot across the bow with GDPR, data at the center. Explain the phenomenon. >> Yeah, so, look, what's happening is, more data is being generated today than ever before. I think Anil Chakravarthy, CEO, said this morning during his keynote, it's increasing twofold every six months. It's just an amazing amount of data that's occurring, both through data warehouses, as well as realtime data through things like IoT and other streaming types of mechanisms, and at the same time, every enterprise in the world is trying to figure out how to transform this business, leveraging that data, and that data exists across so many different platforms, whether it's on-premise, whether it's the cloud, whether it's a combination of both, whether it's multiple clouds. So, trying to homogenize all this data, or to be able to capture it and get it usable in one place for analytics, for decision making, is an incredible task. Fortunately, it plays into Informatica's strength. >> I want to get your thoughts on two dimensions to that, because I agree, that's all happening, but you add the pressure to scale with the cloud, okay, that is a huge deal, okay, as well as, build then new applications faster. So, this pressure, not just to kind of get it right in the data, you got to scale with the cloud, so there's a lot of big things being built out. >> Yeah, and it's not as simple as the cloud, it's the combination of leveraging on-premise workflows with the cloud, with new applications or new workflows, and how do you make sure you have data integrity between those two environments? And I'll add another layer to it, most enterprises don't want to be held hostage to one cloud infrastructure provider, and what you are seeing is, those enterprises leveraging multiple cloud infrastructures. So, between the data that's on-premise, the data that might be residing in Azure, data that might be residing in AWS, trying to make sure that there's one view of this data, and that it's secure, it's cleansed, it's of high quality, is a greater task than ever before. >> So, Bruce, let me build on that and see if you agree with this. It sounds to what you're suggesting is that we've got all this data, it's growing very fast, but we have to be able to do two things to it. We have to be able to organize it, and we have to turn it into objects or things that have business value so that we can generate returns on it, appreciable increasing returns on it. Is that kind of the centerpiece of what we're talking about here at Informatica World? >> Absolutely, and if you look at the quick success of the enterprise data catalog that was launched last year and the number of customers that have already adopted the platform, which really is a catalog of the metadata that sits across the data across the entire enterprise. The fact that so many customers have adopted a 1.O product that quickly is validation that they want to be able to leverage and take advantage of all of this data that's sitting in thousands and thousands of different entities within their own enterprise. >> So with your experience, you think the adoption's greater than what you've seen, but put it in comparison, compare the magnitude of that adoption. >> We expected a handful of customers to adopt it in the first year, we have hundreds of customers that have adopted it in the first year. >> John: So, well over the forecast. >> Well over our forecast. >> Well, they bought it. Are they adopting and changing the practices, evolving their organizations, imagining new ways of generating work, as a consequence of being able to discover and apply data faster? >> They know they want to analyze their data. They want to use tools like Power BI, tools like Tableau. What they haven't been able to do is use those tools as effectively as they would have liked to, 'cause they didn't a mechanism to capture all that data or to view all that data across their entire enterprise. The other challenge they had was there was no data integrity that existed, because the data in one repository was different than the data in a different repository. To be able to have one view of that data means that the information that they're analyzing is accurate, which didn't exist before. >> Alright, so what's next? That's table, not table stakes, but the first low-hanging fruit. Value proposition is, okay, I get a sense of the metadata, where is everything, so that's check. >> Yeah, so, there's two things in my mind, one is making sure that we make it easy for them to use any of the cloud platforms. So today, the company announced their relationship with Microsoft, with Azure, with Informatica's IPaaS running natively on Azure, in addition to what already exists with Amazon AWS. The second thing is to continue to add AI capability to that metadata, so instead of a person having to navigate and collect all of that information, is to use intelligence to be able to make sense of-- >> John: Machines. >> Machines. >> Streaming the data in faster, handling the volume. >> And being able to throw out garbage and use only what's really-- >> That's what I want to push you on, so everybody said, oh, we're going to apply AI, but they don't say what the AI is going to do, and I think specifically, as it relates to MDM, as it relates to catalogs, replaces some of these other things, it's identifying patterns, identifying inconsistencies in data objects, it's identifying how it feeds different workflows commonly. That kind of stuff. Are there other things that we're really trying to apply this AI to to improve data quality, data consistency, data flows, usability? >> It's going to do all of that, which is what was, it required a human to do in the past. In addition, as the machine, as the AI engine or the machine learns, the ability to do this more quickly is going to become apparent. So, with this massive amount of data being exposed, the last thing you want to do is to have the decision maker being slowed down. So AI is just going to speed it up significantly. >> Bruce, talk about the state of the company. Obviously, we've had Bruce on, we tried to get a little teaser out of him on what's going on with the board level, stock option, grants, so on and so forth. I'm only kidding. Obviously a valuable company, we've been watching it and covering you guys and pointing out, actually earlier on than others, the benefits of the data. Certainly it's become a very valuable private company. Once public, now private. You were involved in that journey, outcome for an offering soon, or bankers must be licking their chops, prospects, not saying when are they going public, I don't want to ask that question, but there's obviously a trajectory. What's the company's position, vis-à-vis the financial health and growth? >> Informatica will be one of those rare instances in the world of private equity, where a sponsor has come in and decided on a growth model top line revenue versus bottom line profitability. >> You mean shedding the parts? >> Shedding the parts, really squeezing the company for maintenance revenue, for cash. What Permira and CPP, the two investors, have done has really helped the company to continue to focus on growth. So, when we look at R&D expenditures, they're close to 200 million dollars, which is well above industry average as a percentage of revenue. >> So they came in to build the company. >> Came in to build it, and more importantly, grow it. It's exceeded our expectations, haven't determined a timeline to go public, there is a possibility you could see an offering sometime in 2019. >> And we talked with also Jerry and others yesterday about this notion of timing, right? Timing's everything in life. You couldn't ask for a better time to be the Switzerland, or whatever domicile you want to call that's neutral to multiple platforms. Certainly, the data layers' a nice position, you've got companies like NetApp underneath, having a nice layer, storage, so you've got the data fabric there, you guys are playing across multiple clouds. This makes it a unique opportunity. Now, why is this time for being the Switzerland of data important, and how should customers look at this timing of the movement for Informatica vis-à-vis the industry trend? >> Yeah, enterprises want to make sure they don't get held hostage to any one vendor. That happened in the past with the likes of an SAP for ERP. They don't want to fall into that trap. They want to be able to move their workflows between Azure, between AWS, between Oracle, and continue to have legacy workflows on-premise where necessary. So, they want someone, they want a provider who's going to provide them with a solution that's not biased and is not going to show any preference towards any one provider. Many years ago, I had the privilege of being the CEO of Adobe, and if you think about it, PDF, Acrobat, was the Swiss solution, or the Switzerland of documents. And the reason why PDF became so popular and became the standard was because nobody was comfortable with .DOC being that solution. The same is true-- >> Because of the incompatibility of the operating systems? >> .DOC, two reasons, one is nobody wanted to be held hostage to Microsoft, they already felt uncomfortable with Windows and Office. >> Ended up becoming hostage to Microsoft anyway, but that's all good. >> And, at the same time, .DOC showed preference towards a Microsoft environment. >> Peter: And it was the wrong technology. >> And it didn't work across platform. >> Exactly. >> In the case of Informatica, Informatica is the only scaled provider in the data business that has a solution that works across all environments, all vendors, all providers, hybrid, on-premise, cloud, multiple infrastructure providers. >> So, my summary of what everything you said Bruce is that Informatica today is a company that's going to help you organize your data, so you can put more data to work. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, Bruce, thanks for coming on. Great to see you, always a pleasure. We've got to do it again in the studio in Palo Alto, get you in, get some information out of you on what's going on with the public offering. (Bruce laughs) Great company, congratulations, it's been a fun ride, I can't wait to hear all the war stories when it's all said and done, great job. Switzerland of data here. At Informatica World, it's theCUBE, out in the open, sharing you the data here in Las Vegas. More live coverage, stay with us, Be right back. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live, from San Francisco, it's the Cube, covering Informatica World 2017. Brought to you by Informatica. (techno music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. Live here in San Francisco, this is the Cube's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017, our third year covering Informatica, and more to come. I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle, the Cube. My co-host, Peter Burris, Head of Research for Silicon Angle Media, as well as General Manager of Wikibon.com, check out the great research at Wikibon. Some great stuff there on IOT, cloud ping data, great stuff. Of course, go to SiliconAngle.com for all the coverage YouTube.com/SiliconAngle for all the Cube videos. Our next guest is Bruce Chizen, board member of a lot of private companies, also Special Advisor at Informatica. You're on the board of Informatica, no? >> Executive Chair. >> John: Executive Chair of Informatica. Not only as Special Advisor, Executive Chair. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Great to be here. >> You were on last year, great to have you back. What a popular video. Jerry Held was on yesterday. Let's get some Board insights, so first question, when are you going public? (laughing) >> Good one. >> John: Warmed you up, and then, no. I mean the performance is doing well. Give us a quick update. >> Company's doing well. Q4 was a good quarter, Q1 was a good quarter. I think we will be positioned to do something late 2018, early 2019. A lot depends on how the company continues to do. A lot depends on the market. The private equity investors are in no hurry. >> John: Yeah. >> But it's always nice to have that option. >> So it's one of the things we, yeah, great option. Doing well. We heard that also from some of the management. We got O'Neil coming on, we'll press him on some of the performance side, but always had good products out, we talked about it last year. But the industry's going through a massive transformation. You've seen many waves over the years. The waves are hitting. What's your perspective right now? I mean, it's a pretty big wave. You got to get the surfboard out there, there's a set coming in. What's the big wave right now? >> So, data is driving every transformation within every organization. Any company that is not using and taking advantage of data will be left behind. You look at how companies like Amazon and Google and now a lot of our customers like Schwab and Tesla and others, the way they're using data, that will allow them to continue to either be successful in the case of a Schwab, or be a disruptor, like somebody like Tesla. Fortunately for us at Informatica, we are helping to drive that digital transformation. >> One of the things that I always observe, younger than you are, I've only seen a few waves in my day, but in the waves that were the most impactful in terms of creating wealth, and opportunity, and innovation, has had a cool and relevant factor. Meaning, if you go back to the PC days, it was cool and relevant. If you go back to mini computer, cool and relevant. And it goes on and on and on. And certainly internet, cool and relevant. But now, the, you mention Tesla. I'm testing driving one on Friday. My kids are like "Don't buy the Audi, buy the Tesla." This is my kids. So it's a cooler, it's a spaceship, it's cooler than the other cars. >> Bruce: Or an iPhone on wheels. >> Peter: (laughs) Exactly. A computer on wheels. >> So cool and relevant, talk about what is the cool and relevant thing right now. You talk about user experience, that's one. Data's changing it. So how is data being the cool and relevant trend? Point to some things that... >> If you look at what's happening from the chip on up, everything, everything will be intelligent. And I hate to use the term "internet of things," but the reality is everything will have intelligence. And that intelligent information will be able to be taken advantage of because of the scale of the cloud. Which means that any company will be able to take information, data, analyze it on the cloud, and then use it to do something with. And it's happening now. Fortunately, Informatica sits right in the middle of that, because they're the ones who could rationalize that data on behalf of their customers. 'Cause there's going to be a lot of it and somebody needs to govern it, secure it, homogenize it. >> John: You consider them an enabling platform? >> Absolutely, absolutely. I was joking, we just went through a rebranding exercise. And it's kind of cute, new logo, and it's kind of bold and sleek and it shows we'll have a leader, but it's a logo. But there's really around the messaging, we are finally getting across that we are the ones unleashing the power of data. That's what Informatica does. We'd just never really told anybody about it. We're very product focused, not really helping customers understand how uniquely positioned the company was. >> And it's also, you guys have done some things. Let's just go back and look at going private. Brought a new management team, have product chops again, we've talked about that in previous years. Last year in particular. So, okay, you have the wind at your back. Now you got Sally as a CMO, now you got to start being a humble braggart about the cool stuff you're doing. So which is marketing, basically. >> That's correct. >> John: But now, it's digital. >> Yeah. >> So, what's the Board conversation like, you say "Go, go build the brand!" >> So first of all, being private is great. (laughing) Because we get to do things you couldn't do as a public company. We're, a lot of our customers what to buy the products and solutions via subscription, that has huge impact to the P&L, especially in the short term. Cash flow's fine. So the PE guys are going okay, it's great, because we'll come out of this as a better company, and our customers like it because that's the way they want to buy products. So, that helps a lot. The conversation at the Board level has been, "Wow, we're number one in every category in which "we participate in. "Everything from big data to cloud integration "to traditional on-premise, to real-time streaming, "and, and, and data security." >> You're only one of three vendors in the Google general availabilities banner which went out yesterday. We covered that on Silicon Angle. >> We're number one there, we had AWS speak at our conference, we had Azure speak at our conference. All of the cloud guys love Informatica because we are the ones who are uniquely positioned to deal with all this data on behalf of their customers. As a private company, we're able to take advantage of that, spend some extra money on marketing. You know a lot of our customers know about us, but a lot more should know about us. So, part of coming out, having a new logo, having a new digital campaign, changing the website, that costs money. But as a private company, we get to do that. Because the fruits of those efforts will end up occurring a couple of years down the road, which is fine. >> So let me see if I can weave those two thoughts together in what I thought was an interesting way. Given that increasingly a lot of data's going to be in the cloud, and that's where the longer analysis is going to be required, that means a lot of the tools are going to have to be in the cloud. Amazon Marketplace is going to be a place where a lot of tools are going to be chosen. People are going to go into the Amazon Marketplace and see a lot of different options, including some that are free. They may not work as well, but they're free. You guys, what happens with marketing, and what's happening with that kind of a trend, is you need to buy, as customers, to choose tools that are actually going to work to serve or to solve the problem, to do the work that you need them to perform. And so what Sally Jenkins, the CMO, has done, with this new branding, is introduce the process of how do you buy us more customers to choose the right tool to do the right job? Does that make sense to you? >> It makes absolute sense, free is good. But be careful what you ask for. Sometimes you get what you pay for. You're talking about enterprise data. You want it to be governed, you want it to be secure. You want it to be accurate. >> John: Now there's laws coming out where you have to do it. >> You look at GTB... >> Peter: GDBPR. >> GDBPR in Europe, the privacy issues. You look at what's happening with Facebook, or what was reported today with France and how they're not happy with Facebook's privacy behaviors. It's an issue. It's an issue for anybody who does business anywhere, especially if you're a global company and you do business in Europe. You have to worry about corporate governance. Data security, data governance, data security. That's Informatica. The other thing is, while there will be some customers who will say "I'm going to AWS," there will be more customers who will either say "I have some legacy "systems that I'm going to leave on-premise, "and new projects will be in the cloud." Or they're going to say "I'm moving everything to "the cloud, but I don't want to be held hostage "by one cloud provider." And they're going to go with Amazon and Azure and Google and maybe Oracle, and, and, and. And again, because Informatica is Swiss, we're able to provide them with a solution that allows them to accomplish their data needs. >> Well, congratulations on the performance, I want to get that out of the way. But I want to ask a specific question on the historical, holistic picture of Informatica. Going back, what were the key bets that you guys made? 'Cause you guys sit around, and you got the private equity now coming to the table, they have expectations, but at the end of the day you've got to build a business. What were the key bets that is yielding the fruit that we're seeing? >> The number one bet was that the company had great products and a great R&D organization. We believed that, and fortunately, we got it right. Because if you don't have great products and passionate R&D organizations around the world, you can't make up for that. It doesn't make a difference how much you spend on marketing. At least not in the business that we're in. So that was number one bet, and that proved to play out well. The second thing was, this was a company that had done so well for so long that they never needed to change their business processes to behave like a billion, two billion, three billion, four billion dollar company. Many of their business processes were like that of a 200 million dollar company. And that's easier to fix. So things around back end, IT, legal, finance, go-to-market, marketing, sales. >> John: Less of a risk from an investment standpoint. >> That's correct. So that's what we believed, we were right And where we've been spending most of our energy and effort is helping the company, through the new management team, improve their business processes and their go-to-market. >> So we had a critical analysis yesterday during our wrap up session, and one of the comments I made, I want to get your reaction to this, was although impressive, your number one and all these Gartner Magic Quadrant categories, but that's an old scoreboard. If we're really living in digital transformation, those shouldn't really be a tell sign for what the performance of the new KBIs or the new metrics are. And so we were pontificating and analyzing what that would be, still unknown, we're going to see it. But Peter had a good point, he said "At the end "of the day, customer wins." >> Yeah, that was my reaction. It's like at the end of the day, all that matters do the customers.... >> What's the scoreboard look for customer wins? I know you were at the executive summit they had yesterday at the Intercontinental right around the corner. I had a chance to meet some of them at that dinner, some conversation. But I want to get your perspective. What is the vibe of the customers, what are those customer wins, and how does that translate into future growth for Informatica? >> Any customer who is looking at data, data management, strategically, is going with Informatica. >> Mmm hmm. >> There are a number of competitors that we have who try to compete with Informatica at the product level, and they end up doing okay through pricing, through better sales tactics, but when we have the opportunity to speak to the Chief Data Officer, the CIO, the CEO, they go with Informatica. It's the reason why Tesla went with Informatica on their project where they're trying to tie together the auto business with the solar business. Because if they get to know both sets of customers and are able to sync that up, one plus one will be greater than two for them, and that's why they did that deal. Or it's why Amazon has chosen our MDM solution for their sales operations. So you look at leading companies who are able to look at the enterprise level, at the strategic level, they are going with Informatica. That's why we know we're winning. >> So Bruce, give us three sentences, what is strategic data management? >> Strategic data management is being able to take reams and reams of data from all different platforms, traditional legacy, big data, real-time solutions, and data from the cloud and be able to look at it intelligently. Use artificial intelligence and machine learning to be able to analyze that data in a more intelligent way, and then act on it. >> So two questions on that point, I was going to ask about the AI washing going on in the industry. Every event now is like, "Oh my god, AI, we've got AI," but that's not really AI. What is AI, we call it augmented intelligence because you're really augmenting with the data, but even Google IO's got a little neural net throwback to the 80s, but what's your thoughts on how customers should look through the lens of b.s. to say, "Wow, that's the real AI, or the real "augmented intelligence." >> Does it do anything? That's ultimately the question that a Chief Data Officer or CIO or CEO...is something changing because of the artificial intelligence being applied? In the case of Informatica, we announced an AI platform called Clair, "clairvoyant," so artificial intelligence. What is Clair? It allows you to develop solutions like our enterprise information catalog, where an organization has thousands and thousands of databases, it's able to look at the metadata within those databases and then over time keep disclosing more and more data appropriate to the information that you're looking for. So then, if I'm an analyst or a businessperson, a marketing person, a sales person, I can take action on the right set of data. That's true artificial intelligence. >> Bruce, I want to get to one final point as we are winding down here. Again, you've seen many waves. But I want to talk about the companies that are trying to get through the transition of this transformation, Informatica certainly cleared the runway, they've got some things to work on, certainly brand-building. I see that as their air cover in many rising tide will float a lot of boats in the ecosystem. But there are companies where they have been in the infrastructure business and the cloud is one big infrastructure, selling boxes and whatnot. Other companies have traditional software models, download, whatever you want to call it, on-prem licenses, not subscriptions. They're working hard. Your advice to them if you are on their Board, or as a friend, what do you say to them, what do they got to do to get through this? And how should customers look at who's winning and who's losing, in terms of progress? >> The world of enterprise computing is moving to the cloud. Legacy systems will remain for a while. They need to figure out how to take their legacy solutions and make them relevant to the world of cloud computing. And if they can't do that, they should sell their company or get out of business. (laughing) >> And certainly data is the oil, it's the gold, it's the lifeblood of an organization. >> Of any organization. Even at Informatica, internally, we're using our own intelligent data platform to do our own marketing. Sally Jenkins is working closely with our CIO Graeme Thompson on working on solutions where we could help better understand what our customers want and need, so we can provide them with the right solution, leveraging our intelligent data leg. >> Bruce, thanks for coming on the Cube. Really appreciate your insight. Again, you've seen a lot of waves, you've been in the industry a long time, you have great Board presence, as well as other companies. Thanks for sharing the insight, and the data here on the Cube. A lot of insights and analytics being extracted here and sharing it with you. Certainly we're not legacy, we don't need to sell our business, we're doing great. If you haven't, make the transition. Good advice, thanks so much. >> Bruce: Great to be here. >> Bruce Chizen inside the Cube here. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier. We are joined by Tracey Newell, she is the President Global Field Operations at Informatica. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, for coming back on theCUBE. >> Coming back on theCUBE, it's great to be here. >> So the last time you were on, you had just taken over as the president of Global Field Operations. Give our viewers a catch up on exactly what you've been doing over these past two years, and what the journey's been like. >> Yeah, no that's great, thanks so much. As a reminder the last time we were together, I had just joined the company. I was literally two weeks in, and yet I actually did join Informatica three years ago. So I joined on the board of directors, and I was on the board for two years, and the company was doing so extremely well that after a couple of years we all agreed that I would step off the board and join the management team. >> I got to get in on this! >> I know, exactly. I've got to get off the sidelines and get into the game. >> Both sides of the table, literally. >> Exactly. >> So that's really interesting that you were on the board watching this growth and seeing, obviously participating in it, too, as a board member, but then you said, "I want to be here, I want to be doing this." What was it about the opportunity that so excited you that you felt that way? >> Well, it's funny, because when I did join the management team I spent two months on a listening tour, and the first question from all the employees and our partners was, "Why'd you do that?" Usually it goes the other way around, you go from the management team to the board. And the answer was really simple in that my hypothesis in joining the board was that digital transformation is an enterprise board of director's decision, that governments and large organizations are trying to figure this out with the CEO, the board, the management team, because it's critical, and yet it's also really hard. It's complicated, the data is everywhere. And so when you have something that's important and really complicated, you need a thought leader. And so my belief was that Informatica should be that thought leader. And two years in we were doing so phenomenally well with the platform play that we had been driving from an R&D standpoint, it just seemed like such an amazing opportunity to literally get off the sidelines and get into the game. And it's just been fabulous. >> And you have experience, obviously, doing field organizations so you've been there, done that. Also you have some public sector experience, so also being on the board was a time when Informatica went private. And that was a good call because they don't have to deal with the shot clock of the public markets and doing all those mandatory filings, and a lot of energy, management energy goes into being public company. >> That's right. >> At the time where they could get the product development and reposition some of the assets, and the thing that was interesting with you guys, they had customers already. So they didn't have to go out and get new customers to test new theses. >> That's right. >> They had existing customers. >> Oh no, we serve the biggest companies and governments on the planet. Globally, a very large percentage of the global 2000, is kind of our sweet spot. And yet thousands and thousands of customers in the mid market. And so to your point, John, exactly we had built out this platform that included all things on-premise, we're almost synonymous, PowerCenter and ETL, that's kind of been our sweet spot. And MDM data quality, but adding in all of the focus on big data, all the area of IPAAS, all the work that everybody's doing with AWS, with Azure, with Salesforce.com, with Google Cloud, and suddenly we've got this platform play, backed by AI and machine learning, and it's a huge differentiator. >> So you've seen a lot of experience, again you worked in the industry for a long time, you know what the field playbook is, VCs say the enterprise playbook. It's changing, though, you're seeing some shifts and Bruce Chizen was talking to me yesterday about this, there's a shift back to technology advantage and openness. It used to be technology advantage, protect it, that's your competitive advantage, hold it, lock in, but it's changing from that to technology, but open. This is the new equation, what's your take on that? >> Our strategy's been really simple, that we want to be best of breed in everything that we do. And Gartner seems to agree with us. In all five categories we play in we are up and to the right. And yet we want you to get a benefit that if you do decide to buy one product, and then add a second, or a third, or a fourth family, you're going to get the benefit of all that being backed by a platform play, and by AI and machine learning. And so this concept of we'll work with everybody, a customer called us Switzerland of Data, and that's certainly true, we partner with everybody. Where you do see synergies to leverage your entire data platform, you're going to get a real advantage that no one else will have. >> You've got a lot of customers, this is a very intimate conference here at Informatica, this is our fourth year covering it, it's been great to watch the journey, but also the evolution and the tailwinds you guys have. What are some of the customer conversations you're having? You're in all the top meetings here, I know you guys are busy running around, I see you doing meetings and the whole team's here. What are some of the top-level priorities and challenges and opportunities that your customers have? >> We literally have thousands of people at the conference here as you know, and it's just been phenomenal. So I've been in back-to-back meetings, meeting with some of the largest companies in retail that are trying to figure out, "How do I serve my customer base online?" "And yet when they walk into one of my stores, "I want to know that. "My salesperson needs to know exactly what that person's "been shopping for, and looking on the Internet for, "if they're on my site, "or perhaps what they've been tweeting about." So they want to know everything about their customer that there is to know. The banks want to know who their high wealth clients are. And hey want to make sure that if they call in on a checking account and have a bad customer service experience, they want to know that. If it's a hospitality company, they want to understand what's going on every time you check into a hotel. If you looked for a quote and you don't actually follow through, they want to understand that. And so there's this theme of understanding everything that there is to know about a customer. And yet at the same time, a huge requirement for governance, in the California Privacy Act, the CCPA and GDPR are changing everything. I had a large bank once say, and this was years ago, "How can I forget you?" Which is what GDPR says I have the right, you have the right to be forgotten in Europe. How can I forget you if I don't know who you are? Again that's because data's everywhere, and again we're enabling that, so it's a pretty exciting time. It literally is about companies transforming themselves. >> I remember the industry when search engines came out, when the web came out, you had Google and those greenfield opportunities, they were excellent, you type in a keyword and you get results. When people tried to do enterprise search, it was like all these different databases, so you had constraints and you had legacy. Similar today, right? So how has that changed? What's different about it now? And again you had compliance and regulation coming over the top. How does an enterprise unlock those constraints? >> It's funny, you say unlock the power of data is one of our catchphrases. I'm meeting with CIOs around the planet who sound like they're CMOs, because they're using these phrases. They're saying things like, "I need to disrupt myself before someone disrupts me." Or there was one, it was a large oil and energy, it was a CIO at this massive company said, "Data's the new goldmine, and I need a shovel." So they're using these phrases, and to your point, how do you do that? Again, we do think it is about getting the right platform that plays both on-premise and ties in everything the customers are doing in cloud. So we see partnerships as being critical here. But at the same time, one of our fastest growing solutions has been our enterprise data catalog, which is operating at the metadata level. My peer in products Amit Walia likes to say, "How come you can ask the Internet anything at all?" You're so used to it, when your kids ask you a question, you just get online, I don't know, and get the answer. But you can't do that in your own enterprise. And suddenly, because of what we're doing at the metadata level working with all of the different companies around the globe through open APIs, you can now do that inside your enterprise, and that is really unlocking the capabilities for companies to run their businesses. >> You're giving us so much great insight into the kinds of conversations you're having about this deep desire to know the customer and understand his wants and needs at every moment. And yet the technology is so often the easy part, and the hard part of the implementation are the people and the processes. Can you talk a little bit about the stumbling blocks and the challenges that you're seeing with customers as they are embarking on their digital transformations? >> That's a great question. Because one of the things that I caution our clients about is companies get so focused on, I've got to pick the right technology. And we agree with that, again, that's why we focus so much, we've got to be best in breed in every decision. We're not going to lock you into something that doesn't make sense. And yet half of the battle, if you would, in these projects, it's not about the technology, it's a people/process issue. So think about to have a comprehensive view of your data, if you're a large CPG company or a large bank, you might have 10 CIOs, 50 CIOs. We have customers that have 10 ERP systems, we have folks that talk about 50 ERP systems. These are very cross functional, complex projects, and so our focus is on customer success and customer for life. I have more people in customer success than I do in sales by design. Literally thousands of people around the world, this is all that we do, that are focused on business outcomes. And so we really give an extra guarantee, if you would, to our customers to make sure they know that we're in this to make sure that they're successful, and when we start running into challenges, we're going to raise those high so that both organizations can make sure that we get to that promise that everybody is committed to. >> Talk about the ecosystem, because you continue to get success with the catalog, which is looking good. Great that, by the way, we covered that on theCUBE, I remember those conversations like it was yesterday. That really enables a lot, so you're seeing some buzz here around obviously the big clouds, the Google announcement, Amazon, and Microsoft are all here, on-premise, you've got that covered. But the ecosystem partners have a huge economic opportunity, because with the value proposition that you guys are putting forth that's rolling out with a huge customer base, the value-to-economic shift has changed, so that the economics are changing for the better for the customer and the value's increasing. That's kind of an Amazon-like effect if you think about that flywheel. That's attracting a lot of people in to your ecosystem because there's a money making opportunity. >> That's right. >> Talk about that dynamic. >> It's been humbling. I'm really pleased with Informatica World and how things are shaping up because we've had some amazing speakers here as you mentioned, from Amazon, Thomas Crane here from Google Cloud, AWS sending their CMO. It's just been a phenomenal event, yet if you go to the show for literally dozens and dozens and dozens of other providers that are critical to our customers that we want to partner with. When we say partner, we actually do deep R&D together so that there's a true value proposition where the customer gets more and a better-together solution when they choose Informatica and their critical partners. There's another category of partners that I think you're hinting at which is the large GSIs. >> The global system integrators, yeah. >> The global systems integrators. >> Accenture, Deloitte. >> Accenture, Deloitte, Cognizant have been phenomenal partners to us. And so again, when you talk about this being a board level discussion, which literally I've met with so many CIOs who say, "I just presented to my board last week, "let me tell you about this journey that we're on." Of course the large global system integrators are in the middle of that and we are very clear, we don't want to compete with those folks that are so good at both the vision and also really good in arms and legs and execution to help drive massive workflow change for our clients. So we work together brilliantly with those folks. >> And these are meaty projects, too, so it's not like they're used to, back in the old days when these projects were massive, rolling out these big ERP systems, the CRMs, back when people were instrumenting their operation of businesses. Similar now with data, these are massive, lucrative, profitable opportunities. >> These are really strategic for the client, the global system integrator, and for us for all of the same reasons. This drives massive change in a good way for our clients to keep ahead of whoever's nipping at their heels, but certainly it's a tremendous services opportunity for the large integrators, there's no question. >> Being humble. >> One of the things that's really coming through here is Informatica's commitment to solving the skills gap, especially with the Next 25 program, and this is something your company's being really thoughtful about. I'm interested from your perspective, particularly as somebody who's been in the technology industry and was on the board for a while, how do you see the skills gap and what the technology industry is doing as a whole to combat it? And then your advice from your vantage point in terms of what you think are the next things that kids should be studying in schools? >> This reminds me, and Furrier, you're talking about the old days, so I'm going to date myself, it reminds me a lot of when the Internet first started to occur. This is a very similar type change. People have been, companies have been trying to make these changes and they're starting to realize that it does start, they've got to have a good grasp of the data in order to run all of these strategic initiatives that they've got. And so it's tremendous opportunity, to your point, for young people. So how do we think about that? Certainly we do our fair share of hiring interns trying to get them early in life, when they're sophomores, juniors coming into senior year and then hiring those folks. So we see an opportunity for our own company to bring in those young people, if you would. And then the GSIs, the global systems integrators, we partner quite a bit with them, because we see them as massive scalers, they have-- >> How about people specialize in majors, any areas of interest that someone might want to specialize in to be a great contributor in the data world? Obviously stats and math are clear on machine learning and that side. But there's affects, there's societal, business outcome challenges that have not yet been figured out. What areas do you see that someone can go after, have a career around? >> So it literally is a business and a technical problem that we're solving, and so there's going to be career opportunities for everyone that's in school. Whether it be on the business side, whether it's business management, marketing, sales, because again think about when you talk about change of management, it is a CMO trying to rethink how do they reach their clients. It is a sales leader thinking, "How do I get better analytics as to what's working "and what's not working?" And then of course it crosses over into computer science and engineering, as well, where you're actually developing these products, and developing these AI applications that are just beginning to take off. But it's in the early days, so for young folks coming out of schools this is a tremendous opportunity. >> Well, next you'll have to find what's up with the field, and your customers, and then next year, next event. >> Yeah, I can't wait, it's great. I've really enjoyed spending time with you all, and we look forward to seeing you soon. >> Indeed, well thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Tracey. >> Okay, thank you. >> Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, you've been watching theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World, stay tuned. (upbeat music)

[Narrator] Live from Las Vegas! It's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World, here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We're joined by Sally Jenkins. She is the executive vice president and CMO here at Informatica. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Sally. >> Oh you're welcome, thank you for having me. Its nice to see you all again. >> So congrats on a great show, we're going to get to the stats of the show, but the framework of Informatica World is built around these four customer journeys. Next Gen analytics, Cloud Hybrid, 360 engagement, Data Governance and Privacy. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about how this framework reflects what you're hearing from customers and their priorities >> Yes absolutely, Rebecca and yes, you got the right and in the right order, thank you. So, we started this journey with our customers and trying to understand how do they want to be spoken to. What business problems are they solving? And how do they categorize them, if you will. And so, we've been validating these are the right journeys with our customers over the past few years. So everything that you see here at Informatica World is centered around those journeys. The breakouts, our keynotes, all the signage here in our solutions expo. So, its all in validation of how our customers think, and those business problems they're solving. >> So the show, 2600 attendees from 44 countries, 1200 sessions. What's new, what's new and exciting. >> Oh, gosh, there's so many things that are new this year. And one other stat you forgot, 92 customers presenting in our Breakouts. So our customers love to hear from other customers. As to what journeys they're on, what problems their solving. Those are record numbers for us. Record number of partners sponsoring. We've got AWS, we've got Google, we've got Microsoft, we've got the up and comers, that we're calling in the Cloud and AI Innovation zone. So people like DataBricks and Snowflake. We wanted to highlight these up and comer partners, what we call our ecosystem partners. Along with the big guys. You know, we're the Switzerland of data. We play with everybody. We play nicely with everybody. A lot of new things there. A few other things that are new, direct feedback from our customers last year. They said we want you to tell us which breakouts we should go to. Or what work shops should we attend. So we rolled out two things this year. One's called the Intelligent Scheduler. That's where we ask customers what journey are they on. What do they want to learn about. And then we make a smart recommendation to them about what their agenda should look like while they're here. >> You're using the data. >> Yes, AI, we're involving AI, and making the recommendations out to our customers. In addition, our customers said we want to connect with other customers that are like us, on their journeys, so we can learn from them. So we launched we called the Intelligent Connect and again this is part of our app. Which, our app's not new, but what we've done with our app this year is new. We've added gamification, in fact as part of the AI and Cloud Innovation zone, we are asking our customers and all of our attendees to vote on who they think is the one with the best innovation. They're using our app to use voting. They can win things, so there's lots of gaming. There's social that's involved in that, so the app's new. We're taking adavantage of day four. We usually end around lunchtime on day four, this year we're going all in, all day workshops, so that our practitioners can actually roll up their sleeves and get started working with our software. And our ecosystem partners are also leading a lot of those workshops. So a lot that's new this year. And as I mentioned, the Cloud and AI Innovation zone, that's new it's like a booth within a booth here on the solutions expo floor. So this is the year of new, for sure. >> You know one of the things that's been impressive, I was talking with Anil and also Bruce Chizen, who is a board member, The bets you guys have made is impressive. You look back, and this our tenth year in theCUBE, so we go to a lot of events, 100s events in a year, over 100 events over 10 years. We've seen this story with you guys, this is now our fourth year doing theCUBE here. And the story has not changed, its been early moves, big bets. Cloud, early. Going private to see this next big wave. AI, early before everyone else. This is really kind of showing, and I think the ecosystem part is on stage with Databricks, with Snowflake. Really kind of point to a new cast of characters in the ecosystem. >> That's right. >> You're seeing not just the classic enterprise, 'cause you guys have great big, large enterprises that you do business with. That want to be SAS like, they want the agility, they want all those great things but now you have Cloud. The markets seems to have changed. This is an ecosystem opportunity. >> That's right. >> Can you share what's new? Because you see Amazon, Google and Azure, at the cloud, you got On-Premise, you now Edge and IoT, everything's happening with data. Hard, complex, what's new, what's the ecosystem benefit? Can you just share some color commentary around how you guys view that as a company. >> Yeah, thanks, John, and that's a good question. I'm glad you're pointing out that our whole go to market motion is evolving. It's not changing it's evolving because we want to work with our customers in whatever environment they want to work in. So if they're working in a cloud environment, we want to make sure we're there with our cloud ecosystem partners. And it doesn't matter who, cause like I said, we work with everybody, we work nicely with everybody. So we are tying in our cloud ecosystem partners as it makes sense based on what our customer needs are. As well as our GSI partners. So we've got Accentra's here. They brought 35 people to Informatica World this year. We play nicely with Accentra, Deloitte, Cognizant, Capgemini so we really are wanting to make sure that we're doing what makes sense with our customer and working with those partners that our customers want to work with. >> Well I think one of the observations we've made on theCUBE and we said in our opening editorial segment this morning, and we're asking the question about the skill gaps, which we'll get into with you in second, but these big partners from the Global System Integraters to even indirect channel partners, whether they're software developers and or channel partners. They all are now enabled and are mandated to create value. >> Yes, that's right. >> And if they can't get to the value, those projects aren't going to get funded and they're not going to get renewed And so we've seen with the Hadoop cycle of just standing up infrastructure for infrastructure sake isn't going to fly. You got to get to the value. And data, the business that you're in, is the heart of it. >> Well, data's at the heart of it. That's why we're sitting at a really nice sweet spot, because data will always be relevant. And the theme of the conference here is data needs AI and AI needs data. So we're always going to be around. But like I said, I feel like we're sitting right in the middle of it. And we're helping our customers solve really complex problems. And again, like I said if we need to pull in a GSI partner for implementation, we'll do that we've got close to 400,000 people around the world, trained on how to use Informatica solutions. So we're poised and we are ready to go. >> We were talking before we came on camera. We were sitting there catching up, Sally. And I always make these weird metaphors and references, but I think you guys are in an enabling business. It reminds me of VMware, when virtualization came in. Because what that did was, it changed the game on what servers were from a physical footprint, but also changed the economics and change the development landscape. This seems to be the same kind of pattern we're seeing in data where you guys are providing an operational model with technical capabilities. Ecosystem lift, different economics. So kind of similar, and VMware had a good run. >> We'll take that analogy, John, thank you. >> What's your reaction? Do you see it that way? >> Yeah I do, and it all comes back to the journeys that we talk about right. Because our customers, they're never on just one journey. Most of them are on multiple journeys, that they are deploying at the same time. And so as they uncover insights around one journey, it could lead them to the next. So it really comes back to that and data is at the center of all that. >> I want to ask about the skills gap. And this is a problem that the technology industry is facing on a lot of different levels I want to hear about Informatica's thoughts on this. And what you're doing to tackle this problem. And also what kinds of initiatives you're starting around this. >> Well, I'm glad you asked because it's actually top of mind for us. So Informatica is taking a stance in managing the future, so that we can get rid of the skills gap in the future. And last year we launched a program we call the Next 25. That's where we are investing in middle school aged students for the next seven years. Its starts in 6th grade and takes them all the way through high school. They are part of a STEM program, in fact we partnered with Akash middle school here in Las Vegas. Cause we wanted to give back to the local communities since we spend so much time here. And so these kids who are part of the STEM program take part in what we call the Next 25. Where we help them understand beyond academics what they need to learn about in order to be ready for college. Whether that's social skills, or teamwork, or just how do we help them build the self confidence, so it goes beyond the academics. But one of the things that we're talking about tomorrow, is what's next as part of STEM. Cause we all know they're very good at STEM. And so we've engaged with one of the professors at UNLV to talk about what does she see as a gap when she sees middle school students and high school students coming to college and so that's where she recognizes that coding is so important. So we've got a big announcement that we're making tomorrow for the Next 25 kids around coding. >> Its interesting, cause we could talk about this all day, cause my daughter just graduated from Cal, so its fresh in my mind, but I was pointed out at the graduation ceremony on Saturday that the first ever class at University of California Berkley, graduated a data science, they graduated their inaugural class. That goes to show you how early it is. The other thing we're hearing also on these interviews as well as others, that the aperture or the surface area for opportunities isn't just technical. >> Right >> You could be pre med and study machine learning and computer science. There's so much more to it. What do you see just anecdotally or from a personal standpoint and professional, key skills that you think people should hone in on? What dials should they turn? More math, more coding, more cognitive, more social emotional, What do you see as skills they can tailor up for their-- >> Well so let's just start with the data scientist. We know LinkedIn has identified that there are 150,000 job openings just for data scientist in the US alone. So what's more interesting than that, is four times that are available for data engineers. And for the first time ever, data engineers' starting salaries are paying more than starting salaries on Wall Street. So, there's a huge opportunity, just in the data engineering area and the data scientist area. Now you can take that any which way you want. I'm in marketing and we use data all day long to make decisions. You don't have to be, you don't have to go down the engineering path. But you definitely have to have a good understanding of data and how data drives your next decisions, no matter what field you're in. >> And its also those others skills that you were talking about, particularly with those middle school kids, it is the collaboration and the team work and all of those too. >> It does, again, it goes beyond academics. These kids are brilliant. Most of them are 7th or 8th grade. But nothing holds them back, and that's exactly what we're trying to inspire within. So we have them solving big global problems. And you'll hear as they talk about how they're approaching this. They work in teams of five. And they realize to solve huge problems they need to start small and local. So some of these big global problems they're working on, like eradicating poverty, they're starting at the local shelters here in Las Vegas to see how they can start small and make a difference. And this is all on their own, I have folks on my team who are junior genius counselors with them, but that is really to foster some of the conversations. All the new ideas are coming directly from the kids. >> My final question is obviously for the folks who couldn't make it here, watching, know you guys, what's the theme of the show because the news right out of the gate is obviously the big cloud players. That's the key. And the new breed of partners, Snowflake, Databricks as an example. Hallway conversations that I'm hearing, can kind of be geeky and customer focused around "where do I store my data?" so you're seeing a range of conversations. What is the theme this year? What's different this year, or what more the same? Where are you doubling down? What's going on here for the show? What's the main content? >> Well so this is our 20th Informatica World if you can believe that. We've been around for 26 years, but this is our 20th Informatica World. And several years ago we started with the disruptive power of data. Then last year we talked about how we help our customers disrupt intelligently. And this year the theme is around ClAIrity Unleashed. You can tell the theme has been that we've been talking about for the past three years is all underpinned with AI. So it is all about how AI needs data and data needs AI. And how we help bring clarity to our customer's problems through data. >> And a play on words, ClAIr, your AI to clarity. >> Exactly, AI is at the center of our Intelligent data platform. So it is a play on AI but that is where ClAIrity Unleashed comes from. >> Terrific, thank you so much for coming on theCube, Sally. Its great having you. >> Great, thanks Rebecca. Thanks, John. >> Thank you. >> Nice to see you all. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from Informatica World, stay tuned. (upbeat pop outro)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you >> by Adobe. >> Well, Brian, welcome to the Cube Lives Conversations here. Recovering Adobe summat twenty nineteen in Las Vegas. I'm tougher with Jeff Frick co hosting for the next two days wall to wall coverage around Adobe Summit, a company that is transformed from some making software to being a full blown cloud and data provider. Changing the user experience That's our Kino revue. Jeff, this morning was the keynote. The CEO Sean Tom knew no. Ryan took over in two thousand seven. Bruce Chizen Cube alumni, right. What a transformation. They actually did it. They kind of kept down low. But over those years absolutely changed the face of Adobe. We're seeing it now with a slew of acquisitions. Now seventeen thousand people attending this conference. This is kind of interesting story, your thoughts >> a lot of interesting stuff going on here, John and I think fundamentally they they took the risk right. They change your business from a by a news buying new license every year for eight hundred bucks. Nine hundred bucks, whatever used to be for Creative Cloud to go to an online model. And I think what was interesting about what Johnson, who said, is when you are when you're collecting money monthly, you have to deliver value monthly. And it completely changed the way that they paste their company the way they deliver products the way their product development works. And they moved to as we talked about all the time, instead of a sample of data that's old and making decisions. Now you can make decisions based on real time data in the way people are actually using the product. And so they've driven that transformation. And then now, by putting your whole sweet and with these gargantuan acquisitions of Mar Keto, now they're helping their customers really make that transition to a really time dynamic, digitally driven, data driven enterprise to drive this customer experience. >> It's interesting. Adobes, transformations, realist, legit It happened. It's happening. It's interesting, Jeff, you and I both live in Palo Alto, and I was looking through my Lincoln and my Facebook. There's literally dozens of friends and your colleagues over the years that I've interfaced with that all work at Adobe but feed all the acquisitions. They've built quite a huge company, and they brought a different set of experiences, and this is the to be the big story. That hasn't been told yet. Adobe again. This our first time covering Adobe Summit and excited to be here and continue to cover this. But here's what's going on That's really important. They transformed and are continuing Transformer. They did it in a way that was clever, smart and very predictive in their mind. They took a slow, slow approach to getting it right, and we heard the CEO talk about this. They had an old software model that was too slow. They want to attract the next generation of users, and they wanted to reimagine their product and the ecosystem changed their business model and change their engagement with customers. Very targeted in its approach, very specific to their business model. And their goals were innovate faster, moved to the cloud moved to a subscription based business model. But that's not it. Here the story is, the data equation was some kind of nuances in the keynote, like we didn't get the data right. Initially, we got cloud right, but data is super important, and then they got it right, and that's the big story. Here is the data driven and this is the playbook. I mean, you can almost substitute Adobe for your company. If someone's looking to do Tracy, pick your spots, execute, don't just talk about >> it, right? Right? Yeah. They call it the DDO in the data driven operating model, and he pulled up the dash board with some fake data talked about The management team runs off of this data, and when you know it's everything from marketing spend and direct campaigns and where people are sampling, there was a large conversation, too, about the buyer journey. But to me, the most important part is the buying act is not the end of the story, right. You want to continue to engage with that customer wherever and however, and whenever they want you. There was an interesting stat that came out during the keynote, where you know the more platforms your customer engages with you, the much higher the likelihood that they're goingto that they're going to renew, that they're going to retain so to me. I think you know, we talk a lot about community and engagement and this experience concept where the product is a piece of the puzzle, but it's not. It's not the most important piece that might be the piece Well, what she experiences built around, but it's It's just a simple piece. I think the guy from Best Buy was phenomenal. The story, the transformation, that company. But they want to be your trusted. A provider of all these services of two hundred dollars a year. They'LL come take care of everything in your home so you know they don't just want to ship a box. Say, say goodbye. They want to stay. >> Well, let's talk. Let's talk about that use case. I think the best bike Kino Best Buy was on the Kino with CEO. But I think that what I what? I was teasing out of that interview and you just brought it up. I want to expand on that They actually had massive competition from Amazon. So you think, Oh my God, they're going to be out of business? No, they match the price. They took price off the table so they don't lose their customers who want to buy it on Amazon. You can still come in the story of experience, right? They shifted the game to their advantage where they said, we're not going to be a product sales company. We're going to sell whatever the client want customers want and match Amazons pricing and then provide that level of personalization. That then brought up the keys CEOs personalization piece, which I'd like to get your thoughts on because you made a stat around their emails, right, he said, Quote personalization at scale, Right? That's what they're >> that's that they're doing right? And he talked about, you know, they used to do an e mail blast and it was an email blast. Now they have forty million versions of that e mail that go out forty million version. So it is this kind of personalization at scale. And you know, the three sixty view of the customer has been thrown around. We could go in the archives. We've been talking about that forever. But it seems that now you know the technology is finally getting to where, where needs to be. The cloud based architectures allow people to engage in this Army Channel way that they could never do it before. And you're seeing As you said, the most important thing is a data architecture that can pull from disparate sources they talked about in the Kenya. The show does they actually built their customer profile as the person was engaging with the website as they gave more information so that they can customize all this stuff for that person. Of course, then they always mentioned, But don't be creepy about it. I >> don't have too >> far so really delivering this mask mask, personalization at scale. >> I think one of the lessons that's coming out a lot of our interviews in the Cube is Get the cloud equation right first, then the data one. And I think Adobe validates that here in my mind when it continue investigating, report that dynamic the hard news. Jeff The show was Adobe Cloud experiences generally available, and I thought that was pretty interesting. They have a multiple clouds because a member they bought Magenta and Marquette on a variety of other acquisitions. So they have a full on advertising cloud analytics, cloud marketing cloud and a commerce cloud. And underneath those key cloud elements, they have Adobe, sensi and Adobe Experience platform, and we have a couple of night coming on to talk about that, and that's making up. They're kind of the new new platform. Cloud platforms experience Cloud. They're calling it, but the CEO at Incheon quote. I want to get your reaction to that. This, he said, quote people by experiences, not products. That's why they're calling it the experience cloud. I hear you in the office all the time talking about this, Jeff. So it's about to experience the product anymore, >> right? It is the passion that you can build around a community in that experience. My favorite examples from the old days is Harley Davidson. How many people would give you know they're left pinkie toe, have their customers tattoo their brand on their body? Right in The Harley Davidson brand is a very special, a special connotation, and the people that associate with that really feel like a part of a community. The other piece of it is the ecosystem. They talk about ecosystem of developers and open source. If you can get other people building their business on the back of your platform again, it's just deepens the hook of engagements that opens up your innovation cycle. And I think it's such a winning formula, John, that we see over and over again. Nobody can do by themselves. Nobody's got all the smartest people in the room, so get unengaged community. Get unengaged, developer ecosystem, more talk of developers and really open it up and let the creativity of your whole community drive the engagement and the experience. >> We will be following the personalization of scale Cube alumni former keep alumni who is not at the show. I wanted to get opinion. Satya Krishna Swami. He's head of persuasion. Adobe had pinned them on linked him. We'LL get him on the Cuban studio so keep on, we're going to follow that story. I think that's huge. This notion of personalization of scale is key, and that brings us to the next big news. The next big news was from our friend former CEO of Marquette. Oh, Steve Lucas. Keep alumni. They launched a account based experience initiative with Adobe, Microsoft and Lincoln, and I find that very interesting. And I'd start with Ron Miller TechCrunch on Twitter about this. Lincoln's involved, but they're keeping in Lincoln again. The problem of data is you have these silos, but you have to figure out how to make it work. So I'm really curious to see how that works, so that brings up that. But I think Steve Lucas it was it was very aggressive on stage, but he brought up a point that I want to get your thoughts on, He said. Were B to B company, but we're doing B to seeing metrics the numbers that they were doing at Marquette. Oh, we're in the B to see rain. So is this notion of B to B B to see kind of blurring? I mean, everyone is a B to C company these days. If everything's direct to consumer, which essentially what cloud is, it's a B to see. >> Yeah, well, it's interesting records. We've talked about the consumer ization of again. Check the tapes for years and years and years, and the expectations of our engagement with applications is driven by how we interact with Amazon. How we interact with Facebook, how we interact with these big platforms. And so you're seeing it more and more. The thing that we talked about in studio the other day with Guy is that now, too, you have all these connected devices, so no longer is distribution. This this buffer between the manufacturing, the ultimate consumer, their products. Now they're all connected. Now they phone home. Now the Tesla's says, Hey, people are breaking in the back window. Let's reconfigure the software tohave a security system that we didn't have yesterday that wasn't on our road map. But people want, and now we have it today. So I think Steve's perception is right on. The other thing is that you know, there's so much information out there. So how do you add value when that person finally visits you in their journey? And let's face it, most of the time, a predominant portion of their engagement is going to be Elektronik, right? They're going to fill out a form. They're going to explore things. How are you collecting that data? How are you magic? How are you moving them along? Not only to the purchase but again, is that it was like to say, is never the orders, the reorder in this ongoing engagement. >> And that's their journey. They want to have this whole life cycle of customer experience. But the thing that that got that caught me off guard by McKeen against first time I went satin Aquino for an adobe on event was with me. All these parts coming together with the platform. This is a cloud show. Let's plain and simple. This is Cloud Technologies, the data show we've gone to all the cloud shows Amazon, Google, Microsoft, you name it CNC Athletics Foundation. This is a show about the application of being creative in a variety of use cases. But the underpinnings of the conversations are all cloud >> right, And they had, you know, to show their their commitments of data and the data message right? They had another cube alumni on Jewell of police have rounded to dupe some it all the time, and she talked about the data architecture and again, some really interesting facts goes right to cloud, she said. You know, most people, if you don't have cloud's been too much time baby sitting your architecture, baby sitting your infrastructure Get out of the way Let the cloud babe sit your infrastructure and talk. And she talked about a modern big data pipe, and she's been involved with Duke. She's been involved with Spark has been involved in all this progression, and she said, You know, every engagement creates more data. So how are you collecting that data? How are you analyzing that data and how are you doing it in real time with new real time so you could actually act on it. So it's It's very much kind of pulling together many of the scenes that we've uncovered >> in the last two parts of a Kino wass. You had a CEO discussion between Cynthia Stoddard and >> Atticus Atticus, other kind. Both of them >> run into it again. Both big Amazon customs, by the way, who have been very successful with the cloud. Then you had and you're talking engineering, that's all. They're my takeaway from the CEO. One chef I want to get your thoughts on because it can be long in the tooth, sometimes the CEO conversation. But they highlighted that cloud journey is is there for Adobe Inn into it? But the data is has to be integrated, totally felt like data. Variables come out the commonality of date, and she mentioned three or four other things. And then they made a point and said, quote data architectures are valuable for the experience and the workload. This is critical with hearing us over and over again. The date is not about which cloud you're using. It's about what the workload, right, right? The workloads are determining cloud selection, so if you need one cloud. That's good. You need to write. It's all depending on the workload, not some predetermined risk management. Multi cloud procurement decision. This is a big shift. This is going to change the game in the landscape because that changes how people buy and that is going to be radical. And I think they're they're adobes right on the right wave. Here they're focusing on the user experience, customer experience, building the platform for the needs of the experience. I think it's very clever. I think it's a brilliant architecture. >> Yeah, she said that the data archive data strategy lagged. Right? The reporting lag. They're trying to do this ddo m >> um, >> they didn't have commonality of data. They didn't have really a date. Architecture's so again. You can't build the house unless you put in the rebar. You build the foundation, you get some cement. But once you get that, that enabled you to build something big and something beautiful, and you've got to pay attention. But really, we talk about data driven. We talk about real time data, they're executing it and really forcing themselves by moving into the subscription business model. >> Alright, Final question I want to get one more thought from you before I weigh in on my my answer to my question, which is What do you mean your opinion? What was the most important story that came out of the keynote one or two >> or well or again? You know, John, I was in the TV business for years and years before getting into tech, and I know the best buy story on what came before them and what came before them and what came before them. So what really impressed me was the digital transformation story that the CEO shared first, to basically try to get even with their number one competitors with which was Amazon in terms of pricing and delivery. And then really rethink who they are Is a company around using technology to improve people's lives. They happen to play in laundry. They play in kitchen, they play in home entertainment. They play in computers and education, so they have a broad footprint and to really refocus. And as he said, To be successful, you need to align your corporate strategy and mission with people's strategy and mission. Sounds like they've been very successful in that and they continue to change the company. >> I agree. And I would just kind of level it up and say the top story, in my opinion, wass the fact that Adobe is winning their innovating. If you look at who's on stage like best buy into it, the people around them are actually executing with Cloud with Dae that at a whole another level that they've gone the next level. I think the big story here is Adobe has transferred, has transformed and continues to do transformation. And they just had a whole nother level. And I think the story is Oracle will be eating their dust because I think they're going to tow. You know, I think sales force should be watching Adobe. This is a big move. I think Oracle is gonna be twisting in the wind from adobes success. >> Well, like he said, you know, they tie the whole thing together from the creativity, which is what creative cloud is to the delivery to them, the monetization in the measuring. So now they you know, they put those pieces together, so it's a pretty complete suite. So now you can tie back. How has my conversion based on What type of creative How is my conversion based on what type of campaigns? And again the forty million email number just blows me away. It's not the same game anymore. You have to do this and you can't do by yourself. You gotta have automation. You got have good analytics and you got a date infrastructure that will support your ability to do that. >> So just a little report card in adobe old suffer model that's over. They have the new model, and it's growing revenues supporting it. They are attracting new generation of users. You look at the demographics here, Jeff. This is not, you know, a bunch of forty something pluses here. This is a young generation new creative model and the products on the customer testimonials standing on this stage represent, in my opinion, a modern architecture, a modern practice, modern cloud kind of capabilities. So, you know, Adobe Certainly looking good from this keynote. I'm impressed, you know. Okay, >> good. Line up all the >> days of live cube coverage here in Las Vegas for Doby summit. I'm John for Jeff. Rick, Thanks for watching. We'll be back with a short break

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE, here at Informatica World 2018 in Las Vegas. CUBE's exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, here for the wrap-up of day two of Informatica World, wrapping up the show coverage. Peter Burris has been my co-host all week, chief analyst at Wikibon.org, SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. And Jim Kobielus, lead researcher on AI analytics, big data for Wikibon, SiliconANGLE and theCUBE as well. Guys, let's kind of analyze and dissect what we heard from the conversations. Peter and Jim, we heard from the customers, we heard from the executive management, top partners and top executives. So interesting, and Jim, you've been at the analyst one-on-ones, the keynotes. Good show, I thought it was well done, the messaging, again, continuing the brand. The 25th anniversary of Informatica. Which, that's okay for me, but it's really not 25 years old. It's really like five years old. When the private equity came in, they took the legacy and made it new. >> Well they're a continually renewed company. They're a very different company from what they were even ten years ago, and they've got a fairly aggressive roadmap in terms of evolving into the world of AI and so forth. So they continually renew, as every vendor that hopes to survive inflection points must. >> Jim, what was your takeaway from your sessions? I mean, you saw the keynote, you saw the messaging, you had a chance to sit down one-on-one and ask some tough questions. You heard the hallway conversations amongst the other analysts and customers. What's your personal takeaway? >> A personal takeaway is that Informatica understands that their future must be in the cloud and a subscription model. That means they need to get closer to their core established cloud partners, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google. At this show, Microsoft, they had the most important new announcements at this show, were all about further integration of the new ICCS, which is the Informatica-- >> Intelligent cloud service. >> Integration and platform service offerings, into the Azure cloud. That was the most important new piece of news in terms of enabling their customers, they have many joint customers already, to bring all of their Informatica assets more completely into the Azure cloud. That was quite important. But there was of lot of showing from AWS here on the main stage and so forth. And we expect further deepening of their Informatica footprint on AWS from those customers. So a, Informatica's future and their customers' future is in public clouds, and I think Informatica knows that the prem-based deployments will decline over time. But this will be-- >> Still good now, so the migration-- >> Well it's a hybrid cloud store. They have Informatica, a strong hybrid cloud store in the same way that an IBM does, or that a Hortonworks does, because most of their customers will have hybridized, multi-cloud models for deployment of this technology for the long term, really, with an emphasis on more public deployments, and I think it's understood. >> Peter, what's your thoughts? You had some great observations and questions. I was listening to you highlighted some of the digital business imperatives that you've been observing and researching and reporting on with the team, but also these guys have been doing it themselves. Any takeaways from you on any change of landscape on digital business, the role of data, the role of the asset. What's your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think if we look at the 25 year history, and Jim mentioned there've been a lot of inflection points. The thing that's distinguished Informatica for years is that it always was a company that sought to serve underserved data requirements. So it started out when relational database was the rage, started out doing OLAP and new types of analytics. And then when the data warehouse became what it was it became a data integration issue. And you can kind of see Informatica's always tried to be one step ahead of the needs of hardcore data people. And I think we're saying that here too. They have got really, really smart people that went private so that they could re-tool the company and they are introducing a portfolio that is very focused on the next needs, the next rounds of needs of data people. >> That's a lot of cloud too. >> They're a data pipeline power-- >> Well I would say they're a data pipeline pure player, I think you're doing a-- >> The closest of anybody out there. >> But I think the key thing is, right now, they're at the vanguard of talking about data as an asset, what it means to present data as an asset, tools that should provide for managing data as an asset. And they have the pipeline and all the other stuff, the catalog store that they have is very tied to that. The CLAIRE store that they have is very tied to that. Data is very, very complex. And often it takes an enormous amount of manual labor. >> I think they're checking the boxes on some of the things that I've observed over the years, going back to the early Adobe days streaming data requires some machine intelligence, obviously machine learning, AI, CLAIRE, check. Ingestion of data, managing, getting it all in an intelligent, not a data lake or data swamp, in a fabric that's going to be horizontally scalable-- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> With APIs-- >> Well horizontally scalable actually means something, it means expanding out through APIs and finding new ways of leveraging data. And I think we can make a prediction here based on four years of being here, that Informatica will probably be at the vanguard of the next round of data needs. So today, we're talking about cloud versus on-premise. I wouldn't be surprised if in a year to two years Informatica isn't talking more about how IoT data gets incorporated-- >> And blockchain. >> Yeah, IoT was not mentioned, nor was blockchain, and I think those are kind of significant deficiencies in terms of what we're hearing at this show from Informatica in terms of strategic-- >> Well hold on-- >> But I've think they've got a great team and I expect to see more of that in coming years. >> Well that's a double-edged sword, when the hype's not there, they have a lot of sizzle at stake. >> When I say deficiencies, I mean in terms of strategic discussions of where they're going. I would have liked to have heard more of Peter's discussion. >> I would too, let's get to that in a second. But I want to get your reaction on the whole enterprise catalog piece. Pretty much promoted by Jerry Held, founder of INGRES, legend in the industry, Bruce Chizen, really pumping that up. Their quote was, "This is probably "the most important product." Now, is that a board perspective bias, or is that really something that you guys believe? >> That's really organic. Metadata management is their core competency, and really their core asset inside of all their applications at Informatica, and that's what the big data catalog is all about. It's not just a data catalog, it's a metadata catalog for data discovery and so forth. Everything that is done inside of the Informatica portfolio requires a central metadata repository, and I think we at Wikibon, in our recent report on the big data market, focused on the big data catalog as being one of the key pieces of infrastructure going forward in multi-cloud. You know, there's not just Informatica, there's Alation, and there's Codero, Hortonworks and IBM and others that are going deep on their big data catalogs. >> So you see that's a flagship product for these companies. >> Well let's put it this way, AI has been around since the late 1940s. The algorithms for doing AI have been around, '40s, '50s. The algorithms have been around for years. But the point is, what's occurred recently is the introduction of technology that can actually run these algorithms, that can actually sustain the algorithms against very large volumes of data. So the technology's gotten to the point where you can actually do some of this stuff. The catalog concept has been around for as long as database managers have been around. The problem was you could only build a catalog for just that database manager. The promise of building enterprise-wide catalogs, that dream has been in place for years. One of the worst two days of my life was flying back from Japan, into New York, and sitting in an IBM information model meeting for analysts. It was absolutely-- >> Was that the 40s or 50s? (laughter) >> That was in the 80s. It was absolute hell. But the point is that Informatica is now-- >> You were the prodigy. >> Yeah, I was a prodigy. Informatica is now bringing together a combination of technologies, including CLAIRE, to make it possible to actually do catalog in a very active way. And that's trend setting. >> I think they're right too. I think that's clearly, they make a good product because I've got to say, you know, watching them for five years. This is our fourth year coming to Informatica World. Our first meeting with Anil, when he was chief product officer, was 2014 and so we've seen the progression. They're right on track, and I think they have an opportunity with IoT and blockchain, but the question I want to ask you guys is, this event of about 4,000 people, not a huge big data show, but it's really all about data. There's no distractions. The fact that they can't even get a lot of IoT airtime means that there's been a lot of core discussions. >> They're really focused. >> This is not like a Strata-- >> No. >> Where everyone's marketing some tool or platform. >> These guys are down and dirty with the products. >> They are really focused on their core opportunities, and like Peter was saying, they're really focused, they're the premier, I see the data pipeline solution or platform vendor. The data pipeline is the center of the AI revolution. And so in many ways, all of the forces, all of the trends have converged to the advantage of Informatica as being the core, go-to vendor for a complete data pipeline for all your requirements, including machine learning development. >> There's one more thing. We didn't hear blockchain, we didn't hear IoT, although I bet you there's a lot of conversation, one-on-ones between customers and Informatica about some of those things. But there's one other thing we didn't hear, which I think is very telling, and speaks to some of our trends. We didn't hear open source. Open source was not once mentioned on theCUBE, except maybe you mentioned it once. >> John: You're right. >> Now, if we think about where the big data market was forged, and where it was going to always remain, was it was going to be this big, huge, open-source play. And that has not happened. Informatica, by saying, "We're going to have "a great individual product, "and a great portfolio that works together," is demonstrating that the way to show how the new compute model is going to work is to take a coherent, integrated, focused approach on how to do it. >> It's interesting, I mean we could dissect this. Open source is a great observation, because is there really open source needed if you have a pipeline thing? I'd much rather have a discussion about open data, which I think as your deal points to, is getting into hybrid cloud as fast as possible in a console. To me, that's so much more powerful than open source. >> Jim: Open APIs. >> Open APIs where I can not get locked into Azure. >> I think open source is still important, but I'll bet you that the open source, if you start looking at what these guys are doing and others like them are doing, my guess is that we'll see open source vendors saying, "Oh, so that's how you're going to do catalog. "Okay great, so let's take an open source approach "to doing that." And you know, Informatica's going to have to stay in front of that. >> They might be using some open source. It might not be a top-line message. But let's go the next level, let's go critical analysis on Informatica. What does Informatica need to do, obviously they've got a tail wind, they've got great timing with GDPR, you couldn't ask for a better time to showcase engineering data, governance and application integration across clouds than now. So they're in a good spot. Where are they strong? What do they need to work on? >> Well okay, let's just focus on GDPR, because it is three days from now for that compliance date. GDPR, I mean, Informatica's had some good announcements at this show and prior to this show, in terms of tools for discovery of all your PII and so forth, so you can catalog it in the big data catalog. What needs to be built up by them and other vendors as well, is a more fully fleshed-out, GDPR compliance platform, or portfolio, or ecosystem. There's a lot of things that are needed, like a standardized consent portal so your customers can go in, look up their PII in your big data catalog and indicate their consent or their withdrawal of consent for you to use particular pieces of data. Hortonworks a few weeks ago at their data works in Berlin, they made an announcement related to such a portal. What I'm getting at is that more vendors, including this, every big data catalog vendor needs to have in their portfolio, and will, and I predict within the next two years, a consent portal as one of several important components to enable not just GDPR compliance, but really compliance with any such privacy-- >> A subject portal that offers consent but then is verified. >> Jim: For example, but it needs to be open source. >> Here's what I'll say, John. And we had a conversation about it with Amil, the present chief product officer. I think that if Informatica, similar to what we think, is on the right path, the world is moving to an acknowledgment that data has to be treated as an asset. That tooling is required so that you can do so. And that you have to re-institutionalize work, re-organize work, and re-think, culturally, what it means to use data as an asset. >> With penalties down the road, obviously on the horizon. >> Well there are penalties, and you know, proximate like GDPRs, but also you're out of business if you don't do these kinds of penalties. But one of the things that's going to determine what's going to gate their growth is how many people will actually end up utilizing these technologies? And so if I were to have one thing that I think they absolutely have to do, we're coming out of a world that's focused on we use process, and process models and process-oriented tools to build applications. We're moving into a world where we use data, data methods, data models to build applications. This notion of a data-first world as opposed to a process-first world, Informatica has to take a lead on what it means to be data-first, tooling for data-first, building applications that are data-first, and very importantly, that's how you're going to grow your user base. >> Sajit was talking about data value, data value chains or whatever it's called. >> Supply chains. >> Data supply chains. I think there's going to be a series of data supply chains that are going to be well-formed, well-defined, and ones that are going to be dynamic. Seeing it happening now. >> And actually that's an interesting discussion, data value chains, data supply chains, but really, data monetization chains. The whole GDPR phenomenon is that your customer's PI is their property, and that you need their consent to use it, and to the extent that they give you consent. On some level, the customer's expecting a return of value to them. You know, maybe monetization. Maybe they make money, but more enterprises have to start thinking of data as a product. And then they need to license the IP from whoever owns it. >> Peter: This is a huge issue. >> And vendors like Informatica need to understand that phenomenon and bake it, as it were, into their solution portfolio. >> Either they're going to be on the right side of history on that, or the wrong side, because you're right and you just highlighted Peter's point, which is that data direction, not the process, to your point. >> Data first. >> If I own the data, it's got to be very dynamic. Okay, my final comment would be, and I mentioned this last night when we were talking, is that I think that things are clicking for them. I think they've got tail winds, I think they're smart enough on the product side. The trend is their friend. They've got the clould deals in place. They're in a nice layer in the stack where they can be that Switzerland. You've got storage vendors underneath, there's a nice data layer, so in the position, with coming over the top cloud-native Kubernetes and containers-- >> This is going to get messy fast. >> John: I didn't hear Kubernetes at all this show. >> Hold on, let me finish. This is going to be a robust Switzerland model where I don't think they can handle the onboarding of partners. I think they have a lot of partners now from their standpoint, but I think they might have an AWS factor where they're going to have to start thinking really hard about how to be efficient about onboarding partners. To your point about adoption, this is going to be a huge issue that could make or break them. They could scale the partnership model through the APIs, they could have a robust ecosystem. That could show us 15,000-- >> If they could be a magnet brand inside Azure, or a magnet brand inside AWS for how you think about building new classes of value, applications and others, with a data-first approach, then a lot of interesting things could happen. >> Yeah, they could be a magnet brand to avoid getting disintermediated by their public cloud partners because Microsoft's got a portfolio they could place with theirs. AWS has built one. >> Everybody wants this. >> Yeah, everybody wants them. >> Guys, great job. Peter, great to host with you. Jim, great to have you on, making an appearance in between your meetings, one-on-ones and the analyst stuff. >> I'm a busy man. >> That's theCUBE here, wrapping up day two of coverage here at Informatica World 2018. The trend is their friend. Data's at the center of the value proposition, and more strategic ever, data engineering, governance, application. This is all happening right now. Regulations on the horizon. A cultural shift happening. And we're out here in the open doing it, sharing the data with you. Thanks for watching Informatica World 2018. (energetic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2018. It's our fourth year covering Informatica on the front lines. Every year it gets bigger and bigger. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, with Peter Burris, my co-host, with some, chief analyst at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE on theCUBE. Our next guest is theCUBE alumni Amit Walia, who's been on many times, even before he was president. Now he's the president of products and strategic ecosystems for Informatica. Great to see you, great to have you on. Congratulations on your keynote. Thanks for stopping by. >> Thanks, John, glad to be here. Always good to be back. >> You're super, well, I love talking with you because one, you know, the business is growing. You've been in the product side, you guys are all great product folks. And this, they're shipping products. It's not like it's, like, vaporware. It's, like, great stuff. Now Azure deal was announced. But now the timing of the data play with Switzerland, we talked about this fabric, better time than ever. This year, you got data lakes turned into data swamps last year. This year it's about governance and catalog. Good timing. What's your assessment? Give us your point of view from the keynote, timing, product. >> Well, I mean, I think you're exactly right. We see that it's a unique time, and it was building over the last couple of years. So, you know, we have this phrase that this is a data 3.0 world where data has become its own thing. It's no more captive to an application or a database. Those days are gone. And I think in data 3.0 world, I think we talked about it this morning in my keynote, that, you know, customers have to step back and think differently. You can't just do the same old things and expect to be different, and especially as they're driving digital transformations. So we introduced this concept of system thinking 3.0, where as you're thinking about a data, you have to think about it as a platform. A nimble platform, not a ERP-ish platform. Think of it at scale. It's doubling every year. >> Yeah. >> Think of it metadata in, metadata out. Let AI assist you. You know, you've got to have, we as humans are just going to be swamped with so much data we can't process it. And last, very important thesis, as you all know, is that governance, security, and privacy have to be design principles. They cannot be an afterthought. >> Last year you announced CLAIRE AI component of the system. >> Amit: Yeah. >> How has that evolved this year? I mean, I know it was a strategic centerpiece for you guys. Obviously the catalog is looking really strong right now, a lot of buzzing to show around the enterprise catalog. Where is the AI, the CLAIRE piece fitting in? Can you just give us the update on CLAIRE? >> Well, CLAIRE's come a long way. Basically part of every product we have. So it manifests itself probably most holistically in the catalog, but whether in the data lake, it's in the context of surfacing data, discovering data, giving recommendations of data to an analyst in a very business user context, all in the context of an MBM, giving you relationship discovery of, let's say, John, who you are, into who you are. So it is in Secure@Source helping anomaly detection happen. So CLAIRE has now made its way into every product. But as you said, the one product where it basically surfaces itself in its full bloom is the catalog, which, by the way, has been the fastest growing product in Informatica's history. One year since launch, it has just gone, taken off. >> Well, presumably there's a relationship. Sorry, John. Presumably there's relationship there. Catalogs have been around for years, but they've been very, very difficult to build and sustain and maintain. CLAIRE presumably is providing a capability that removes a lot of the drudgery associated with catalogs, and that's one of the things that's making it possible. Have I got that right? >> No, yeah, absolutely. And actually, building the new catalog also has been a hard thing. So in some ways building it for scale has been a massive common sense problem that we've been solving for the last three, four years. You know, collecting metadata across the full enterprise is a non-trivial activity, so it was never done across the enterprise ever. If you remember when I was here last time, our vision for the catalog was very simple. We want to be the Google for enterprise data... >> Peter: Yeah. >> ...through metadata. >> And that's what we were able to do through the catalog. But as you rightfully said, it's very hard to consume it if you don't write AI to help it. That's where CLAIRE made a very big road. So the UI's very straightforward. It's a Google UI, and any business user can, with the help of CLAIRE, start using it. >> But it persists. >> Yes. >> So unlike just putting a search term in and getting a page of stuff back, a catalog has to persist. >> Has a persistence, exactly. >> And so describe, now that you have that in place with CLAIRE, as John asked, where does it go? >> Solving use cases. Actually, I'll give you a little preview. Tomorrow I do the closing keynote, and usually what I do, the closing keynote is all about features. So actually, it's a whole demo on CLAIRE where we're taking CLAIRE to the whole next level. As a great example, you know, building data supply chains, you know, it's a manual activity that you have to do. With the help of the catalog, we actually understand the system architecture. So if you want to add new sources of data or change anything you want to do, you don't have to go through those steps again. We will service it to you and we'll tell you what to do. In fact, tomorrow I'll show what we call a self-integrating system. It'll happen by itself. You have to just go and say whether I agree or not agree and the machine learns. Next time it gets smarter and smarter. Or in the context of governance. If a new policy comes up in an enterprise, the biggest challenge is how do I even know what the impact of the new policy is? Look at GDPR right now. So with the help of CLAIRE, we can understand across the entire enterprise what would be the impact of that policy across different functions and what the gaps are. Those are the kind of places we are taking CLAIRE towards more bigger business-driven initiatives. In fact, tomorrow there'll be a whole demo on that one. >> I mean, GDPR is interesting because it really exposes who's ready. >> Yeah. >> Who has had invested their, the engineering in data, understands the data. So that's clear. We're seeing some, and it's also a shot across the bow of companies saying, look, you got to think strategically around your data. We talk about this all the time with you guys, so it's not new to us, but it is new to the fact that some people are right now sitting there going, oh no, I need to do something. >> Amit: Yeah. >> How is Informatica going to help me if I have a GDPR awakening of, oh man, I got to do something. >> You know, GDPR... >> Do I just call you up and do the, roll in the catalog? Do I... >> That's a great place to begin, by the way. So GDPR, by the way, is a data problem. So GDPR is not necessarily a compliance/security problem, because you want to understand which data pass through boundaries, who's accessing it. It's a true data problem. So today, I mean, in fact, at Informatica World, we have customers like PayPal talking about their journey with us on GDPR. And so you begin with the catalog, and then we have three products that help in the GDPR journey, the catalog, Secure@Source, and the Data Governance Axon product. And again, each company's GDPR implications are slightly different, and companies, as I said, like MasterCard, like PayPal, that are using our products to run their GDPR activity right now, it's a... So we are seeing that going through the roof. And in fact, one of the big use cases for catalog has been in the context of governance and GDPR. >> I want to talk about the trends on, that are impacting you guys. Again, I was saying earlier that it's a tailwind for you guys. The timing's perfect. Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. I'd say hybrid cloud's probably in its second year, maybe third year hype, but now multi-cloud is real. You have announced a Azure relationship. You guys have a growing ecosystem opportunity. >> Amit: Yeah. >> How are you guys looking at it? 'Cause it's really emergent. It's happening right now. How are you guys targeting the ecosystem, whether it's business development partnerships, joint product development go to market, and/or on the business side? What's the orientation, what's the posture? Are you guy taking a certain approach, expecting certain growth? What's the update on the ecosystem, the global partner landscape? >> You know, the way we think about ourselves is that we've been the Switzerland of data always. And customers, actually, I always say it's always customer-backed. >> John: Yeah. >> If you solve for the customer, everything goes good. Customers expect us to do that. And customers are going to be in a heterogeneous world. Nobody's going to ever pick one stack. You know, you all know, right, there are customers who are still, larger devices still running mainframe for some processing, and they are already using new platforms for IoT, so they have to somehow manage this entire transition, and there will be multi-cloud, cloud hybrid world. So they naturally expect us to be a Switzerland of data across the board, and that's our overall strategy. We will always be there for them. In that context, we work with, we have learned the art of working with their ecosystem. >> John: Yeah. >> So you saw Azure today, and we are very close partners of hundreds of customers. Amazon, hundreds of customers. Google's coming up. So those are common. So we, Adobe, tomorrow you'll have Adobe. >> John: So you're cool with all the cloud players. >> And, you know, I always look at it this way. If you solve for the customer, everybody will work with you, and I think we're doing meaningful work. So that's helping our strategy. But what we have done two very different things with that. We've gone deep in terms of product integration. I mean, you saw today. We are making it easy from a customer experience point of view to get these jobs done, right? If you are spinning up a data warehouse in the cloud, you don't want to repeat the mistakes of the last 20 years. So now it's five clicks, you should be good to go. >> John: Yeah. >> That's an area we've invested a lot to make sure that those experiences are a lot simpler and easier and very native. >> We had Bruce Chizen on earlier. He was implying that you guys have significant R&D, and he was trying to get me to get you the number. I think it was on Twitter. I think I'll ask Neal. I think he's out there already. But it's not so much the numbers. It's about the investment and the mindset you guys have for R&D. I know you had, went with a private equity company. >> Amit: Yes. >> We talked about that. >> You guy are growing. >> So this is a growth company. >> Amit: Yeah. >> You need R&D. >> Absolutely. >> What is the priority? How are you looking at that? How would you talk to the industry and customers about your R&D priorities? >> Well, I think we've been very blessed, and I think our investors, and I think Bruce, when we sit in a board meeting, you know, we always joke around. They have never skimped on investing in products. And I think that we've been, our belief is that we are the innovation leader in our markets. There is a massive opportunity in front of us to obviously capitalize on, and the only way you do it where you innovate, and innovate means we invest. And I tell you we've been very fortunate that the investment in products has continuously increased every year. I mean, this year, forget just the products and technologies. We made, John, double digit million dollar investments in building a brand-new hosting architecture across the world, in Americas, NMEI and APJ, and we benchmarked ourselves against the Amazons and the Azures of the world, not our competitors. So not just products, but taking the cloud infrastructure across the globe, most secure, most... >> So your own infrastructure. >> Absolutely. >> Well, I mean, we run our own stuff. >> Yeah. >> But we leverage both AWS and Azure in that context. But our goal is that we can be in the countries because data should not leave some of those countries. We comply to the biggest regulations. So we've made lots of investment, and hence we can also innovate and get into new product categories. I mean, you see we have a whole new cloud architecture out there. Catalog, security, these are all brand new markets that actually, some of them have all come out since we went private. Actually more innovation has come out of Informatica since we went private than in the three years previous to going private. >> So, you know, let's play a game. Let's say that the catalog, doing very well. Let's say that you, working with Microsoft, working with AWS, you're actually successful at establishing a standard... >> Amit: Yeah. >> ...for how we think about data catalogs in a hybrid, multi-cloud world. Combine that with R&D and products. If you have, in a data-first world, where the next generation of applications are going to be data-first, that catalog gives you an inside edge to an enormous number of new application forms. >> Amit: Yeah. >> How far does Informatica go? >> Well, that's a great question. I mean, I think, I generally believe that in some ways, we are barely scratching the opportunity in front of us. I mean, none of us have seen where this world will go. I mean, who would have imagined, think of all the trends that have happened. Look at the world of social, where it has brought us to bear. I generally think that, look, each company that I talk to, each customer I talk to, and I talk to hundreds of customers across the earth, they all want to become a tech company. They all want to be an Amazon or a Google. And they realize that they will not become an Amazon Google by replicating them. The best way they can become an Amazon Google is to figure out all of the data they have and start using it, right? >> Institutionalizing their work around their data. >> Exactly. So that's where the catalog becomes very handy. It's a great first step to begin that. And in that context, there are Fortune 5000, there's Fortune 10,000, there are mid-market customers. I think we have just literally scratched the surface of that. >> Do you envision catalog-driven applications... >> Amit: Oh, absolutely. >> ...that get into, with the Informatica brand on them? >> Oh, so we actually have, so a great point. We actually made the catalog rest API-driven. So there are customers who are building their applications on the catalog. In fact, I'll give you a preview of that tomorrow. I'll show a demo where Cognizant took our catalog, took CLAIRE within the catalog, used Microsoft's chatbot to create a complete third-party custom application called the Data Concierge, where you can go ask for data. So it's Microsoft chatbot, our CLAIRE engine, and a custom app written by... So the world where I see is that it will be, that is a central nervous system of the platform, and enough custom apps will be written in time. >> It's a real enabler. So I got to ask, and I know we got not a lot of time left, I mean, but I want to get thoughts on cloud native. >> Amit: Yeah. >> 'Cause you have, with containers, you don't have to kill the old to bring in the new. And what you guys are doing is with on-prem and some of the coolness, ease of use around getting the data kind of cataloged in with the metadata, you're enabling potentially developers. Where does this lead us with containers, microservices, service meshes, 'cause that's right around the corner. >> It's happening as we speak. I mean, so we rewrote the cloud platform as I just talked about. It's completely microservices-based, completely. We had to, we had a whole cloud platform. We basically said we're going to rewrite the whole thing. Microservices-based. And it's containerized. So the idea is that A, microservices give you agility, as we all very well know. We can innovate a lot faster. And with the help of containers, you can just rapidly scale, I mean, rapidly deploy. You can test. Dev becomes a whole lot easy. The, I mean, today's cycle is so short. Customers want to do things rapidly. So we are just really helping them be able to do that. >> So you see the data actually being an input into the development process... >> Oh, absolutely. >> ...via microservices and your service mesh. >> I mean, if you don't do that, you don't know what you're building. >> It's going to be a data-first world. My, going back to my point, I think there's an opportunity for you guys to then go to the marketplace with some thought leadership about what does it mean to build data-first applications. Historically we start with a process and we imagine what the data structure's going to look like, we put it in the database, and then there's all the plumbing about interaction and integration. You guys are saying get your data assets, get your data objects rendered inside the catalog and think about the new ways you can put them to work, and you think of your code... >> Amit: Yeah. >> ...as the mechanism by which that happens. >> Flips everything on its ear. >> Amit: Yeah. >> It's a data-first world, and a data-first approach to building applications seems like it's an appropriate next conversation. >> That, I agree with that, and that's a big opportunity, and obviously there's a task at hand to make sure we can help educate everyone to get there. And I think, you know, it'll take some time, but of course that's the, anything which is easy is not interesting. It's a hard problem that where you basically, you solve and you kind of make it a big industry. >> I mean, it's great to see you. We feel like we've been following the journey of the success of you guys. We've been talking, go back four years. >> Amit: Yeah. >> You can go back to thecube.net, look at the tape. You can see the conversations. You guys stayed on task. Great product team, very, you guys are kicking some butt out there. Congratulations. Final question for you. Put you on the spot. Biggest surprise this year for you. What's, obviously the catalog, you mentioned it's been taking off. What surprised you? Anything jump out in terms of successes, speed bumps in the road, architecture trends? What's the big surprise? >> You know, I think I'm actually very warmed up by seeing, I talked about the day zero. You know, it is a data-driven world where we see so many customers looking to come here. We've become the biggest data conference of the industry. In fact, we were reflecting, Informatica World has become the biggest accumulation of people who think data-first. And I think that has been more than any technology. To me, at the end of the day, look, as much technology will come and stay, I'm a big believer it's people that make the difference. >> John: Yeah. >> And I've been seeing all of those people here, seeing them make contributions, learn, and drive change has been my biggest, not only a positive surprise, but biggest, you know, gratification that I've seen at Informatica World. >> And the emphasis of not having such a big hype. I mean, getting excited about new technology is one thing, but the rubber's got to hit the road. You've got to have real performance, real software... >> Yeah. >> ...real results. >> 'Cause the pressure of scale fast, time to market... >> ...all that stuff. >> Right. >> Congratulations, great to see you. Amit Walia, president here at Informatica on products and strategic ecosystems. I'm sure he's going to continue to be busy over the next year when we see him certainly at our next theCUBE event. Amit, great to see you. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, live here at Informatica World 2018. It's the largest data-first conference on the planet We'll be right back with more after this short break. (musical sting)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2017. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live in San Francisco for CUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier, SiliconANGLE. Our next guest, Anil Chakravarthy who's the CEO of Informatica, CUBE alumni multiple times, but the chief executive officer leading the charge of a great private company doing very well. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here, John. Thanks very much. >> We've got a couple of things to talk about, but I want to just jump in. Behind us you see the new logo, Informatica. Really kind of the last leg of the stool, if you will, you guys have gone private, >> Yep. >> Great product work over the years. You know I've been pretty complimentary of you guys, although we've had a critical analysis session yesterday. But all the big bets were very well done playing off. You've got a great product team, great leadership team, new CIO hire. But the last leg of the stool is the brand. >> Anil: That's right. >> You guys haven't been showboating much. Now you got to kind of brag and be humble about it and get the word out. New marketing program, what's that all about? >> Yeah that's exactly right. So you just said, the transformation that we are going through, three big steps is the transformation. The product portfolio transformation, we've been talking about that. This is all driven by cloud, by big data, and machine learning, and all of that. Then the transformation of the business model, from license to subscription and cloud services. And now the brand transformation. And we see the brand transformation as actually catching up to where the company actually was. We were just talking about that right before we got started. We actually have done a lot of things. Like for instance, did you know that we are doing 1 trillion transactions a month in the cloud? I mean, very few people knew about that. >> Yeah, what's more impressive on that, I found that out earlier it was 1 billion in January. >> Anil: It's unbelievable. It's-- >> I mean how do you do that? It's a growth hockey stick, straight up. >> It's a hockey stick, it's huge, it's huge growth, and that's driven by the fact that we are the leader in cloud data management for the biggest ecosystems, for Salesforce, for Amazon, for Azure, and that drives a lot of the data volume across the cloud. >> Before we get in the keynotes, on that note, one of the big bets you know I've been very impressed on is the cloud play, right? The data architecture of things, the winning formula. But you got cloud presses, you had Amazon Web Services. Google just announced span or horizontally scalable database, generally available. You were on the of the three data partners on the front end of that. >> Anil: That's correct. >> And part of the launch of Google. >> That's correct, yeah. >> I didn't know that. >> So you know, the way we think of the world is from our customer's perspective. It really is the best way to think about it is as the enterprise cloud. Put it together. All the data you have in the enterprise that you have generated over the years, that's still very valuable data. And then the data you have in the cloud. And you can't think of those two things as separate. For instance, you could have customer data, the same customer. John, you're the customer of a retailer. Some of that data about you is in their on-premises systems, and some of the data may be in a cloud system, but it is all interconnected data and you can't have two separate silos. We believe that we are the only ones that can really manage that. And that's why we are supporting every major cloud platform or cloud system, just like we are supporting every major on-premises system. >> Yeah, you guys call it Switzerland. It was a great way to describe it. But really to me it puts bigger than that, is that you guys make data ready. And that's really the value of what I call the tier two data layer that's building, where you've got stuff in memory, I get that, it's some odyssey streaming stuff, and things going on there. But now, then you have third tier, archive, but data tier two is just like all the data: IoT, structured data. That's growing, but the cost of storage is getting lower and lower. Now companies are incented to store. How is that impacting your business? We heard that at DellEMC World over and over and obviously they're in the storage business, but the tier two storage is significantly growing. >> Well data is still growing at over 25% a year. That's a huge number given all the way the size that you have, so it's going to be within by 2020, it'll be over 15 zetabytes, and a zetabyte, for those of you who are interested, is 10 to the 21. That's a huge amount of data. And what we're seeing is, the value comes from being able to first of all see your way through the data, being able to understand what data is valuable and what's not, and then connect the data. If you have customer data, product data, location data, et cetera, being able to put all of that together. That's really where the value comes from. >> So I've got to ask you about your keynote. You talk about the digital transformation's unfolding and data is the critical foundation for digital transformation. Okay, we've heard digital transformation. I mean, I'm not to say it's played, I know you guys have your theme, but this business transformation going on. So digital transformation is a known trend, but it kind of is played in my mind. I want to know what's different about Informatica now. Why is it unfolding now versus two years ago when we started talking about digital transformation? What's the most relevant thing now? >> Well I think the biggest relevance is, two years ago, as you exactly said, people were talking about digital transformation. Now they're doing digital transformation. Now you're seeing, you know, we talk about our own customers like Tesla or GE or Amazon doing it, but lots of other customers are actually doing the digital transformation. Now when you first take the first step toward the digital transformation, that's when you realize, my data, I got to fix the data foundation. If I can't have a data foundation, then I just, you know, everybody cares about a good customer experience. If I can't tell all the interactions a customer has with my company, and that data is in different places, there is no way I can provide a good customer experience because the customer knows what they're doing with me and I don't know what they're doing with me. And that's really the foundation for the data foundation. >> I want you to take a minute to just re-explain that because this is something comes up all the time and I get different answers and people have different definitions. What does it mean to have a digital data foundation and what are some of the impacts to the customers when they do have that? >> Think of it the simplest way. Let's say you have a customer and a lot of the new customers are like that. You are a bank, and you have a customer who doesn't want to talk to anybody. They only want to do everything through a mobile application. They want to file a loan application through the mobile, they want to check their balance through mobile, they want to deposit a check through mobile, et cetera, et cetera. If they have a problem, they might talk to somebody through a chat on a mobile, but they don't really want to talk to a live person. And this is, by the way, a common scenario now. Now they are doing probably 20 different things through the mobile. But when you get into your back end, that's the front end. You can put 20 things on the mobile, but the back end you've got 20 different things. But you have to have a single picture across those 20 things. When did the customer interact with us? What did they do? What is the pattern of that customer? How do you profile what the customer is doing? If you don't have that picture, everything that you do with the customer is going to just appear disconnected to them. It's going to frustrate them even more. And that's really the reason we have to have the data foundation. >> Okay, so, that's kind of a data layer, I get that, and believe me, horizontally-scalable data, making it accessible only helps the apps. The question to you is, your reaction to people saying, "Hey, Anil, I got to be innovative. "I got to free the data up and I got to let it grow "and you know a thousand flowers bloom, all this goodness. "But hey, I got to control it." So that's a huge issue. I've got governance, I've got compliance, there's laws now. So am I stuck in the mud? I want to be innovative and go fast, but now I've got to govern it and control it. How do you answer that question? >> You can do both now and that's the reason why we're announcing CLAIRE and all these innovations that we announced this. The advent of machine learning and metadata let's you do both. You basically say, look, I can use all these new technologies to find out what data I have. It's not going to slow you down. In fact, if you set up something like an intelligent data lake, because it has the metadata layer, you are actually opening up the data you have to the end user without having to come through IT for every piece of data, which means they can go faster. That's where the innovation happens. So you can do both. >> John: So it's a control catalog, basically. >> It's exactly right. It's a controlled catalog and you basically get to define different levels of trust. You can say, this data is curated data, it's trusted data and we can vouch for it. And maybe other data that's just shared collaboratively, and you can just flag it and then that way the user knows, okay here's data that I'm getting from a central system and this is what I need to use when I'm talking about something like revenue. And I'm tying something like a trend of what's going on. I might be able to use other data and that's the key there. >> Talk about the trend around CLAIRE. A lot of buzz here at the show. CLAIRE stands for clairvoyant. It's got the word AI in it. It's a name. SAP's got Leonardo, Salesforce has Einstein, all these different terms, but it's a clever way to point to AI, augmented intelligence, and machine learning. >> Anil: Correct. >> What does that mean for Informatica as a company? Certainly it kind of humanizes it. >> Anil: Correct. >> Shows the access of data should be democratized. What does it mean for you guys and the customers? How does that play out in your mind as the CEO? What do you see CLAIRE doing? >> Well the three big points I'll make about CLAIRE. First of all, when we built CLAIRE, we did not invent the artificial intelligence or the machine learning. A lot of that is already available. So we took a lot of the best algorithms in machine learning and applied them to metadata and applied them to data management. That's the secret sauce. It's not the building the AI itself, it's the use of the AI for data management. That's number one. Second, we defined CLAIRE very clearly and we said it's not a product. It's an engine, it's an AI-powered engine. In fact, I call for CLAIRE, I say it's cloud-scale, AI-powered real time engine, that's CLAIRE. Right, so it's an acronym, but it's the engine that powers other products. The third big thing is we're telling customers, you're going to get the benefit of CLAIRE, but you don't need to deploy CLAIRE. When you buy any of our products that are powered by CLAIRE or any of our solutions that are powered by CLAIRE, that will automatically come in there. So it means once you have any product like our enterprise information catalog or our secured source or data governance, you're starting to use CLAIRE and then you can use CLAIRE for other use cases as well. >> What's been the reaction? You know, and obviously you get nervous, CEO, probably got these things out there, probably wonder what the reaction is. What's your take on the reaction? >> People are very intrigued. I know that's what they, they look at CLAIRE and go, what is CLAIRE? How are you guys using it? I think people are asking us, tell us a little bit more about how AI is being used in the world of data and data management. So it's absolutely the reaction we wanted. >> So I got to ask you this question. I asked Mark Hurd the same question at the Oracle media day a few weeks ago. I want to ask you the same question. Everyone's number one at everything now. You guys are number one in six quadrants. Oracle's number one, the Dell E's. Everyone's number one at something. So the question really is, not so much about being number one, congratulations, you've got some magic quadrant wins that was highlighted in the keynote. But you guys are going through a transformation. You're telling your customers that they're going through a transformation. Wouldn't it make sense that the transformation scoreboard looks different than the old way? And I want to get your thoughts on this because, not that we have the answer, but there's one answer in customer wins, but as this new world transforms and unfolds, what's the scoreboard look like? How, because it's not as clean to say, this is the category, you're starting to see a little blending, as you mentioned how data is evolving. What's the new scoreboard look like? >> Is it the scoreboard for us or for the customer? >> John: You guys, the industry. How do I know if you're doing well? Obviously customer wins is obviously number one. >> Yeah, I think the best way to. I'll give you a couple of metrics, financial and nonfinancial, okay. From a nonfinancial perspective, as you said, a couple of key metrics. One is customers. How many new customers, how many new customers, reference customers do we have? Second one that you want to look at is just mind share or when people think about digital transformation, do they think of, hey, Informatica, they have a key role in my digital transformation. Just looking at mind share and so on, because that's a good leading indicator. In terms of the nonfinancial, or the financial metrics for us, obviously as more customers do what we call enterprise cloud data management, you're going to see our subscription revenue grow dramatically and you know, that's something that when you look at our subscription revenue, you'll see that impact of the enterprise cloud data management. >> And you guys made the move to subscription, obviously went private. Bruce Chizen and Jerry Held, your board members talked about this. You can do a lot of things 'cause it doesn't, it impacts the P&L but that it's still baking out, it's evolving, you're private, not public, but you want to get it right before you go public. >> That's correct. >> How do you feel about the progress on that front now? >> Oh we're making fabulous progress. We're very pleased with where we are. From my perspective, we are ahead of where we thought we would be by this time. I think customer buying behavior has converged really nicely with where we are in terms of where we want to go. So I think that's definitely been a big plus. >> Sally Jenkins, your new CMO, you got to feel good about her coming on the board-- >> Anil: Oh she's done a great job. >> High impact. She said on theCUBE that you guys are the hottest privately held pre-IPO startup. >> Anil: That's right. >> Twenty years in the making, whatever. I mean, but you guys are private. >> Billion dollar startup. >> But you act like a startup, which is why we like you guys a lot. You guys are like a very hustling like a startup. But now you're growing and you're getting beyond the 200 million, over a billion dollars now. When's the IPO coming? >> Yeah, I mean, you know look, I can tell you the factors that will be the lead to the perfect timing for the IPO. When those factors come together, I don't have a crystal ball right now, but I can tell you it weighs both on us and the market. From our perspective, we are making this big shift in the business model. We want to make sure that we can say, hey look, now the shift is very clear and stable and we can see where they where you know we'll be able to project out our own forecast for the next three, four quarters. So that's one key indicator for us. The second key indicator that we look at is the total revenue growth of the company and what percent of the growth of the revenue is recurring revenue for us. So we're going to be looking at those two factors. And of course from the market perspective, we want to make sure that the market wants to, continues to be. >> If you wait four years til we have a new president, and then heard all the politics from the Kara Swisher thing was, got a lot of people stirred up, in the conversation. But in all seriousness now, you also have private equity so you have to make the company worth money after they go public so you've got to have some growth left in you, right, I mean you guys are, you feel good about the? >> Oh we really do because you know, we look, that's where these six categories that we talked about make a lot of sense. You look at data integration, data quality, master data management, these are all categories that are well established. We know the patterns and we are seeing very good growth in those categories. Then you look at the new categories: cloud, big data management, data security. Those are all coming into their own right now. So that's why when you look at our portfolio, you go, wow, there are some that you already have great, well established and going well. These other ones, they're well established but they also have a lot of promise and future growth. >> Great chatting with you. You're a great, insightful, and inspiration. You guys have done a great job. But I've got to ask you the question because I think you have an interesting role. I mean, you have, you're acting like a startup, but you're not a startup. You went private from a public company. You've got a great board of directors. You've got Jerry Held and Bruce Chizen on there, but you've also got private equity sharks on the board. So, that's my definition, I won't say you said that. >> No, no, but I was actually in the private equity world, to my pleasant surprise, I've seen the whole spectrum of investors and our guys on the board are very much growth-oriented. They know that the value gets created for them through growth so it's well aligned. >> Yeah, but you're not sitting back having pizza and drinking wine. These PE guys, they're financially driven. >> Anil: That's right. >> So the question is, advice to other startups, whether they're venture backed or other companies going through innovation strategy. How do you manage the success of having such good product excellence? I know you've got good people, so that's an easy one answer. How as a CEO do you maintain the disciple to have the cadence of the financial performance? Because those guys look, they're probably not going to give you, hey how we doing? Numbers matter, but you're transforming technology and products. >> That's right, so what we do is-- >> How do you do it? >> We have a scorecard which has both the short term and the longterm metrics and we look at both of those. You know, we do monthly business reviews. So the pulse of the company has definitely quickened. We're operating at a new level of intensity. But when we look at the scorecard, it's not just the immediate financial metrics. It's things like, for example, are we building the back end infrastructure to be a subscription company? That doesn't get done in a month. >> John: That's an IT challenge, right? >> That's an IT challenge, a process challenge, it takes 12 months, 18 months, the kind of things that you talk with Graeme about. But that is an example of, you can have a scorecard. You don't necessarily have to look at a scorecard just for the short term metrics. You look at it for both short term and what makes you successful over the longterm. And that's, you know, that's what we're doing is just keep our eye on the ball, focus on a few things, both short term and longterm, and make sure we're doing them well. >> How about customer wins? To me, that's the scoreboard ultimately as we look at it at our team. How are you doing on customer wins? Can you share some, I see you have a lot of great customers. I met a few last night, obviously big wigs, big names. >> Anil: Yeah, exactly. >> What are some of the big wins look like and why are you winning? >> Well you know, we have 7,000 plus customers. We have a great customer base. Just at this show we've had 85% of our sessions here at the show have had customer or partner speakers. That gives you a sense of customers want to talk about us. A couple of ones that I would highlight for example, which are fairly recent for example, Amazon is one. They just spoke at the show and in fact the CMO of Amazon was here, Ariel Kelman. And he spoke about he is a customer of Informatica and how he's using Informatica for his own marketing systems and the marketing data analytics that he is doing. Another example is Tesla. You know, we talked about them at the show. >> I got a test drive on Friday with one. >> There you go, exactly, and then they are using us for the Tesla and the Solar City acquisition and driving synergies there. So lots of great examples. >> John: Tough customers, by the way, very, very finicky. >> Oh they are very demanding, very demanding customers and we are really proud to be serving them. >> Okay, final question, Anil. What's next? How do you look forward. Obviously this event, congratulations on getting the branding out. Peggy and the team did a great job. Sally and the team did a great job. What about next? What's next? >> Yeah, you know, what's next for us is simply work with customers to first of all get our story out, understand their priorities, and make sure that they understand that we can be a great partner for them. So we believe that this is the beginning of that journey. We talked about digital transformation and how we help them. Now we take the show on the road to our customers, make sure that we help them at their pace to transform. >> So bring the message out, build the brand. >> Absolutely. >> That's the key priority. >> And then continue. >> Product side, what's going on the products? >> Well on the product side, for instance, you saw a teaser of all the big trends. Machine learning, cloud, big data, security, all of these have full-fledged roadmaps that we're going to be working on over the course of the next six months. >> Anil, great to see you. Congratulations, you can tell, you're still intense. You've got the intensity, it's not going to stop by the way. >> Anil: No it's not. >> It's not like you're not going to get more intense as you guys grow. And congratulations. >> Thank you for having me on your show. >> We are here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017 with the CEO here, Anil Chakravarthy, inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more coverage from Informatica World after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco it's The Cube covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. >> Okay, welcome back everyone we're here live in San Francisco for the Cube's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier of SiliconAngle Media. My cohost, Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconAngle Media as well as the general manager of Wikibon.com, Wikibon research, check it out. Some great research there on IoT, big data, and certainly cloud computing. Our next guest is Graeme Thompson, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Informatica, great to see you, welcome back to the Cube. >> Nice to see you, John. >> Conference here, lot of customers, you've got an executive summit, dinner last night, you're kind of like the sounding board, they go to you for the checkpoint, hey, does this story jive, what's going on internally, 'cause you're living through a transformation as well at Informatica. Your customers are going through a transformation as well. We're at this tipping point. What's your take so far of the conference, and is that still the case? Anything you'd like to share on that would be great. >> Yeah, I mean we're proud to have some of the world's best companies using our products to do meaningful and important things. And the scale that some of these companies are doing it at is just staggering. I met with someone last night at dinner and, at Allegis, the talent management organization, and they process and keep up to date 55 million resumes every day. And they extract the metadata from those resumes to match the right candidate to the right job. And you know, that's interesting for them as a company but the societal impact of that is significant. Imagine, I mean we're all starved for talent, and you're matching the right talent with the right opportunity more often than not, using the intelligence of the data, it's pretty interesting. And then of course, I know you had Andrew McIntyre from the Cubs on yesterday, I mean how can you not love that story of how an organization as great and renown as the Cubs is using data to transform it's business operation. It's really amazing. >> We had Bruce Chizen on who's Executive Chairman of the Board of Informatica, was on the board at Oracle, but Peter asked him an interesting question that I'll ask you. What's your definition of strategic data management? >> That's a good one, so the way I define it is, if the basis of your competition is on digital assets compared to physical assets. So we're no longer dealing with plant or machinery or even capital, it's digital assets. If that is the basis of your competition, then the data that you rely on is the very foundation of that. And then it becomes strategic just like money is strategic. And the access to talent is strategic. The ability to leverage the data within your company, about your company, is strategic, and you have to be able to do it on-prem, you have to be able to do it on the cloud, you have to be able to do it in the real world where most of us live, which is in both worlds. And that to me, that's what makes it strategic. >> But let me build on that Graeme, 'cause in many respects the whole concept of digital transformation is, oh let me step back. One of the premises of business is to try to reduce what's known in financial or economic worlds as an asset specificity. So traditionally we've looked at assets and said, this asset's going to be applied to that use, and this asset's going to be applied to that use, and if it's the use isn't needed or it's not being applied, you lose the value of the asset. One of the basic premises of digital business and business generally is how to we reduce asset specificity, and data let's us do that by turning an aircraft engine into a service, we have transformed the role that that asset plays in our customer's business. So you're absolutely right, it's the ratio of physical to digital assets, but all businesses have to find ways to reduce their asset specificity by adding digital on top of it so they can appropriate that asset to a lot of new purposes. Do you agree with that? >> Absolutely, so take, so I know you talked to Sally about the data leak. So take a user case like customer support. Who in a software company knows more about the customer, what product their running, what version of product their running, what they're using it for because of the connectors they have. Nobody in the company knows more about that than the customer support organization. But that asset, the most profitable use of that information, may be in marketing, because then we can help our customers adopt something more quickly, we can help them get value from it more quickly. And it helps us because it helps us focus our R&D effort where the customers are really using the product instead of having to guess. So I think you're spot on, if you can remove the constraint on the asset to be for who paid for it, for one particular purpose and make it available to the entire enterprise and outside the enterprise, then you really start to see the value. >> The thing that you mentioned about digital assets Peter, and the Wikibon team talk about this all the time in their research, digital assets, is the data. Whether it's content or whatever. Certainly we're in the content business, but... >> Peter: Well digital assets are data. >> Are data, exactly, and whether it's content or whatever aspect it is. So I've got to ask you... >> Software, software is a digital asset. >> Data is at the center of it all. So I've got to ask you, there's been a lot of artificial intelligence watching going on in the industry. I call it augmented intelligence because it's really not yet artificial by the strictest, purest definition, but machine learning is very relevant. We talked about IoT when you were last in our studio. How is it impacting your business and customer's business? Because that's the real proof in the pudding, if you will. And customers are trying to sift through the BS that they're hearing from other folks. I'm not saying that you guys are saying BS, but what's the acid test? How do you differentiate between smokescreen and real deal? >> I think it comes down to, like any other technology investment, is what is the business outcome that it generated? So if you're trying to... So humans make mistakes, if you're trying to eliminate human error from a process, a machine can execute that process more repeatably and more accurately than a human. It's not about reducing cost, that's only semi-interesting. It's about enabling outcomes that weren't possible before. So you think about healthcare industry. Everyone talks about self-driving cars and how safer it'll be if the cars aren't dependent on a human, but one thing I read recently is we kill more people in the US by prescribing the wrong drug or the wrong dosage than we do on the roads. So humans work hard, but they make mistakes. If we can have the machine do that job because a human can tell it how to do the job and it can learn over time, then you can eliminate that error. And we're able to do things that we can only imagine. >> Machines rarely get tired, they rarely lose attention, blah blah blah blah blah, and it's all those things, and that's where the augmentation is. And there will be the other forms of artificial intelligence, the algorithms have been around for a long time. The hardware now can support it, and the data is being generated to apply it. >> The data's available and the cost of compute is approaching zero. So we're able to do things that the government could only do before. >> Graeme, I want to get your thoughts on data integration. Certainly we saw yesterday the news with Google Spanner. You guys were one of three companies that was early on, before they announced their general release of Spanner Worldwide, the attributed database, horizontally scaled database. Big deal, but you guys were also on the front end of that as it says in their blog post, and you guys are really strong at data integration. What are some of the challenges that the customers face with integration? What are the key things? Because that seems to be, whether you go multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud today, which is a gateway to multi-cloud, which is happening pretty fast, data integration is pretty important. >> Yes, so as a CIO this is something that is a very hot topic for me, and it's not a new hot topic, it was a hot topic 15 years ago when we went nuts and deployed all these client server applications because they were cheap and easy. And then you had to think about, oh these different disconnected applications don't serve an end-to-end process anymore, now we have to stitch them all together. That was hard, but it was all on-prem and you had access to it all. >> Peter: It was all programed. >> Right, whereas now, like you said you've got Salesforce, you've got Workday, you've got Great People, you've got your on-prem stuff, you've got applications that you're hosting on someone's PAS cloud and the IAS cloud and the SAS cloud, but to execute an end-to-end business process to generate an outcome you have to tie it all together. So instead of thinking about... >> John: And it's not on-prem so you can't touch it, and it's not on, you don't have it. >> Right so you can't hand code that, you could, but I would argue that that would be an unintelligent way to do it, which is where Microservices API has come in. So you can leverage the R&D efforts that the great software vendors like Salesforce create for us. And then you use Microservices to plug into that instead of having an army of people hand-coding interfaces, which is what we used to do 15 years ago. >> That's the human error point. I mean, it could be spaghetti code, all kinds of errors could happen. >> But also the maintenance of that is just virtually impossible given the speed and the fact that human beings are now thinking about new ways of doing things. You just can't keep up with that. >> I mean the coding thing's a big deal. We used to call it, back in the day, spaghetti code cause it's like all this integrated purpose-built coding for one purpose to glue it together. >> Right and then you change one data element and you have to rewrite or retest the whole thing. >> John: A guy leaves or a girl leaves, it's a nightmare, right? With APIs and Microservices you're decoupling that. That's kind of what I think you're getting at, right? >> Exactly, and that's what the whole iPass space is about. You can decouple the user experience from the data and just have, what does a user have to do, and then Microservices and APIs will take care of the work behind the scenes between the applications and that really lets... There's this concept of a citizen integrator. So 15 years ago, it was kind of a modern thought to have business people write reports. I think it won't be long before we'll be able to give the business teams the ability to do integration between applications without depending on me. >> I was talking with a young developer the other day and I'm like, yeah you know your coding is like me doing PowerPoints. They're like, what do you mean, it's so easy. No, it's not that easy. >> Well we've been building macros, good or bad, inside for example things like Excel for a long time and one of the primary drivers, in fact of a lot of the BI stuff, was citizen coders building macros and said I need the data to make my little macro run. Now I don't want to say that that is... That's not what we're talking about, we're talking about something that's considerably more robust where we can be very very creative in thinking about how we might use the data. And then being able to discover it and find it and very quickly and with a low-code orientation being able to make the actual application happen that has consequential impact in the marketplace. So Graeme, you're in a company that's trying to help customers move through some of these transitions. You're in a crucial role because we know where the data is, we know how to integrate it. >> Graeme: You did? >> Well we're discovering where the data is, we have tools that's going to help us, we're learning how to integrate it. But one of the big challenges is to get the business to adopt new orientations to the role that data's going to play. That to me is one of the key roles of the CIO, having worked with a lot of CIOs over the years. For a very very simple example, agile development does not line up with annual budget finance. How are you with Informatica helping to acculturate executive teams to think through new processes, new approaches to doing these things so that the business is better able to use the data so that consequential action happens as these concepts of these great insights that you're generating? >> So the whole change in management effort is a huge and complex thing to overcome. But I have a personal passion about making sure that you always remind people why they're doing it. Too often as product people or technologists, we get into the how and the what and we forget the why. And as soon as it gets difficult people abandon because it starts to get too hard, it starts to get painful, and if they've lost sight of the big why they're not going to role their sleeves up and gut it out and get through the process. So that's the first thing you have to do is remind them that the prize at the end is worth the pain. And it will be painful because no longer are you optimizing just your function. You have to think about what happens upstream from you, what happens downstream from you, and try and optimize things at the enterprise level. And that's not how most people were brought up. It's not how their measured, it's not how their compensated, but that's what's really required if you're going to make that transformation I think end-to-end. >> But it's also, even our language, we talk about innovation in this industry as though it was synonymous with just creating something new. Certainly our research very strongly shows that there's a difference between inventing something which is an engineering act and innovating around something which is a social act. Exactly what you just said. How do we get people to adopt things and change behaviors and fully utilize something and embed it within their practices so that we get derivative innovation and all of the other stuff that we're looking for? >> Yeah there's no easy recipe. People are different so people require a different story in order to have them buy in. Some people are loss-framed people, where you got to explain here's what's going to be bad if you don't do this. Other people are gain-framed people where you can say if we can accomplish this, we'll be able to do these great things. And it would be great if everyone was the same and one story worked for everyone, but it doesn't. So it's almost a feet on the street. Go talk to people and just keep reminding everyone why you're doing this and why it's going to be worth it. >> Peter: A little bit of behavioral economics there. >> John: Graeme I want to ask you one final question. You mention client server and how it was easy on-prem in the old days, get your arms around things, which is the IT practice, you know? That's the way it was done. In the cloud, a little bit more complex. But to take that a little step further, I want to get your thoughts on something. You lived through the world of server sprawl. More servers, more glue, you get your arms around it but then it got bloated, IT got bloated. And that's one of the catalysts for going to the cloud is efficiencies, bottom-line costs. But now, top line revenue now is a mandate. So now we have SAS sprawl. So with APIs, a little bit more security concern, but your thoughts on the now we have a SASification happening or API economy. So you have a lot more APIs, there's Microservices coming on the scene, it's emerging very quickly, still emergent. Embryonic some will say, not so, but I think it's embryonic still. Okay server sprawl, client server, VM sprawl, now you got SAS sprawl. Your thoughts on this dynamic and how a CIO tackles that? >> Yes, so it's the modern equivalent of your legacy technical debt. So it's a modern mess instead of an old mess, but it's the same problem. You know, you have to stitch these applications together and it's made worse by the ease of consuming these SAS applications. So one business function can go off and buy an application that's just for them, and the adjacent business function goes off and buys another application that's just for them. And before you know where you are, you're single sign-on page has three pages because you've got so many applications that you're using to run your business. So I think we have to be more thoughtful and not make the same mistake that we made after 2000 when we went nuts on all these client server applications and make sure that we're thinking about the end-to-end business outcome. >> John: So the unification layer is what, Identity, is it the data? I mean how do you think about that just conceptually? >> Well I think you still need a sensible portfolio of applications. I don't advocate that you just go buy every great application that's out there. If your business doesn't compete based on the capability that that application provides, you've got no business innovating. Just be as good as the next guy. But if you compete based on something, go pick the very best application you can but deploy it thoughtfully. Make sure it's integrated, make sure it serves the end-to-end... >> Well I'm also fascinated by the role that Clair might play here at going and looking at the metadata associated with some of these SAS applications to help us identify patterns and utilization. I think Clair and the thing that was announced here actually could have an impact in thinking about some of these things. >> The Clairvoyant app is a great one, Clair, I mean... She, he, it's vendor neutral, that's a whole different story, only kidding. Final thought Graeme on this show? Just color perspective, what's your thought so far just on the show vibe for the folks who aren't here, what's it like? >> So when you and I met a couple weeks ago we talked about the fact that I'd just joined the company just after last year's show. So I have nothing to compare it to, but the energy level is phenomenal. The feedback from the customer's I've talked to just reinforces that we have really really important customers and we're really important to them. You know, the customers are the ones driving this digital transformation and we're proud to be helping them. And every conversation I've had with customers has really reinforced that and it's great, I can't wait to get back to the office. >> And as we say the KPI, the metric of the transformation of the world is not quadrants or category winners, it's customer wins. >> Graeme: Absolutely. >> And I think that's a great point. Graeme Thompson, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Informatica sharing his insight. He is an integral part of their transformation as well as his customers. Informatica World coverage with the Cube continues. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris with Wikimon.com. We'll be back with more, stay with us after this short break. (electronic music)