>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to the special CUBE Conversation here in the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE. We have our quarantine crew and we are here getting all the stories and all the top news, information from experts and thought leaders in the industry. And we're here for a special interview as part of Informatica's digital, virtual event happening. We have Tracey Newell who's the president of Informatica, a CUBE alumni. Great to have you on remotely. Normally you're here in person, but we're in person. Thanks for coming on. >> (laughs) It's great to be here, John. We're virtually together. Happy to spend time together. >> Yeah, and we were in a really tough crisis situation with COVID-19, had a lot of discussions around strategies of how to manage it, get through it, and grow beyond it. But business needs to go on, and this has been the theme. You got to kind of stabilize your base, move forward. But a lot of people are looking at either retrenching and rethinking with coming out of this on the other side. You guys have a digital, virtual event happening where you still got to get the word out. You are the president of Informatica. You guys have a value proposition that is core to the future. It's data and it's been something that we've talked about for years on theCUBE around data's value. And now, this is now apparent to everybody in this COVID crisis. You're talking to customers all the time. What are they thinking? It's not just an industry inside baseball, kind of inside the ropes conversation. This is now mainstream. What are you hearing from your customers? >> Yeah, so it's certainly been interesting times. Digital transformation, has been a CEO on boardroom discussion now for several years and customers have known for a while that the key to having a real strong transformation is data. They've got to have high-quality data to make the right decisions. And what I've been hearing from clients, I've spent a lot of time over the last six to eight weeks while we are in the midst of this situation, talking to customers that are thriving, that are retailers quickly trying to stand up e-commerce sites because their customers are trying to reach them virtually, and they're just not equipped for that. And so data's key when it comes to e-commerce, of course. And yet, there's other customers that know that they do have to re-imagine, they have to re-plan, they have to re-organize coming out of this situation. And even though some of these clients have been hit pretty hard economically, they're all saying data is the most important thing to make sure that they make the right decisions and the right calls. So literally, CDO for a Fortune 100 manufacturer said data is more important today than it was 60 days ago 'cause we've got to make the right decisions. >> It's interesting, we were joking on theCUBE just last week around the term virtualization, which was kind of VMware invented, and that enabled Amazon to be a cloud, right? So without virtualization, all of that value wouldn't have been realized and that whole wave. But now when you think about virtual living, which we're all kind of doing, this interview here is an illustration of that, the virtualization of life and companies is now happening. So when we come out of this, it's going to be a hybrid world (laughs). People are going to not ignore what just happened, they're going to see the benefits. E-commerce, to your point, has grown in the past eight weeks faster than it has grown in the past 10 years. I just saw a stat come out. So now we believe that the world is going to be accelerated on this digital side quickly, not just the talking point. But as we go physical and hybrid, this is going to be a double-down situation. So what are the challenges in that? Because obviously, it's a complex world digital, it's not easy, you don't just video stream. And it's community, it's data (laughs). What are the challenges? What are the core challenges that customers have to solve to execute through this new reality? >> Yeah, so many customers are, as I said, rethinking and re-planning. There's a large oil and energy company where the CIO said, "I want to be data center free over the last few years." And we're talking about, "Why is that?" And this move to cloud is simply accelerating given the current situation that people are in, and why is that? Well, we're certain they're trying to improve analytics. They're trying to innovate, and they're doing an outstanding job. And yet at the same time, every time they can sunset one of those legacy applications that's sitting on premise, they can save millions and millions if not tens or hundreds of millions of dollars as they start to exit the data center. So we see a huge move to cloud. It's complex because they have to make sure, again, a large insurance company said, "We're sunsetting our cloud data warehouse, our data lake, "and by the way, we're using that to close our books "every quarter, so we can't get this wrong." And so from our standpoint, we built most of the on-premise data warehouse and data lakes. We're pretty good at this stuff. And we're very focused on helping our clients here. >> It's interesting, you're going to see a lot of core thinking around what's important going forward and doubling down around it. I just did an interview for a developer audience and I asked, "What's the reality "that you think comes out of this?" And the answer was microservices and cloud native and automation is here to stay. It's definitely been validated. There's really no debate there. You guys have had this intelligent and automation fabric product in the environment out there, is one of the value propositions of Informatica. How does that fit into all this? And can you give some examples of customers and/or prospects that take advantage of this and how it relates to being positioned to help going forward? >> Great question. So we believe that automation and AI is critical for clients to have a data-driven strategy because data is everywhere, it's fragmented. But you can't solve this by sheer muscle. You got to have AI and machine learning underlying everything that you're doing around your data strategy. So our strategy has been simple for a long time. If you buy one-for-one family category Informatica, we believe that you should choose the best-of-breed. And Gartner thinks that we're best-of-breed in all categories that we play in. But if you have a second or third product, you should get the benefits of AI and machine learning. Examples would include the American Medical Association. They're clearly such an important client to serve these days. They're using our data quality, our data integration, and our master data management tools to ensure that they have privacy but also accurate data at the same time. >> It's interesting the at scale problem that we're seeing and the current environment we were just talking about earlier is exposes the value of data because we're lurking at home. This is an edge on the network (laughs). There's still data being processed, you need security. So the complexity now doesn't change the need for governance and compliance. All these things are still available. So it seems that the game is still the same, but yet now more complexity's been surfaced from this. What's your thoughts on this? You've been talking to customers pre-COVID, pre-pandemic. And now you're going to be doing during and post. There's more complexity but the game doesn't change. You still got to do all these things. >> The importance of making sure you have a holistic data strategy is more important now than ever before. Again, when I talk to clients, some as we've mentioned with e-commerce, they're saying, "I've got to have a 360 degree view "of my customers, my partners, my suppliers." CFOs want a 360 degree view of their supply chain so they can do better vendor management than ever before. And yet, at the same time as we mentioned, they're trying to modernize their data as they move to cloud and improve analytics. And of course, you can't accomplish either one of those objectives if you don't have a strong governance strategy. So this concept of an intelligent data platform is really resonating with clients. I had a large GSI in our briefing center back when we were doing that a few months ago, and they said, "You know, gosh, "we would need 20 companies to do what you do." And that you've got to have a platform play, and it's all got to be backed through AI and machine learning to make sure you're making the best decisions. >> You know, platform business is not for the faint of heart. And I've looked at, and we've built platforms certainly on theCUBE on a small scale. But the difference between a tool and a platform are two different things. Platforms enable change and create value. You create more value than you deliver for the partner that's building on top of that, seems to be the tenet of platforms. Whether it's cybersecurity or data, this has just been a ton of tools, right (laughs)? So you got a tool for this, you got a tool for that. So this has been one of those things, again, we've talked with them and you guys were on theCUBE many years about in this big data world. As you move to a platform, what are some of the analytic challenges that the customers need to be thinking about to solve? Because you're starting to see the bifurcation of a nice-to-have versus core. The analytics 360, you mentioned business 360. Hey, who doesn't want a 360 degree view of their business? But is it a nice-to-have or is it critical? So these are the kind of conversations I would love to get your thoughts on, Tracey. Nice-to-haves versus critical, and what are the key problems to solve for analytics? >> Yeah, so when you think about analytics, really, frankly, any decision that clients are making right now, you got to make sure that this is truly the most important. That it's got a business case behind it, and it's the most important place to be spending your dollars these days. What I'm seeing with clients, just last week, a large airline, you can imagine, they invested heavily in data governance and data privacy because they know that it's important to have an analytical and clear view to who are their customers, and how do they make sure they protect the privacy of the customers while they build on their loyalty program? We just, last week, saw a large auto manufacturer, again, investing heavily in this area of data governance and privacy. One of my favorite stories came from a CDO who's in oil and energy. Again, another industry making tough choices right now. And they said, "I want my data "to be like pouring myself a glass of water." And I looked at him, I said, "What does that mean?" And she goes, "Well, if you go pour yourself a glass of water, you don't curate the water, "test the water, and prep the water." And of course, that's what all these expensive data scientists are doing. They're spending all their time trying to understand the data. And so CFOs are getting tired of two reports showing up on their desk to answer one question and the reports say something else. Which one do you believe? You've got to have a trusted and really strong analytical approach to making the decisions that clients are going to be forced to make coming out of this situation and the data's integrity has never been more important. >> I love the water example because it's really a lot of flow. You've got fast flowing data. You've got real relevance, maybe slow data but it's relevant. You've got clean data, you've got dirty data. I mean, thinking about the old database days, cleansing data, it's a term. Data wrangling, totally makes sense. This is the outcome that they want. They just want to have the applications sides dealing with the data as fast as possible, most relevant. So it is like water. But to make that happen, you got to have the processing (laughs) behind the curtain. This is the hard part. Can you just illustrate some thinking around how you guys help do that? Because, okay, you've got a platform. But if you're making the water clean and flowing on tap if you will, what goes on to make that happen? Take me through the pitch there, what do you guys do? >> Yeah, so we think every enterprise in the future is going to want to invest in a data marketplace. And so what we announced in December as part of our governance solution, which again, is tied into the entire intelligent data platform on all that we do, for us to helping customers to modernize their products with master data management. We're heavily invested in cloud native solutions with all the major hyper-scalers. And then combined with our governance solutions, we've announced a data marketplace where the very business friendly application that the data scientists can use. They don't have to be data engineers or data wranglers. And yet, it's also a place where people can go to have a clean and trusted view. It's all backed by machine learning and AI so that data scientists can see, you know, where did this data pull from? Based upon, you know, you asked this question, then you might also want to look over here to get a different answer to your question. Understand, what's been certified, who certified the solution? All those questions. We always say you can ask the internet anything. How come you can't ask your own company anything and trust the information? And that's what we've announced with our governance solutions, then the clean enterprise data marketplace. >> I love data value. Both have been close to my heart from day one. Maybe back when theCUBE started in 2010 when Hadoop hit the scene, we saw the value of data. I always felt it was going to be part of the applications. And now more than ever, these kinds of things like trust, real time, and being programmable. I mean, when I start thinking about automation, you're really talking about programmability, right? So you got to have the efficiencies. I think you guys have got a really interesting value proposition there. Great stuff. >> Yeah, well, your example on Hadoop and Big Data, we're seeing a repeat in history again. When everyone built the on-premise data warehouses and data lake, they used Informatica to automate and to build at scale. And then we did it again when people moved to Big Data and they started investing in Hadoop and Cloudera and Hortonworks, now Cloudera, of course. We helped to accelerate that automation, and that's exactly what we're doing again in cloud. So most CIOs are trying to again sunset legacy applications, and the faster you can speed data ingestion at scale, but also understand data quality and data integrity at the same time so that you don't move your on-premise data, data swamp into the cloud, that's expensive. We can really help to look at this holistically and solve these problems for customers faster. >> Well, Tracey, it's great to see you. I wish we could be there in person, but there's no personal event. You've got a virtual digital event happening. It's going to be ongoing which is digital. So it's 365 days a year more ongoing. Take a minute to talk to your customers that are out there since we have you on camera. Let's automate the value proposition. What's the update on Informatica? What's the pitch to your customers and prospects? What's new with Informatica? Why Informatica? Your core value proposition and why they should work with you. >> Yeah, so we've been serving our customers for 25 years. And the reason why we have such loyalty, This is John Furrier here inside theCUBE studios we serve 85 of the Fortune 100, over half the global 2000. for an update with Informatica's digital conference. The reason why customers come back and speak on our behalf Take a look at it, check it out online. and literally thousands of customers speak on our behalf, Join the community. Be part of those thousands of customers that they have, it's humbling, is because we have the best and check it out, give them feedback. Again, we're remote, we're virtual. It's a virtual CUBE. intelligent data platform in the market. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. And we also understand our customers aren't buying software. (soft music) They're buying a business outcome. And we have more people in customer success to enable customers to be successful in all of these journeys we've talked about today. And so I'd like to encourage everyone to attend CLAIREview, which is our new conference series, kicks off on May 20th. CLAIRE is our AI engine, is a Netflix-like experience where you can learn more about all the areas where we can help you in the items we've discussed today. So for clients that are looking to save money by sunsetting legacy apps, we can help accelerate your move to the cloud, improve analytics while you also build a data governance strategy and culture into your environment. So really excited about it, John. I mean, it will be an ongoing series so that based on what you learn and what you like, we'll recommend future sessions for you to help you be successful coming out of this current situation. >> Tracey, thanks for that great insight.

>> Presenter: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with Dot leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Everyone welcome to theCUBE studio here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with our quarantine crew. We've been here for three months quarantining but we're getting the stories out. We're talking to all of our favorite guests and most important stories in technologies here remotely and we have a great conversation in store for you today with Amit Walia CEO of Informatica. Cube alumni, frequent guest of theCUBE, now, the CEO of Informatica. Amit, great to see you. Thank you for coming on this CUBE conversation. >> Good to see you John. It's different to be doing this like this versus being in the studio with you but I'm glad that we could leverage technology to still talk to each other. >> You're usually right here, right next to me, but I'm glad to get you remotely at least and I really appreciate you. You always have some great commentary and insights. And Amit, before we get into the real meaty stuff that I'd love around the data, I want to get your thoughts on this COVID-19 crisis. It's a new reality, it's highlighted as we've been reporting on SiliconANGLE for the past few months. The at scale problems that people are facing but it's also an opportunity. People are sheltered in place, there's a lot of anxiety on what their work environment is going to look like but the world still runs. Your thoughts on the current crisis and how you're looking at it, how you're navigating it as a leader. >> No doubt, it is a very unique situation we all live in. We've never all faced something like this. So I think first of all, I'll begin by expressing my prayers for anyone out there who has been impacted by it and of course, a huge round of thank you to all the heroes out there at the front lines. The healthcare workers, the doctors, the nurses (mumbles) so we can't forget that. These are very unique situations but as you said, let's not forget that this is a health crisis first and then it becomes an economic crisis. And then, as you said there is a tremendous amount of disruption and (mumbles) I think all of them will go through some phases and I think you can see already while there is disruption in front of us, you see the digital contents of organizations who are ready for that have definitely faced it lot better but as obviously the ones that have been somewhat in the previous generations, let's just say business models or technologies models are struggling through it. So there is a lot data chain. I think they're still learning. We're absolutely still learning and we will continue to learn til the end of this year and we'll come out very different for the next decade for sure. >> If anyone who's watching goes to YouTube on the SiliconANGLE CUBE and look at your videos over the years, we've been talking about big data and these transformational things. It's been an inside the industry kind of discussion. Board room for your clients and your business and Informatica but I think this is now showing the world this digital transformation. The future has been pulled forward faster than people have been expecting it and innovation strategy has been on paper, maybe some execution but now I think it's apparent to everyone that the innovation strategy needs to start now because of this business model impact, the economic crisis is exposed. The scale of opportunities and challenges, there will be winners and losers and projects still need to get done or reset or reinvented to come out of this with growth. So this is going to be the number one conversation. What are your thoughts around this? >> No, so I've talked to hundreds of customers across the globe and we see the same thing. In fact actually, in some ways as we went through this, something very profound dawned on me. We, John, talked about digital transformation for the last few years and clearly digital transformation will accelerate but as I was talking to customers, I came to this realization that we actually haven't digitally transformed. To be honest, what happened in the last three to four years is that it was more digital modernization. A few apps got tweaked, a few front-ends got tweaked but if you realize, it was more digital modernization, not transformation because in my opinion, there are four aspects to digital transformation. You think of new products and services, you think of new models of engaging with your customers, you think of absolutely new operating models and you think of fundamentally new business models. That's a whole rewrite of an organization, which is not just creating a new application out there, fundamental end to end transformation. My belief is, our belief is that, now starts a whole new era of transformation, digital transformation. We've just gone through digital modernization. >> Well, that's a great point and the business model impacts create... And in times of these inflection points, and again, you're a student of history in the tech industry, PC revolution, TCP IP. These are big points in time. They're not transitions. The big players tend to win the transitions. When you have a transformation, it's a Cambrian explosion of new kinds of capabilities. This is really, I would agree with your point but I think it's going to be a Cambrian explosion because the business model forcing function is there. How do you see it play, 'cause you're in the middle of all this, 'cause you guys are the control plane for data in the industry as a company. You enable these new apps. Could you share your-- >> So, we see a lot of that and I think the way to think about it, I think first of all, you said it right. This is a step function changing orbit. This is a whole new... You get to a new curve, you go to a different model. It's a whole new equation you're hiking for the curve you're going to be on. It's not just changing the gradient of the curve you've been on, this is going to be a whole journey. And when we think of the new world of digital transformation, there are four elements that are taught. First of all, it has to be strategic. It has to be Board, CEO, executive topped down, fundamentally across the whole organization, across every function of an organization. Second one you talked about scale. I believe this is all about innovating at scale. It's not about, hey, let me go put a new application in some far plans of my business. You've got to innovate at scale, end to end change does not happen in bits and pieces. Third one, this is cloud native, absolutely cloud native. If there was any minuscule of doubt, this is taking it away. Cloud nativity is the fundamental differentiator and the last but not the least is digital natives, which is where everybody wants to go become a digitally transformed company that are data-led. You got to make data-led decisions. So for competence, strategic mindset, innovation at scale cloud nativity and being data-led is going to define digital transformation. >> I think that encapsulates absolutely innovation strategy. I agree with you 100%, that's really insightful. I want to also get your thoughts on some things that you're talking about and you have always had some really kind of high level conversations around this and theCUBE has been a very social organization. We'd love to be that social construct between companies and audiences but you use a term, the digital transformation, the soul of digital transformation is data 4.0. This idea of having a soul is interesting because the apps all have personalization built in. You have CLAIRE, you've been doing CLAIRE AI for a while. So this idea of social organizations, a soul is kind of an interesting piece of metadata you're putting out in the messaging. What do you mean by that? How can digital transmission have a soul? >> I think we talked about it a lot and I think it just came to me that, look at the end of the day, any transformation is so fundamental to anything that anybody does and I think if you think about, you can go to a fundamental transformation that is just qualitative, it's qualitative and quantitative. It's about a human body, it's about a human body transforming itself and then something doesn't have a soul, John, it does not have life. It cannot truly move to the next paradigm. So I believe that, any transformation has to have a soul and the digital world is all about data. So obviously, we believe that we're walking into a data-for-data world where, as I said, the four pillars of digital transformation would be data-led and I believe data is the soul of that transformation and data itself is moving into a new paradigm. You've heard us talk about 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and this is the new world of 4.0, a data 4.0 which basically is all about cloud nativity, intelligent automation, AI powered, focusing on data, trust in data ethics and operations and innovation at scale. When you bring these elements together, then that enables digital transformation to happen on the shoulders of data 4.0, which in my opinion, is the soul of digital transformation. >> All right, so just rewind on data 4.0 for a minute. Pretend I'm a CIO, I'm super busy. I don't have time to read up about it. Give me the bottom line, what is data 4.0? Describe it to me in basic terms, is it just an advancement, acceleration? What's the quick elevator pitch on 4.0, data 4.0? >> Very simple?. We're all walking into a world where we're going to be digital. Digital means that we're basically going to be creating tons of data. By the way, and data is everywhere. It's not just within the four walls of us. It's basically what I call transaction and interaction and with the scale and volume of data increasing, the complexity of it increasing. We want to make decisions. I say, tomorrow's decision, today and with data that is available to us yesterday, so I can be better at that decision. So we need intelligence, we need automation, we need flexibility, which is where AI comes in. These are all very fundamental rewrites of the technology stack to enable a fundamental business transformation. So in that world, data is front and center and you look at the amount of data we are going to collect, the whole concept of data ethics and data trust become very important, not just Goodwill governance, governance is important but data privacy, data trust becomes very important. Then we're going to do things like contact tracing, it's very important for the society but the ethics, trust and privacy of what you and I will give to the government is going to become very much important. So to me, that world that we go in, every enterprise has to think data first, data led, build an infrastructure to support the business in that context and then, as I said, then the soul, which is data will give life to digital transformation. >> That's awesome. Love the personalization and the soul angle on it. I always believe that you guys had that intelligent automation fabric and to me, you said earlier, cloud native is apparent to everyone now. I think out of all this crisis, I think the one thing that's not going to be debated anymore is that cloud native is the operating model. I think that's pretty much a done deal at this point. So having this horizontally scalable data, you know I've been on this rant for years. I think that's the killer app. I think having horizontally scalable data is going to enable a lot, souls and more life. So I got to ask you the real, the billion dollar question. I'm a customer of yours or prospect or a large enterprise. I'm seeing what's happening at scale, provisioning of VPNs for 100% employees at home, except for the most needed workers. I now see all the things I need to either process, I need to cancel and projects that double down on. I still got to go out and build my competitive advantage. I still have to run my business. So I need to really start deploying right out of the gate data centric, data first, virtual first, whatever you want to call it, the new reality first, this inflection point. What do I do? What is the things that you see as projects or playbook recipes that people could implement? >> First of all, we see a very fundamental reevaluation of the entire business model. In fact, we have this term that we're using now that we have to think of business has a business 360 and if I think about it in this new world, that the businesses that stood the test is that had basically what I call, a digital supply chain or in a very digital scalable way of interacting with their customers, being able to engage with their customers. A digital fabric often making sure that they can bring their product and services to the customers very quickly or in some cases, if they were creating new products and services, they had the ability for a whole new supply chain to reach that end customer. And of course, a business model that is flexible so they dont obviously, they can cater to the needs of their customers. So in all of these worlds, customers are a building digital, scalable data platforms and when I say platforms, it's not about some monolithic platform. These are, as you and I have talked about, very modular microservices based platform that reside on what we call metadata. Data has to be the soul of the digital enterprise. Metadata is the nervous system, that makes it all work. That's the left brain, right brain, that makes it all work, which is where we put AI on top. AI that works for the customers and then they leverage it but AI applied to that metadata allows them to be very flexible, nimble and make these decisions very rapidly, whether they are doing analytics for tomorrow's offering to be brought in front of a customer or understanding the customer better to give them something that appeals to them in changing times or to protect the customer's data or to provide governance on top of it. Anything that you would like to do has to ride on top of what I call a, AI led metadata driven platform that can scale horizontally. >> Okay, so I got to go to the next level on this, which is, okay, you got me on that. I hear what you're saying, I agree, great. But I got to put my developers to work and I got insight, I got analytics teams, I got competencies but Amit, my complexities don't go away. I still got compliance at scale, I got governance at scale but I also got, now my developers not just to get analytical insight, there's great dashboards and there's great analytic data out there, you guys do a good job there. I got to get my developers coding so I can get that agility of the data into the apps for visualization in the app or having a key ingredient of the software. How do I do that? What's your answer to that one? >> So, that's a critic use case. If you think about it, for a developer, one of the biggest challenge for analytics project is how do I bring all the data that is in sites across the enterprise so then I can put it in any kind of visualization analytics tool and things are happening at scale. An enterprise is spread across the globe. It's so many different data sources available everywhere. Again, what we've done is that as a part of the data platform when you focus upon the metadata, that allows you to go to one place where you can have full access to all of the data assets that are available across (mumbles). Do you remember at theCUBE years ago, we unveiled the launch of our enterprise data catalog, which as I said, was the Google for enterprise data through metadata. Now, developers don't have to go start wasting their time, trying to find whether data has (mumbles), through the catalog that CLAIRE is in-built, they have access to it. They can start putting that to work and figuring out how do I take different kinds of data? How do I put it in some data times tool? Through which we have the in-built integrations. Do what I call the valuable last mile work, which is where the intelligence is needed from them versus spend their energy trying to figure out where good data, clean data, all kinds of data sets. We have eliminated all of that complexity with the help of metadata data platform, CLAIRE, to let the developers do what I call value-added productive work. >> Amit, final question for you. I know you talk to customers a lot, you're always on the road, you got a great product background, that's where you came from, good mix understanding of the business but now your customers and prospects are trynna put the fires out. The big room that... No one's going to talk about their kitchen appliances when the house is burning down and in some cases on the business model side or if it's a growth strategy, they're going to put all their energies where the action is. So getting mind share with them is going to be very difficult. How are you as a leader and how is Informatica getting in front of these folks and saying, "Look, I know things are tough "but we're an important supplier for you." How do you differentiate? How are you going to get that mind share? What are some of those conversations? 'Cause this is really the psychology of the marketplace right now, the buyer and the customer. >> Well, first of all, obviously we had to adapt to reach our customers in a different way because, virtually based just like you and I are chatting right now and to be candid, our teams were fantastic in being able to do it. We've actually already had multiple pretty big sides of it. In fact, the first week before we started (mumbles), we had set up the MDM and Data Governance Summit up in New York and we expected thousands of customers to come there, ask them (mumbles) virtual and we did it virtually and we had three times more people attend the virtual event. It was much easier for people who attended from the confines of their living room. So we'd gone 100% virtual and good news is, that our customers are heavily engaged. We've actually had more participation of customers coming and attending our events. We've had obviously our customers speaking, talking about how they've created value. In light of that next week, we have the big event which we're calling, CLAIREview named after ClAIRE AI engine. It's basically a beautiful net-filled tech experience. We'll have a keynote, we'll have seasons and episodes, people can do bite-sized viewing at their own leisure. We'll talk about all kinds of transformation. In fact, we have Scott Guthrie who runs all of Azure and Cloud at Microsoft as a part of my Keynote. We have two great customers, CDO at XXL and a CEO of GDR nonprofit that does (mumbles) on diabetes work talk about the data journeys. We have Martin Byer from Gardner. So we've been able to pivot and our customers are heavily engaged because data is a P-zero or a P-one activity for them to invest in. So we haven't seen any drop-off in customer engagement with us and we've been very blessed that we have a very loyal and a very high retention rate customer base. >> Well, I would expect that being the center of the value proposition, where we've always said data has been. One more final question since this just popped in my head. You and I have been talking about the edge for years. Certainly now the edge is exposed, we all know what the edge is, it's working at home. It's the human, it's me, it's my IOT devices. More than ever, the edge is now the new perimeter. It's the edge and now the edges is there. There's something that you've been talking a while. This is another part of data fabric that's important. Your view on this new edge that's now visualized by everybody, realized this immersion. What's your thoughts on the edge? >> Oh, I think the edge is real now. You and me chatted about that almost four years ago and I (mumbles). Look, think of it this way. Think of how security is going to change. There's no more data center to which we route our traffic anymore. It's sitting over there somewhere where no human beings is going to have access. People are connecting to all kinds of cloud application directly from their offices or living rooms or their cultures and the world of security has to change in that context. And people are more going to be more, enterprise (mumbles) are more worried about, hey, how do I make sure that that data centric, privacy and security is there in my device and that connects to the third party cloud vendors versus I can't transfer traffic to mine, everything to my VPN. So the edge is going to become a lot more compute intensive as well as it will require a lot of the elements that are, to be honest, used to be data center centric. We have to lighten them and bring them to the edge so enterprises can feel assured and working because at the end of the day, they have to run a business by the standards that an enterprise is held to. So you will see a ton of innovation, by the way, robotics. Robotics is going to make edge even more interesting in live view. So I see the next couple of years, heavy IOP edge computing, just like the clients that are modeled to mainframe that the PC became like a mainframe in terms of compute capacity. I guarantee at the desktop, compute capacity will go down to the edge and we're going to see that happen in the next five years or so. >> The edge is the new data centers. I always say, it's the land is the way, the way is the land. Amit, great to see you and thanks for sharing and I'm sorry, we can't do it in person but this has been like a fireside chat meets CUBE interview, remote. Thanks for spending the time and sharing your insights and we've always had great interviews at your events, virtual again, this year. We're going to spread it out over time, good call. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thanks, John, take care. >> Okay, Amit, CEO of Informatica, always great to get the conversation updates from him on the industry and what Informatica, as at the center of the value proposition data 4.0. This is really the new transformation, not transition, data science, data, data engineering, all happening. theCUBE with our remote interviews, bringing you all the coverage here from our Palo Alto studios, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to the special CUBE Conversation here in the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE. We have our quarantine crew and we are here getting all the stories and all the top news, information from experts and thought leaders in the industry. And we're here for a special interview as part of Informatica's digital, virtual event happening. We have Tracey Newell who's the president of Informatica, a CUBE alumni. Great to have you on remotely. Normally you're here in person, but we're in person. Thanks for coming on. >> (laughs) It's great to be here, John. We're virtually together. Happy to spend time together. >> Yeah, and we were in a really tough crisis situation with COVID-19, had a lot of discussions around strategies of how to manage it, get through it, and grow beyond it. But business needs to go on, and this has been the theme. You got to kind of stabilize your base, move forward. But a lot of people are looking at either retrenching and rethinking with coming out of this on the other side. You guys have a digital, virtual event happening where you still got to get the word out. You are the president of Informatica. You guys have a value proposition that is core to the future. It's data and it's been something that we've talked about for years on theCUBE around data's value. And now, this is now apparent to everybody in this COVID crisis. You're talking to customers all the time. What are they thinking? It's not just an industry inside baseball, kind of inside the ropes conversation. This is now mainstream. What are you hearing from your customers? >> Yeah, so it's certainly been interesting times. Digital transformation, has been a CEO on boardroom discussion now for several years and customers have known for a while that the key to having a real strong transformation is data. They've got to have high-quality data to make the right decisions. And what I've been hearing from clients, I've spent a lot of time over the last six to eight weeks while we are in the midst of this situation, talking to customers that are thriving, that are retailers quickly trying to stand up e-commerce sites because their customers are trying to reach them virtually, and they're just not equipped for that. And so data's key when it comes to e-commerce, of course. And yet, there's other customers that know that they do have to re-imagine, they have to re-plan, they have to re-organize coming out of this situation. And even though some of these clients have been hit pretty hard economically, they're all saying data is the most important thing to make sure that they make the right decisions and the right calls. So literally, CDO for a Fortune 100 manufacturer said data is more important today than it was 60 days ago 'cause we've got to make the right decisions. >> It's interesting, we were joking on theCUBE just last week around the term virtualization, which was kind of VMware invented, and that enabled Amazon to be a cloud, right? So without virtualization, all of that value wouldn't have been realized and that whole wave. But now when you think about virtual living, which we're all kind of doing, this interview here is an illustration of that, the virtualization of life and companies is now happening. So when we come out of this, it's going to be a hybrid world (laughs). People are going to not ignore what just happened, they're going to see the benefits. E-commerce, to your point, has grown in the past eight weeks faster than it has grown in the past 10 years. I just saw a stat come out. So now we believe that the world is going to be accelerated on this digital side quickly, not just the talking point. But as we go physical and hybrid, this is going to be a double-down situation. So what are the challenges in that? Because obviously, it's a complex world digital, it's not easy, you don't just video stream. And it's community, it's data (laughs). What are the challenges? What are the core challenges that customers have to solve to execute through this new reality? >> Yeah, so many customers are, as I said, rethinking and re-planning. There's a large oil and energy company where the CIO said, "I want to be data center free over the last few years." And we're talking about, "Why is that?" And this move to cloud is simply accelerating given the current situation that people are in, and why is that? Well, we're certain they're trying to improve analytics. They're trying to innovate, and they're doing an outstanding job. And yet at the same time, every time they can sunset one of those legacy applications that's sitting on premise, they can save millions and millions if not tens or hundreds of millions of dollars as they start to exit the data center. So we see a huge move to cloud. It's complex because they have to make sure, again, a large insurance company said, "We're sunsetting our cloud data warehouse, our data lake, "and by the way, we're using that to close our books "every quarter, so we can't get this wrong." And so from our standpoint, we built most of the on-premise data warehouse and data lakes. We're pretty good at this stuff. And we're very focused on helping our clients here. >> It's interesting, you're going to see a lot of core thinking around what's important going forward and doubling down around it. I just did an interview for a developer audience and I asked, "What's the reality "that you think comes out of this?" And the answer was microservices and cloud native and automation is here to stay. It's definitely been validated. There's really no debate there. You guys have had this intelligent and automation fabric product in the environment out there, is one of the value propositions of Informatica. How does that fit into all this? And can you give some examples of customers and/or prospects that take advantage of this and how it relates to being positioned to help going forward? >> Great question. So we believe that automation and AI is critical for clients to have a data-driven strategy because data is everywhere, it's fragmented. But you can't solve this by sheer muscle. You got to have AI and machine learning underlying everything that you're doing around your data strategy. So our strategy has been simple for a long time. If you buy one-for-one family category Informatica, we believe that you should choose the best-of-breed. And Gartner thinks that we're best-of-breed in all categories that we play in. But if you have a second or third product, you should get the benefits of AI and machine learning. Examples would include the American Medical Association. They're clearly such an important client to serve these days. They're using our data quality, our data integration, and our master data management tools to ensure that they have privacy but also accurate data at the same time. >> It's interesting the at scale problem that we're seeing and the current environment we were just talking about earlier is exposes the value of data because we're lurking at home. This is an edge on the network (laughs). There's still data being processed, you need security. So the complexity now doesn't change the need for governance and compliance. All these things are still available. So it seems that the game is still the same, but yet now more complexity's been surfaced from this. What's your thoughts on this? You've been talking to customers pre-COVID, pre-pandemic. And now you're going to be doing during and post. There's more complexity but the game doesn't change. You still got to do all these things. >> The importance of making sure you have a holistic data strategy is more important now than ever before. Again, when I talk to clients, some as we've mentioned with e-commerce, they're saying, "I've got to have a 360 degree view "of my customers, my partners, my suppliers." CFOs want a 360 degree view of their supply chain so they can do better vendor management than ever before. And yet, at the same time as we mentioned, they're trying to modernize their data as they move to cloud and improve analytics. And of course, you can't accomplish either one of those objectives if you don't have a strong governance strategy. So this concept of an intelligent data platform is really resonating with clients. I had a large GSI in our briefing center back when we were doing that a few months ago, and they said, "You know, gosh, "we would need 20 companies to do what you do." And that you've got to have a platform play, and it's all got to be backed through AI and machine learning to make sure you're making the best decisions. >> You know, platform business is not for the faint of heart. And I've looked at, and we've built platforms certainly on theCUBE on a small scale. But the difference between a tool and a platform are two different things. Platforms enable change and create value. You create more value than you deliver for the partner that's building on top of that, seems to be the tenet of platforms. Whether it's cybersecurity or data, this has just been a ton of tools, right (laughs)? So you got a tool for this, you got a tool for that. So this has been one of those things, again, we've talked with them and you guys were on theCUBE many years about in this big data world. As you move to a platform, what are some of the analytic challenges that the customers need to be thinking about to solve? Because you're starting to see the bifurcation of a nice-to-have versus core. The analytics 360, you mentioned business 360. Hey, who doesn't want a 360 degree view of their business? But is it a nice-to-have or is it critical? So these are the kind of conversations I would love to get your thoughts on, Tracey. Nice-to-haves versus critical, and what are the key problems to solve for analytics? >> Yeah, so when you think about analytics, really, frankly, any decision that clients are making right now, you got to make sure that this is truly the most important. That it's got a business case behind it, and it's the most important place to be spending your dollars these days. What I'm seeing with clients, just last week, a large airline, you can imagine, they invested heavily in data governance and data privacy because they know that it's important to have an analytical and clear view to who are their customers, and how do they make sure they protect the privacy of the customers while they build on their loyalty program? We just, last week, saw a large auto manufacturer, again, investing heavily in this area of data governance and privacy. One of my favorite stories came from a CDO who's in oil and energy. Again, another industry making tough choices right now. And they said, "I want my data "to be like pouring myself a glass of water." And I looked at him, I said, "What does that mean?" And she goes, "Well, if you go pour yourself a glass of water, you don't curate the water, "test the water, and prep the water." And of course, that's what all these expensive data scientists are doing. They're spending all their time trying to understand the data. And so CFOs are getting tired of two reports showing up on their desk to answer one question and the reports say something else. Which one do you believe? You've got to have a trusted and really strong analytical approach to making the decisions that clients are going to be forced to make coming out of this situation and the data's integrity has never been more important. >> I love the water example because it's really a lot of flow. You've got fast flowing data. You've got real relevance, maybe slow data but it's relevant. You've got clean data, you've got dirty data. I mean, thinking about the old database days, cleansing data, it's a term. Data wrangling, totally makes sense. This is the outcome that they want. They just want to have the applications sides dealing with the data as fast as possible, most relevant. So it is like water. But to make that happen, you got to have the processing (laughs) behind the curtain. This is the hard part. Can you just illustrate some thinking around how you guys help do that? Because, okay, you've got a platform. But if you're making the water clean and flowing on tap if you will, what goes on to make that happen? Take me through the pitch there, what do you guys do? >> Yeah, so we think every enterprise in the future is going to want to invest in a data marketplace. And so what we announced in December as part of our governance solution, which again, is tied into the entire intelligent data platform on all that we do, for us to helping customers to modernize their products with master data management. We're heavily invested in cloud native solutions with all the major hyper-scalers. And then combined with our governance solutions, we've announced a data marketplace where the very business friendly application that the data scientists can use. They don't have to be data engineers or data wranglers. And yet, it's also a place where people can go to have a clean and trusted view. It's all backed by machine learning and AI so that data scientists can see, you know, where did this data pull from? Based upon, you know, you asked this question, then you might also want to look over here to get a different answer to your question. Understand, what's been certified, who certified the solution? All those questions. We always say you can ask the internet anything. How come you can't ask your own company anything and trust the information? And that's what we've announced with our governance solutions, then the clean enterprise data marketplace. >> I love data value. Both have been close to my heart from day one. Maybe back when theCUBE started in 2010 when Hadoop hit the scene, we saw the value of data. I always felt it was going to be part of the applications. And now more than ever, these kinds of things like trust, real time, and being programmable. I mean, when I start thinking about automation, you're really talking about programmability, right? So you got to have the efficiencies. I think you guys have got a really interesting value proposition there. Great stuff. >> Yeah, well, your example on Hadoop and Big Data, we're seeing a repeat in history again. When everyone built the on-premise data warehouses and data lake, they used Informatica to automate and to build at scale. And then we did it again when people moved to Big Data and they started investing in Hadoop and Cloudera and Hortonworks, now Cloudera, of course. We helped to accelerate that automation, and that's exactly what we're doing again in cloud. So most CIOs are trying to gain some legacy applications, and the faster you can speed data ingestion at scale, but also understand data quality and data integrity at the same time so that you don't move your on-premise data, data swamp into the cloud, that's expensive. We can really help to look at this holistically and solve these problems for customers faster. >> Well, Tracey, it's great to see you. I wish we could be there in person, but there's no personal event. You've got a virtual digital event happening. It's going to be ongoing which is digital. So it's 365 days a year more ongoing. Take a minute to talk to your customers that are out there since we have you on camera. Let's automate the value proposition. What's the update on Informatica? What's the pitch to your customers and prospects? What's new with Informatica? Why Informatica? Your core value proposition and why they should work with you. >> Yeah, so we've been serving our customers for 25 years. And the reason why we have such loyalty, we serve 85 of the Fortune 100, over half the global 2000. The reason why customers come back and speak on our behalf and literally thousands of customers speak on our behalf, it's humbling, is because we have the best intelligent data platform in the market. And we also understand our customers aren't buying software. They're buying a business outcome. And we have more people in customer success to enable customers to be successful in all of these journeys we've talked about today. And so I'd like to encourage everyone to attend CLAIREview, which is our new conference series, kicks off on May 20th. CLAIRE is our AI engine, is a Netflix-like experience where you can learn more about all the areas where we can help you in the items we've discussed today. So for clients that are looking to save money by sunsetting legacy apps, we can help accelerate your move to the cloud, improve analytics while you also build a data governance strategy and culture into your environment. So really excited about it, John. I mean, it will be an ongoing series so that based on what you learn and what you like, we'll recommend future sessions for you to help you be successful coming out of this current situation. >> Tracey, thanks for that great insight. One final personal question I want to ask you. I've been following you guys for a long time, and we've had you on theCUBE many times. You've been a seasoned veteran in the industry. You've seen cycles of innovation. You've seen the ups and downs over the years. You've been on boards, you've been a leader, a senior leader. What do you talk about with your friends and peers when you look at this current inflection point? As there's the candid conversations are happening, it's really an opportunity, but also there are serious challenges. As a leader, how should leaders be thinking about getting through this? What's your personal view? You've seen many cycles. You've see many waves. This wave coming is going to be big. This change is certainly going to create an uptick, we believe, exponentially a step function transformation. What's your view? What are some of the conversations that you're having with your friends, peers around what to do? >> Yeah, so I think in any situation like the one that we're in, it's important first and foremost to take care of the employees, take care of the customers, take care of the short term needs. That's critical. And yet at the same time in parallel, to be thinking longer term because there is an opportunity when you go through a situation like this to regroup and to think about, what will be the key markets that come back the fastest? What will be your differentiation, your company's differentiation so that you come out of this when the market does start to rebound and really thriving. So it's always this constant balance of how you deal with the short-term and the realities that we're in because people are making some tough decisions. And yet at the same time, make sure that you're very clear on your long-term strategy so that you can come out of this swinging. >> Great advice. That's a masterclass right there. Thank you for sharing that. Of course, check out Informatica's CLAIREview event. Of course, the digital events are always online. Check them out. Tracey, thanks for your time and thanks for that insight and update, appreciate it. >> Yeah, great to be here, John. Look forward to seeing you in person soon. >> Okay, take care. This is John Furrier here inside theCUBE studios for an update with Informatica's digital conference. Take a look at it, check it out online. Join the community. Be part of those thousands of customers that they have, and check it out, give them feedback. Again, we're remote, we're virtual. It's a virtual CUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (soft music)