(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, everyone. We are in the middle of two days of coverage of Informatica World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, John Furrier. We are joined by Ansa Sekharan, he is the Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer at Informatica. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube, Ansa. >> My pleasure to be back on theCUBE. >> Great to see you. >> Thank you. >> So, let's talk about your role as the Chief Customer Officer. Last year you announced this change from a customer service model to a customer success model. How has that been? How have you implemented it and how's it going? >> Now, we have a great opportunity ahead of us. You see a number of enterprises embarking on a data transformation journey. As we offer the best products, it was quite apparent we had to take the services to the next level. We had to take the services and connect them to customers' business values. So we are blurring the lines between the various services functions: support, professional services, university, customer success, we want to abstract them, along with their products, we want to offer the best value to the customers. It's very simple. We sign up a new customer. The first thing we want to do is to work with the customer and define the success plan. What does success mean to them? Success, in two words, business outcomes. It's not about go-lives. Are the business users adopting and realizing value? That's where Informatica is very different from other enterprises, and I think that's going to further fuel our growth in the future. >> Ansa, you've been in the industry a very long time, Informatica many many years, how many years? >> 23 and counting. >> So, I'd consider you a historian of Informatica. (speaks indistinctly) I never saw myself as a historian. You've seen the transformations. Talk about what's going on now because, and certainly going private affords a lot of good things, in the public eye anymore in terms of shot clock earnings, being on that treadmill. You guys really did a lot of digging in to innovate. Now four years later, you start to see the fruit coming off that tree in the form of good catalog decision with the catalog, cloud early, AI early, the horizontal scalability of the infrastructure now and one operating model. Interesting kind of tailwinds for you guys. What's going on? How do you talk to customers who have kind of living in a cave, I won't want to say living in a cave, but they've been not as on the front end as you guys have been. >> I think when you use the word innovation it's just not about products. As a company we have been innovating. Along with the products, we have been innovating on all fronts, being at the services. We have, used to have, a major release every four years on services. We have shortened the cycle to two years. As a company we are now offering all our products on the cloud. What does it mean? What does it mean in customer support? We are having to redefine the entire delivery model end to end. You heard in the conference eight trillion transactions we process in a month. That was grown 3X just in a year. We have so much data. It's all about what is the information we can glean from these transactions. We have over a billion interactions with the customers every year. How can we put these transactions and interactions, package it in the form of we have the best telemetry products? We are leveraging this data to better sell the customers so that we can drive them, accelerate the business outcomes. When I started off we were a one product portfolio company. We had power center. Now we are the leader in six categories, and our user base is now, not only IT business, it's a great opportunity for us. >> The other thing that's a perfect storm, at least for innovation that's also happening, is the absolute validation that SAS business models have agility benefits, meaning you can take risk using data, understanding data, to get big rewards if scaled properly with cloud, so the role of data in pure SAS has been proven. Enterprises are recognizing that. Not that easy but still that's the path that people are now seeing clear visibility to. You guys are going after that. What's your take on that? >> I think when it comes to SAS, I think customers realize they should be focusing more on their business processes, and push the technology aside to the vendor. Try to partner with the vendor on how they can leverage on the technology side. That's where Informatica has put in a number of programs around that. Imagine a scenario, I'll give you a quick scenario. There's always this risk of putting this data on the cloud. What if you were to say, and there's upgrades every quarter, we push a lot of features and there's always the worry is something going to break. We are going to come out of the program, it's going to guarantee that we're going to foolproof the upgrades. Your stuff will work better, faster with every upgrade. That's the kind of, what customers expect. >> Guarantee that it won't break, basically? >> That's the kind of programs we're going to offer to our customers. We're going to have them for a day at scale, MDM is coming on the cloud you saw the demos we showed yesterday. I think we are redefining our model and going to push the envelope further on. >> Are customers asking for that assurance or is it more of you guys going to make that a table stakes because it's an opportunity for you? >> Both. >> Okay. >> Within the company our philosophy is very simple. I'll say an equation, CS equal to IS, customer success is equal to Informatica success. In my humble opinion, we both need each other. >> Just like data and AI. A symbiotic relationship. So I want to get back to what you were saying in terms of how you are defining this kind of customer success. We're working together with customers to define the business outcome and then working to see, okay, how do we get there? You have a lot of great customers, many in the Fortune 500, 100. Tell us a little bit about what you've seen over the past year in terms of, maybe without naming names or name names if you want to, but in terms of how these companies have seen a difference since you've changed this model. >> We sell a platform. I think we're the only vendor which offers a platform for data management. There are a number of vendors with poor installations. Informatica is the only vendor which offers late inclusion data platforms. Customers buy into the vision because data is, everyone is looking to leverage the power of data. As they buy this platform, they work with us to see how should they approach. This blueprint needs to evolve. We need to define the building blocks. Should they start with the catalog, should they validate what they're assets are? Where are we trying to push the service's frontiers that's not around technology? How can we help on the business processes side, as well? It's a big journey we are going to undertake and I think that's going to pay off big. I can quote a number of examples. I was sitting in a meeting this morning with a large bank and meeting up with the Chief Data Officer, and she kind of laid out her data strategy and we discussed how Informatica is going to be player owned. They are depending on us, and now we are going to keep our commitment, we are going to deliver on that promise we have made to them. >> How many customers do you guys see really thinking about data location storage where on premise versus cloud or are they more thinking differently around knowing that they're probably going to store it everywhere or somewhere? Can you share any insight into what the trends are there with your customers? >> Informatica's uniquely position is, there's future workloads which go to the cloud. It's hard to change systems that working, there's always going to be data in the premises. That shift, if something is working, customers don't quickly shut it down. So we see future workloads going to the cloud, traditional workloads, even we have a number of large clients still on mainframes. We offer the best products on mainframes as well as, it does not get much press, but-- >> This is the end to ending benefits that you guys are-- >> Correct. We go all the way, we cover the entire gambit of the data spectrum. >> What's the key enabler to make that happen? Is it the catalog, what's the big-- >> Catalog was the big, I think, last year that was the turning point with the catalog coming in, and now through professional services we offer a lot of workshops at no cost to our customer on how they should put their strategy, as well. >> One of the things that I'm hearing from you is the importance of really understanding the business in addition to the technology. I'm interested to hear how you hire. Obviously we hear so much about the importance of technical talent, and the problem of the skills gap in Silicon Valley and beyond, but you obviously are looking for candidates who also really get the business. So, what are the kinds of things that you're looking for and what kind of problems do you see in terms of the candidates that you're getting for your open roles? >> Customer support could be a hard job. We really want to, we look for people who want to make a difference. And if you have that attitude you get plenty of opportunities to make a difference. Now, with so much talk about AI, service automation, Chadbot, robotics, you know at the end of the day employees are still the core of the apple tree. I think the current trainers don't forget the people. The technology is not going to replace the people overnight, so I think we have a fabulous team at Informatica of customer support professionals. Our average retention rate is the mid 90s. So, we hire the best people, and they stay with us because this is a great platform. They move around products, but as long as we can give them that spectrum to grow, over time as they sell customers they build that tribal knowledge, and they can sell them better. And so we look for, I mean, there's a lot of data scientists coming in. We look, we always hire from colleges, groom them. I started off that way, and still with the company 23 years. I want to give that chance for the rest of team, as well. >> So how many other folks in the company have been there that long? That's a long time. You've been there a very, very long time. >> You'd be surprised at the number of people who have been long-timers at Informatica. It's a great company. >> How do you maintain the startup mentality? You were there when it was three years old, and now it's... >> I think personally what drives me is the fear of failure. Having set the bar high, you have to push, and if you want to keep at the pace you need to have the startup mentality. We have a number of projects in flight, and some, you have to have that mindset, and now we are a distributor team. We have to keep that spirit going throughout. And like I said, coming back to my equation, customer success equals Informatica success. That's what we believe as the company. >> You said CS is IS, customer success is. I mean, right? >> There you go. You made it sound even better. >> So just getting back to that, one of the biggest problems in the technology industry is the skills gap. Are you finding enough people to fill the roles you have? >> We do not have a problem hiring. The ramp up time, we have a good enablement program, which is good. Take the space of big data. The whole industry landscape changes every six months, so it's that mindset you need to have. Even I have that mindset today. I come in thinking I'm going to learn something new. Learning never stops. So you've just got to keep learning everyday. And I'm not setting expectations, we're going to groom them. I want people who learn on their own. They have to, they have to keep pace with the current technology. >> Any skills in school, kids in school that might, or parents watching with their kids, in high school or elementary school, what disciplines can they turn up, turn down, you think would make them successful in the future of how the data is going to impact society? There's a lot of new jobs coming out that don't have degrees for. Cal Berkeley just graduated their first inaugural class in data analytics. It's just a tell sign of how early it is, so still, you go back to sixth grade, you go back at the high school. Kids are looking to, they're gamers. They're into tech. They want to dial up some-- >> When I went to high school in 1984 I was the first batch of computer science, and we learned basic programming, things have really changed. My girls don't want to do computers, but it is something which we have to evolve constantly right, but-- >> Any classes right now that jump out at you that think, that's important? >> Data science is hard now, you know? >> A hard one. >> Yeah, it's hard. And with all the emphasis, we have a number of initiatives within support that will leverage AI, ML, as well. And I talked about it in the last year's program, but there could be some skills gap in some pockets, always you fill that that's going to be out of their pocket. You just got to be constantly pushing at it. >> Ansa, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> It's a pleasure being on here, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, great job. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, you are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World. Stay tuned. (upbeat music)