(futuristic music) >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversation in our Palo Alto studios, we're waiting for the crazy madness of the second half conference season to begin but before that it's nice to get a little bit of a break in the action and we can have people into our studio in Palo Alto. We're really excited to have our next guest really adding to this journey that we've been kind of watching over a course of many years with Informatica, she's Tracey Newell she's the newly announced President, global field operations from Informatica, Tracey great to meet you. >> Yeah nice to meet you. >> Absolutely. So we've following Informatica for a long time, I think our first visit to Informatica world was 2015 back when it was still a public company, I think it was Info which still has this legacy, that's the hashtag for this show. >> It certainly does. >> Which is kind of funny cause it's not really a stock ticker anymore. So it's been quite a journey and really well timed with kind of the big data revolution. You joined the board a couple years ago. >> I did in 2016. >> But you just decided to leave Mahogany Row and take off the board outfit and jump in and get on the field and get dirty. So why did you decide to get into the nitty gritty? >> Yeah so I joined the board because I really believed in the mission so. Digital transformation is something that's real, it's a boardroom discussion. Every enterprise and government around the world's trying to figure this out and so I wanted to be part of that and I've had a front row seat for a couple of years. >> Right right. >> I'm not one to sit on the sidelines for very long and I thought this is just too much fun and I want to get in the game so I asked to step down and I've recently joined as a president of Global Field ops. >> Great so your background is a little bit of confusion due to history, a lot of sales, you've been running sales for lot different companies, been in the valley for a while. But sales is really under you so you haven't really left your sales hat, that's just part of now a bigger role that you're going to be doing with Informatica. >> Yeah that's right, it's a bigger and broader role, but my favorite thing is running sales organizations. So I've done other things too, I've run operations, and customer success, but I was thrilled to join and also run professional services as well cause that's so important to the delivery and for our customers. >> So you'll write the digital transformation, it's the hop topic, it's what everybody is talking about, and it's true and as Informatica is in the middle of it, data is such a big piece of the digital transformation as everybody, we used to joke, there are no companies except software companies. I think we're taking it to the next step, now there are no software companies, really everybody should be a data company, and Informatica is sitting right in the middle of that world. No that's right, yeah data is the new currency, it's become of the most important assets for enterprises, everyone's trying to transform, they're trying to disrupt, they're trying to take on the leader or they're trying to keep their lead. And they need all their information throughout their organization in order to do that and so you know one of the stories hat I really like, Graham Thompson's our CIO and he talks to lots of CIOs and he'll use this analogy in that you know he'll say does your CFO have good containment strategy around their most important asset, and that's revenue. Does your CFO, does he or she know what the data is and inevitably the CIO will say of course. Well that's great does he know or she know how they're spending the money and who's spending the money? Do they have controls and compliance and security around that and of course the answer is yes yes yes and yes. And it inevitably turns to the CIO to say well if data is your most important asset, if that truly is the currency in your organization, do you know where all of your data is? And the answers always no. And there's lots of reasons for that, it's most enterprises have hundreds if not thousands of databases and shadow IT projects everywhere. But if the answers no then how do take advantage and leverage that information to the companies advantage? How do you control it, how do you have compliance and that's where we come in. >> So what's the Informatica special sauce? What's the secret sauce that you guys can bring to the party that nobody else can? >> Yeah so I think inevitably that it would be the platform so our intelligent data platform is really important to the enterprise. The CIOs that I've been meeting with for the last decade have said you know I can't have ten widgets that are all solving a similar problem cause it's just too expensive. I need the bet with the leader in the space and so what we're doing to provide that for enterprises is really important and yet at the same time, you've got to be the best at what you do, you can't just be comprehensive but you have to have best debris technology. We're spending 17 cents of every dollar in r&d and we're so focused on just this one thing, our mission is to lead in digital transformation for the large enterprise and we've been doing this for 25 years so we've spent billions of dollars at making sure our customers are invested in us and that we protect that investment. >> Right. So what is your charge is as you're starting your new role I think the press release just came out a couple days ago. You know what does O'Neil say to you, you know we want you, here's where we want you to go take down that next mountain, what are some of your short term priorities, what are some of your longer term priorities? >> Yeah so we have a great opportunity in front of us. So stating the obvious I'm here to drive growth and expansion both in market share opportunities, we have over nine thousand customers globally and yet we all know that there's a tremendous opportunity to continue direct market shares. This is a global phenomena and yet our largest customers we have 85 of the Fortune 100, they certainly need a lot of support and we're here to help provide that leadership. And we do a lot of best practice sharing, we do a lot around helping customers on their journeys cause we see these themes given that we do work with the largest companies around the world. >> And I'm sure you're going to be getting on a plane and meeting with a whole bunch of customers over the next, over the next several weeks and months but was there something from your board position that you could see was a consistent pattern that you really see an opportunity for growth, kind of an unexploited opportunity as people are going through this digital transformation cause we talk all the time, it's how do I get started and you know I have small projects to give me early success and kind of those types of conversations but clearly we're kind of beyond the beginning and we should be starting to move down the field a little bit. >> Yeah certainly. So we work with all the global SIs and we won't ever try to take their place you know Insentrum, Delite, Capgemeni, Cottonsmith, they're tremendous at what they do and we partner with them very well. But we've absolutely seen consistent themes as we work with these big enterprises, I mean we've seen Coca Cola work on delivering new packaging for the World Cup where they drove exponential sales and they wanted to use the power of all of their data. The data in the Cloud, the data that they have on premise, the data in all the SAS applications and that's where we come in and really help them, helping them to leverage all of their information and to do that in an intelligent way and so we've seen several patterns emerge how customers can get started and we've created a series of workshops and summits and specialists that we we can sell on a pro forma basis in helping customers figure out where those quick fixes are. There's a couple of key big buckets, we see most large enterprise moving from on premise to Cloud and they're trying to figure out a a migration strategy so we help a lot there. Most customers are trying to figure out how to get closer to their customers so we do a lot of work around customer intimacy. Intimacy could be driving the top line, cross sale, up sale, or even customer retention. B&P Paraboss did a lot of work with us there around getting closer to you know in their wealth practice. And then we do quite a bit around governance as you would expect. That's a hot topic with GDPR again if you can't say you know where all your data is well then how can you be compliant? >> Right how can you delete me? >> How can you delete me if you don't know where your data is. There's a number of practices that we've set up and we'll do some not for fee consulting work to help customers try and figure this out. >> Yeah clearly when we first met Informatica in 2015, you know the Cloud was moving, the public Cloud, but it wasn't near what it is today. And I guess you guys just had a recent announcement, Google Cloud Next is coming up in a couple of weeks and so you guys are now doing some stuff with Google Cloud? We are yeah so we're pretty good listeners I think that's important if you're going to be a business partner to your clients you got to know what they want and one of the things that clients have said to us is we need you to partner with our partners. You know the days of proprietary and sole source, you know we're going to be everything to you without working with anyone you know those days are over. And so the key Cloud partners our customers have asked us to work with include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Azure, so you're right last week we did make an announcement that we've done deep integration and we're spending our r&d dollars for customers that are investing with Google to make those investments more valuable and we announced API management and integration with Google make that easy for customers so. Informatica world we announced native integration in our Ipass platform for Microsoft so over and over again you'll hear us continue to do more with the the partners that our customers want us to and that's a win win for everybody. >> Its just so funny too because when people talk about a company like say Coca Cola which you brought up they talk about it like it's a company. No it's like not a company, it's many many companies, many many projects, many many challenges you know it's not just one entity that has a relationship with one other entity. >> That's right. >> But the other thing I think is interesting times and Coke's a good example or Ford or pick many old line industrial companies that used to have distribution right and what was the purpose of distribution is to break bulk is to communicate information and to get the product close to the customer. But the manufacturer never knew what happened once they shipped that stuff off into their distribution. Now it's a whole different world, they have a direct connection with their in customer, they're collecting data from their in customer, and so they have a relationship and an opportunity and a challenge with that they never had before. They just sent it off to the distributor and off it went and hopefully it doesn't come back for repair. (laughing) >> No that's right but you're exactly right, and that's the challenge that customers are facing. I don't care if it's a customer in the mid market or it's a customer in large enterprise or if it's a government organization. They need to know all aspects of their customer partner supplier information and how to communicate globally if they're going to drive disruption. And one of the CIOs of a Fortune 500 made a comment that we decided that we were going to disrupt ourselves before someone else disrupted us. And that's, that's my comment on why this is a board level discussion, it's super important, and we can help solve those problems. >> It's funny Dave Potrick one of my favorite executives used to be the number two guy at Charles Schwab and I remember him speaking when they went to fix price trading back in the day, I'm aging myself unfortunately but you know he said the same thing, we have to disrupt ourselves before somebody else disrupts us. And if you're not thinking that way you're going to get disrupted so better it be you than someone that you don't even see and usually it's not your side competitor, it's the one coming from a completely different direction that you weren't even paying attention to. >> That's right. And we see that over and over again and you made the right comment in that it's not always easy, some of these Fortune 500s through consolidation, even the Global 2000. They've done all these acquisitions and so you've got hundreds of BUs that don't have any systems tied together and how do you start to create a common connection in so that you can build your brand and you can try differentiation and that's the key, that's back to the intelligent data platform. >> Right and as you said and there's not single systems and now we got API economy, things are all connected so you don't necessarily even have that much direct control over a lot of these opportunities and you said that first I think it's just like okay where's your data? Can you start with the very simple question and a lot of people aren't really sure and can't even start from there. >> That's right. >> So good opportunities. >> Absolutely, there's no question. >> Alright Tracey, well thank you for stopping by, congratulations on your, on your new position and moving from Mahogany Row down into, down into the trenches. >> Down on the field. >> I'm sure they're going to be happy to have you down there on the field. >> Yeah no thanks Jeff I'm happy to be here and thanks for the time today. >> Thank you and we'll see you in Informatica world if not sooner. >> That's right. >> Alright she's Tracey Newell I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube from Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (futuristic music)