(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 have a CUBE alum joining us Graeme Thompson. SVP and CIO of Informatica. Thank you so much for coming, for returning to theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So one of the themes we talk a lot about on theCUBE, It's the 10th anniversary of theCUBE, is the changing role of the CIO and you are a CIO so you are well positioned to answer this question. In addition to the changing role there's also the perception of what it is versus the reality. Can you talk a little about how you see the role having evolved both at Informatica as well as your other peers at other companies as well as sort of what the industry is expecting or maybe those not in the industry thinks you do versus actually what you do? >> Yeah that's a long frustration thank you >> I'm sorry >> You're keeping me on my toes here Yeah so a lot of things, the outcomes are the same but with different methods so vendor management has always been important, cost management has always been important but as it moves from being predominantly on prem to be primarily in the cloud The dynamics of how these deals are put together changes so you need a different kind of approach to how you manage the portfolio of cloud applications. Security if different in the cloud it's still important it always has been always will be. But it's different in the cloud you have to look much more as vendor risk management make sure that you're comfortable with the risk posture of the vendors you are sourcing your applications from. So those things I would put in the category of You're trying to accomplish the same thing you're just doing it differently because your application work load is more likely to be in the cloud. Things that are different though, completely different are expectations. So everyone can see the power of data and the power of having speed and agility in the cloud but they want it immediately and they don't want to do the hard work to get there so I find that the CIO sometimes has to be the educator or the evangelist for change to explain that if you want all this data to generate all these miraculous new outcomes you have to focus on the process and then you have to enable that process within an application that's going to meet your needs today and tomorrow. You have to think end to end which means you have to integrate applications like Marketo and Salesforce. Then you need to find a way to get it all in your data lake That is completely different it's a completely different sport From what we were playing as CIOs 5 years ago and it's definitely the biggest area of change I've seen both internally and talking to PIOs >> Graeme, we've talked in the past, goo to see you again. You are a CIO your work for Informatica so you're the CIO of Informatica so you don't need to be sold on the value of data You're in the data business. You have a data company that thinks hard and has been building products for years in private, in retooling, you see the wave, we've talked about it you've been on the same wave, a great wave, for 4 years everyone else is now on it. SO as a CIO who works for a company that's you know you're not going to get in trouble for doing a data driven project what are some of the things that you've got going on because you do have relationships with all the different cloud providers you do have a great on premises large install base and now you guys as a company what are some of the projects you're doing that would a nice guiding light to folks watching who were really kicked in the tires on digital transmission, not just like talking about it but like okay architecure, roadmap, really thinking through all the hairy problems of what's coming down the pipe for them. What are you working on? >> Yeah so I think our marketing team has done a really good job framing things in the four journeys. So talk about it within that context. So the first one is next gen analytics. So a lot of companies go into this thinking Right all I have to do is find out where the data lives, ingest the data into my data lake or data warehouse, put Tableau on top of it and job done. Not the case, right? So as soon as you start shading data across more than one function, marketing are really good at knowing their data. They know how its generated. They know how it can be used. As soon as you let someone else loose on marketing's data, it's use at your own risk. Right so that introduces the need for governance. If you're going to use data in one organization that was generated in another one, you have to agree on the definition of terms. You have to agree on calculations so that you don't get the finance team and the sales team debating what the renewal rate is. So the next gen analytics journey for us has been an interesting one. We started with an on-prem data warehouse that's now on AZUR. The tipping point for us was when most of the data is generated in the cloud, why move it back on-prem just to do analytics on it? So we made a decision to build that on the cloud with AZUR. >> So leave it on the cloud, it's there. >> Yeah >> and then have the on-premise piece >> Go onto the cloud. >> It's where the MDM it's where the pieces kind of come together? >> Yep >> All right so... >> So that's the analytics journey. >> So I'll give you another curve bal here. So as you come in here, you say okay great the next step is well you know I need to actually make my AI work. Your clear, you know "the clarity starts here" it's a nice slogan. Nice play on words there but AI is ultimately where everyone wants to get to. >> Yeah >> AI is fed by data, machine learning, other things, really kind of feeding the outcome for AI. But without good data, and/or data can can help the AI get smarter. This kind of brings up the conversation of more data or diverse data - different data sets. So accessing data sets actually is a new dynamic that people are getting into and proving it adds value to AI. >> Yeah >> How do you see that playing out because this is really kind of brings up the real complex question which is that as you mentioned earlier; terms, rights, marketplaces, sharing data, uh you know, all these new things? What's your view on this notion of having more data sets feeding intelligent AI? >> So part of the increase in enthusiasm about AI and ML is really the convergence of.. the technology's actually ready to help, its not a science project off to the side anymore. And the need for it has never been greater. There's no way a human can keep up with all the data that's being generated even at a company like ours. So if you want to find out where the data is created, where it's used, who has access to it, then your going to have to apply some AI to it otherwise there's no shot. You'd need an ever increasing team of humans who would fail to do the job adequately. >> So you see data sets merging... not merging but like being merchandised, if you will, for lack of a better word? >> Yeah well you have to manage the linage of it. >> All right. So you have to know where it's created, where it's used, you know, who has access to it? Is that access appropriate? Uh... all those thing have to be taken into account. Especially when you look at all the compliance and privacy things that we're all faced with now that 18 months ago we weren't all that concerned about. >> And that really goes back to what you said earlier in our conversation in that the role of the CIO is so much as an educator and an evangelist. So can you talk a little bit about what you've learned in terms of making that message really sink in with employees in terms of understand where the data lives, who has access to it, all the obstacles that you just talked about? >> Yeah so part of it is those managing the IT team and then those managing the relationships with your business constituents. So let's take the IT team first. Really good IT people, like really good engineers, will work on the most interesting problem available. It's our job as a CIO to make sure that the most profitable problem is also the most interesting one. Fight number one is getting people working on the right things cause IT people with work incredibly hard . You just need to make sure they're working incredibly hard on the right stuff with a focus on the right outcome at the end of it. So that's the IT part. Then working with the business stakeholders, its really setting expectations. Cause quite rightly, they want everything as soon as they can describe it, it should be available. There's often a lot of technical dept that we have as organizations, you know? We had a more than 10 year old deployment of sales force, you got to believe there was a ton of technical debt in there because it was built to perfection for our old business. It wasn't built for our new business. So you have to work with the buiness stakeholders. Bring them along with you on what to do first, what to do next, what the dependencies are, ' and focus on setting exceptions that its not going to be done overnight. >> So about governance. Obviously governance has been around for awhile, we've talked about it before. But now more than ever your seeing in the news first anniversary of GDPR, I predicted that would be... I won't say it... I said like, months before... bad words.. BS basically. But it's reality. More privacy stuff your seeing more and more, um, regions in cloud dealing with certain restrictions. So when it hear regulation, I hear constrained data. That goes in my mind, I hear oh my god. Regulation and innovation are always sometimes at odds. So it's a balancing act. What are you guys doing to address that? What's the solution today and how do you see that playing out because SAS is about data and agility and that's why SAS has been so popular and that's what digital transformation is going to get to is these SAS-like benefits. Agile, risk-taking, high reward. Low-risk, high reward kind of things. How do you get the balance between, you know, regulation, compliance, risk, and innovation? >> Yeah, so I can talk about how we look at it internally and then a little bit about how our customers look at it. So, for us you can look at it like a tax. As a tax on innovation. Or, if you look at a little bit more optimistically, who wouldn't want to honor the customer's right to be forgotten? Who wouldn't want to consult their customer on where you use their data? So you can also look at it as way that by implementing the GDPR or the California Privacy Standard or whatever it is, it makes your company better. It allows you to be the company that you would like to aspire to be. So you don't have to just look at it as a tax. Now I'm going to look at our customers. They fall into 2 categories: those that have to do it because they're in a regulated industry like financial services or healthcare, and then there's those that do it because they know it will help them serve their customers better. And you see a lot of governance and compliance projects starting from a place of defensiveness. They have to do it because they have to comply with new regulations that apply to them and often its companies that are really trying to make the best use of their data but they want to do it in a really responsible way. Um - if done properly and responsibly, it can be something that's good for everyone, I believe. >> I just have one final question about the skills gap. And this is something we've been really talking a lot about here. What are you doing to address it? And is the problem really as bad as the headlines are making it out to be? >> Yeah so there's the macro problem of aging workforce and where are the new people coming from? There's that one - it's been with us for awhile and applies across all functions. Then there's specific skills areas in IT that are always a shortage. Security is one - it's really, really difficult to find really good IT security.. information security people. Often these groups can be ivory tower-ish so its hard to find people who are really practitioners. It's hard to select them and it's hard to retain them because they always want to build and then move on and build something new. So security is one. Obviously data and analytics is a huge one. Finding people that can, that know a little bit more than what an oric in our warehouse does is a challenge and then once you get those people, you have to make sure they are working on things that they find are worthy of their time so that they are motivated to work as hard as you need them to work. And other areas like managing cloud vendors is I think a skill set that will start to grow up. Um - these cloud contracts get really expensive as you scale and there's no friction at the point of consumption. You know, we've got engineers that aren't allowed to order a stapler from Amazon without approval. But they can sign the company up for tens of thousands of dollars worth of compute cost obligations. You need governance and skills to manage uh - that. If you ask an engineer do you want slow or fast and big or small, they're going to pick fast and large, right? >> Just a dumb follow up on that skills gap question. For the folks who are graduating collage, high school, elementary school.. ..education is obviously kind of a little bit linear but you know people have argued that there's no one playbook for the kinds of courses you would take to get into the data kind of world there. Is there any pattern your seeing where the folks who are really excelling in this new environment have certain skills and classes? So if someone is going into collage maybe honing a class on you know on a particular class or dicipline? Have you seen some things that work? >> No >> No? >> What I have seen that works is finding people who have a track record of solving important business problems and using that to select the people that you hire. Cause the.. having a sound education in technology is one thing. You got to understand the business domain and the problem that you are trying to solve. That's where the value comes from. The business stakeholders value someone that can understand the problem they are trying to solve or the opportunity that they are trying to take advantage of. So finding those people that have a track record of solving meaningful problems, uh to me, has been a way to find the right folks in that area. >> Multitalent is then.. it's early, too, I mean, Berkley just had their first graduating class of you know, Data Sciences, kind of gives you an idea of how early this is. >> Yeah and it takes 2 to 4 years to have a University course accredited. By the time you've done that it's out of date. >> It's out of date. >> So that has to change. >> My final question for you, Graeme, is what's the um... For the folks that aren't here at Informatica World 2019 whats the summary in your view? The theme of the show? What's the key highlights that people should walk away with this year for the focus of Informatica World 2019? >> So it's not a new theme, it's more of a expansion on the' theme from the last couple of years. So the importance of the platform is key. You can go off as an IT professional and source one product to solve one problem and before you're done I guarantee you'll have found an adjacent problem and you're going to wish you'd chosen a platform instead of an individual product. So if you listen to Anneals Keynote this morning and Ahmet got into more detail, its really about the platform and the power of Claire and the AI part as part of that overall platform - that's really the theme - but its not new. It's not something we just came up with last week it's been our strategy for at least 24 months so we just continue to build on it. >> Bad data or no data, there's no AI, or bad data is bad AI and no data is no AI? That's essentially the reality as AI becomes mainstream. >> Yeah. >> All right, thank you. >> Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Graeme >> Pleasure. >> You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019 I'm Rebecca Knight and John Furrier. Thanks for staying tuned. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2018, brought to you by Informatica. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE with Peter Burris, my cohost for the next few days. Live coverage from Informatica World 2018 here in Las Vegas. Our next guest is Graeme Thompson, senior vice president and CIO, chief information officer, for Informatica. He handles all the CIO roles, as well, inside the company and also speaks with a lot of their customers, who are also CIOs. Graeme, great to see you again, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. So last year, we had the conversation around your role as a CIO, but also, you're doing a lot of stuff internally, certainly using your own product, but you're spending a lot of time with customers, and a lot of those customers can either be project guys, application developers, CXOs, CDOs, CIOs. You interface a lot of customers, what's changed in the marketplace with respect to the CXO, chief something officer, 'cause there's been movement. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, definitely. So as I talk to POs and our customers, it's very clear that data integration, data management has moved beyond just trying to get a big project done. It's no longer about deploying ERP or CRM in the cloud and needing to move data around, the data management part is really in service of something much greater, and it may be getting close with your customer, it may be using the data that's generated in your company and about your company to generate insight, so the next best action to improve the operational efficiency of the company or more importantly, to improve the customer experience that they have as they deal with your company, so it's moved way beyond just getting a project done, and it's now a strategic thing in service of something higher-level, and that higher-level thing is usually on the radar of the board and the CEO. >> So our research suggests that we're moving from a world of process first, in the IT organization, to data first. Is that too far a stretch, as far as you're concerned? >> Not for some companies. When you look at the most valuable companies in the world today, companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, you could argue they're data companies. The product that they generate is data, the thing they use to compete upon is data, so for those companies, I don't think that's a stretch at all. For everyone else, they need to figure out what they're going to do about that and figure out whether they're going to try and catch up or whether they're going to try and disrupt, but I think for the world's best companies, you're seeing them more and more focused on the data, and the process is turning into just a thing that generates that data, which is the thing that generates the value. >> We've been seeing companies becoming more data companies, and Peter's research and the team has been showing digital business is about data assets, and Facebooks and the Amazons, they're obvious examples, we see them as hyperscalers, but there's going to be, the end-user customers, the traditional enterprises, they're now becoming service providers. They got cloud, they got multi-cloud, they're going to have an IOT edge, they have a bigger set of complexities around this horizontally-scalable digital business architecture. So your point about projects, in old days, easy, you ship, connect everyone, they log in, they do their job, and then they go out and sell to customers. >> Peter: But you still are. >> Well, I mean straightforward, known, right? It was a known enterprise, you had a perimeter. Now you have digital channel, you have more challenges. How do you look at that, and where does Informatica fit in that conversation with the CIO and the CEO, who have to report to the board level and say, we got to manage our security, we got to do all this stuff, how do you guys fit into that new world? >> Yeah, so the thing that differentiates Informatica from everyone else, frankly, is the fact that we look at it holistically, and we cover everything from discovering the data. If it's an asset, you have to know that you have it, so you got to go discover it, you got to be able to catalog it, so you can keep control of what you have. You need to know the lineage of it, where does it get created, where does it get moved to, who has access to it, with GDPR going in effect later this week. It's increasingly important for us to know who has access to the data, it's increasingly important to manage the lifecycle of that data so that you know where it's being created, used, moved. You have to secure it. If your aspiration is to have a true enterprise data lake, you got to make sure that the identity governance is in place, you got to make sure that information that may be HR-related isn't accessible by people who don't have the privilege to see it in the HR application. So that's the discovery, the cataloging. Then you have to clean it, master it, and looking at an MVM solution for getting a true 360 degree view of your customer or your product or your supplier. And then there's the analytics part, which is often the prize at the end. If you can get all the data into your data lake, and potentially with a data warehouse on the back of that, in the cloud, and then you can choose the presentation layer that you love the most and use that to serve up self-service analytics for your customers. So we're different in that we look at all of it. We've got a lot of nimble competitors that do one thing very well, and if our customer is trying to just get a project done, my advice to them is go to an RFP and pick whatever one you like, but if this is really strategic for you, you need to pick someone that they can do all of it and do it all well in a way that's going to be scalable and independent from the big software providers. >> But I want to come back, Graeme, to this, 'cause I think there's one more thing I want to test you on, this is kind of the basis for my comment earlier about moving to a data-first as opposed to a process-first world. Because I think it also, you have to be able to discover it, catalog it, be able to audit it, all those other things. But you also have to be able to deliver it and deliver it with a high degree of certainty that it's the right data at the right time. Historically, application developers started with a process and they presume that the data would be associated with that process. Now we're starting with these assets that are very, very high value, and we're looking for new ways to leverage those assets. It kind of has a different mindset, doesn't it? >> It really does, and that's the fun part, quite honestly. If you think about, the data used to be hostage to its process, the process used to be hostage to the application that it was executed in, and now we're opening up all these opportunities where you can take, just in our company, you can take usage information and make it available to our customer support organization, so they can proactively help our customer adopt the product. We can tell which features the customer may be using and not using to help focus our adoption efforts and really help the customer get more value from the product. That's an opportunity that was either unknown or very difficult to take advantage of when you were just looking at the process of fulfilling an order, delivering the cloud environment to the customer and then 12 months later, going back and trying to renew it. It's now a connected lifecycle of the customer's experience with your product, and it's all based on the data. The applications and the processes are just the things that generate it. >> What's changed, go back, 'cause you mentioned, that's an awesome example, the old way, with process, it now seems like the data is freed up. What changed, what was the catalyst from going, you know, stuck in the process, slave to the process, slave to the app, to what you just referred to, which seems like the outcome people want to get to, which is create data so that people can innovate on it. What's changed? >> Yeah, so I think as individuals, as humans, our expectations have changed. We now know that it's reasonable to expect that if I have an interaction with one part of your company on a Monday, the other part of your company, who I interact with on a Thursday, should know about it. I think as consumers, we've become conditioned to really expect that, and just like we now see in the B-to-C world, folks are expecting it in the B-to-B world. So you've got higher expectations, and then the capabilities to do it didn't really exist before. And now, with all these different, you've got all your different applications in the cloud, you've still got applications on premise, and there's an expectation and now the capability to do analytics on all of it, there's an expectation that information about you is known and used to improve your experience as a customer when you're dealing with these businesses. >> But the whole notion of data as an asset requires different governance, different people. We're strong believers that actually, you can measure the degree to which a company is on its digital transformation journey by the degree to which it has in fact institutionalized work around data or changed that or organized. When you look at the CIO role and how the CIO role is going to change or is changing and is going to change more, as a consequence of this, increasing focus on data as an asset within the business, what are you doing, what do you expect to be doing, what are you counseling other CIOs to do? >> Yeah, so that's a good one. When I talk to POs, I ask them, I try and create an analogy between the data as an asset and money as an asset, so I would ask them, "If you were to take your CFO, say, and ask them, "'Do you know where all your money is?' "They'll say, 'Of course I do.'" "'Do you know which currency your money is stored in? "'Do you know where it's physically? "'Do you know who has access to it? "'Do you have a governance process in place to try "'and figure out the most profitable use of that asset?' "And they'll go, "'Yeah, of course my CFO knows that.'" I say, "Okay, swap the word money for data, "and you as a CIO, can you answer yes "to any of those questions?" And you get a reaction of, "Oh, I believe I should, but I can't." A lot of companies say that data is an asset, but they're really not operating that way. They don't have the governance around it, they don't have the control around it, they don't have the governance in place to make sure they're using it in the most profitable way to get that return that you suggested. So I think that's definitely where we're moving, and some of the world's best companies are definitely going in that direction. >> That is exactly one of the things we were just talking about on our intro here this morning around the CIO and the CEOs don't know where their data is, and I think the GDPR is, I'm not a big fan of it, with all the technical challenges, and ultimately, it's a signal in my opinion, but ultimately, it's going to happen. But I think it's a signal to your point. You need to know about your data, not treat it as some fenced-off storage thing, and the storage administrator, where is it all, and the guy left, who's running it now, where's the data, what's the schema. These are all technical storage questions. >> Yeah, it's not the stuff on the storage assets, is the bottom line. >> That paradigm is over. You're talking about something that's fundamental, strategic business aspect, so I think this is a new generation. So with that, I want to ask you, you had talked before camera that you have a CDO that reports to you, a change for Informatica. Can you explain that decision, why a chief data officer reports to the CIO, why you guys came to that conclusion, and as a result of that, what's happening? >> Yeah, so we're going through a transformation in our company, as we move from being a traditional software company that sells license and maintenance, to being a cloud and subscription company. The processes and the systems you need to be a subscription company, to be a good one, are very different, right? It's a connected, end-to-end process all the way from how you generate your product, your go-to-market strategy, all the way through how you fulfill it, how you drive adoption and value creation with your customer, and ultimately, how you renew it and sell more. That's a different process than a traditional, ship it and forget it license company. So as we go through this transformation, we are solving a lot of the governance problems, we're solving a lot of the system of record and data quality problems, and we need to make sure that once we're done with each part of the project, it doesn't get broken again. In software companies, IT people are really good at fixing things, but they're not always really good at keeping it fixed. So the time was right for us to create this new position, and we debated where it should report, but we believe that as an action-orientated, get-stuff-done function, it has to be collocated with the team who are delivering the new applications and the new processes, and for the moment, that's within the CIO function. >> Are they going to be tracking this notion of asset, tracking like, if you treat data like an asset, like money, are you guys down the road on that? How are you viewing it internally, as you guys roll out the CDO relationship with you, and obviously, we're making it strategic, obviously, you guys know that, you're in the data business. Where are you on that question that you asked rhetorically for yourselves? >> Graeme: Yeah, so-- >> John: Do you know where your data is and-- >> Yeah, I mean, we're very, very fortunate to have unfettered access to all of our products, so we're very proud of our intelligent data lake deployment, which is on Azure Cloud. As more and more of ours and any other customer's workload move to the cloud, it makes more and more sense to have analytics there. People are questioning the wisdom of bringing all the data back on prem just to do analytics. The only people making money out of that are AT&T and Verizon, there's got to be a better way. So that's one thing that would be under the purview of the CDO, and that would be to enable self-service analytics across the company, get IT out of the way of generating the presentation layer of reporting, and enable the great and talented people throughout the company to do that. So that would be the analytics side. And then obviously, cataloging and securing is something we have the best solutions in the industry, so those solutions are deployed, and that'll help us with our GDPR compliance, but it'll also help us make sure that we know what we have and we have a process in place to at least consider what the most profitable use of that data asset would be elsewhere in the company. >> John: So you feel good about it. >> Yeah. >> Alright, so for the people that can't answer that question, a CIO, "Hmm, you know what, that's a good question, "I should know this." What do they do next, what's the next step of action that a CIO should take when they go, "Oh, no, I can't answer that question." They might have their hands on some fingertips of data, but ultimately, the strategic question is what do I do next? Obviously, call Informatica, I mean, do I do an audit? >> Hopefully, you'll call us, but if you take the vendor and the technology out of it, if you were trying to figure out how much money you had, you would put a process in place to go discover it all. >> John: Count it. >> So the equivalent there is cataloging, so our enterprise data catalog product is the fastest-growing product we've ever had in the company, and what that does is allows Google for your data. You can search for where all your customer data lives, you can search for where all your product data lives, you can figure out where it moves, and that is the first thing that I would advise a CIO to do, is figure out what you have, where it's stored, where it moves to, where it's used, and who has access to it, and if you have that, then at least you've got a shot at figuring out how to, you still need intelligent people to figure out where the most profitable use of it would be, but at least you know what you have, where it is, and who has access to it. And then when someone wants to come and ask you about the GDPR and your compliance level, if you can show them that, then at least it's clear that you have an objective to comply with the regulation. >> And they're going to be pretty lenient from what we hear, but they're going to want to see people making steps for compliance, and it's a moving train with GDPR. Again, we're going to go in deep on this this week. Graeme Thompson, senior vice president and CIO. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, great to see you again, let's keep in touch, love to explore the CDO relationship with the CIO, I think that's cutting-edge, congratulations. Know where your data is, how much it's worth. If you know where your money is and how much it's worth, you don't want to lose your data, you want to make sure you're leveraging it. It's theCUBE coverage here at Informatica World, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, more live coverage 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)

>> 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 at Informatica World 2018 here live, in Las Vegas at The Venetian Ballroom. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with Peter Burris, my co-host this week, Analyist at Wikibon, Chief Analyst at SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. Our next guest is Sanjeev Vohra, Group Technology Officer at Accenture, in charge of incubating new businesses, growing new businesses, handling the talent. Great to have you on thanks for spending the time coming on. >> Pleasure, it's my pleasure to be here. >> So we have a lot of Accenture interviews, go to thecube.net, type in Accenture, you'll see all the experts. And one of the things we love about talking with Accenture, is you guys are in the front lines of all the action. You have all the customer deployments, global system integrator, but you've got to be on top of the new technology, you've got really smart people, so thanks for spending the time. So I got to ask you, looking at the landscape, of the timing of Informatica's opportunity, you've got data, which is not a surprise for some people, but you've got GDPR happening on, this Friday, you've got cloud scale on the horizon, a lot of interesting things are going on right now around data and the impact of customers, which is now pretty much front and center. What're you guys doing with Informatica, what are some of the things that you guys are engaging with them on, and what's important to you? >> We have a very deep relationship with Informatica for many years and, we have many, many, joint clients in the market, and we are helping them sustain their businesses, and also grow their businesses future. Right? In future. And I think, I think there's a lot going on, there's a lot going on sustaining the core of the business, and improving it on a continuous basis, by using new technologies, and, you know, like today's keynote went on a little, talked about the new stuff and it's, there's a lot of things, actually, clients require, or our customers require for, just sustaining their core. But then I caught something in the middle, which is basically: how are you building your new business models, how are you disrupting the market your industry, what's new around that? And, in that piece, I think that's where, we are now starting working with Informatica to see what other pieces we need to bring together to the market, so we can generate, so we can help clients or customers to really leverage the power of technology. And I'll tell you, there are four areas of discussion priorities, that are, you know, you get a sense, and we get a deep dive depending on what you want to see. The first one is, I think the customers now have data warehouses, which are Data 2.0, as is what's told in the morning, so these are still 15 years old data warehouses, they are not in the new. So a lot of customers, and a lot of organizations, large organizations, including some organizations like ours, they're investing right now to make sure that they get to Data 3.0, which is what Anil was saying in the morning, which is around the new data supply chain, because without that, you cannot actually get real data analytics. Right? So you can't generate insight on analytics unless you actually work on your data's infrastructure layer below, so that's one area where we are working with them, that's where the cloud comes in, that's where the flexibility of cloud comes in. The second piece is around, around data compliance and governance because, guess what, there're regulations which are coming up now, which are towards data privacy and data protection. And the data infrastructures which were built 15 years back, actually do not handle that so effectively. >> In being polite, yeah. I mean, it wasn't built for it, they didn't have to think about it. >> Sanjeev: It was not built for that, exactly. So now, now, the point there is that, now there is a regulation coming in, one of them is GDPR, Global Data Protection Regulation, it impacts all the global companies who deal with your EU residents. And now they are looking at how they can address that regulation, and be compliant with that regulation. And we believe that's a great opportunity for them to actually invest. And see how, not only comply with regulation, but actually make this a benefit for them. And make the next leap towards building a next level of infrastructure for them, their data, right? >> And that is doing a lot of the data engineering, actually getting data right. >> And that's the third piece. So the first two are this: one is infrastructure, second is compliance, and the third reason, they're all interrelated finally, but I'm just saying, it depends on, from where do you want to begin your journey, right? And the third piece is around, I think you got it right, is about quality of data, but actually it is not quality, we call it data voracity, it's much beyond quality. We talk about more completeness, and also things like provenance, integrity, and security along with it, so if we, and it's very much business contextual element, because what's happening is, you may have heard the story is that, clients have invested in data lakes, for years now, it's been there for like, eight, nine years, data lake concepts, and everybody talks about it-- >> John: Throw everything into the lake. >> And everybody says throw everything into the lake, and then they become a data swamp. (John laughing) - That was last years theme. >> That was last years theme, and the reason is because, because it's not IT's failure, IT is actually pretty advanced, the technology is very advanced. If the business is not as involved as it should be, and is not able to trust the data, and that's where your point comes in, whether you have the right data, and trusted data with you. >> Though, well we had Toyota on earlier and they said, one of the customers said, we had this 2008 post crisis thing and then, they had all this stuff channeled, they had product in channel, and they had the data! They actually had the data, they didn't have access to it! So again, this is like the new data center, data first, get it right, and so with GDPR we're seeing people saying okay, we've got to get this right. So that's, investing engineering involved, governance, application integration, this is all, now, a new thing. How do you guys advise you clients? 'Cause this is super important and you guys are, again, on the front edge. As a CTO group, you got to look at the new tech and say, okay, that's baked, that's not baked, that's new, that's old, throw a container around it, you know. (laughing) How are you sorting through the tools, the platforms? 'Cause there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff out there. >> Oh yes, absolutely, and there's a lot of stuff, and there's a lot of unproven things as well, in the market. So, the first and foremost thing is that, we should understand what the context in the market right now is. The first question is, mine is, is everybody ready for GDPR? The answer is no. (John laughs) Are they, have they started into the journey, have they started getting on the racetrack, right, on the road? >> Yes? Yeah? It depends on a majority of that organization, some people have just started building a small strategy around GDPR, some people have actually started doing assessments to understand how complex is this beast, and regulation, and some people have just moved further in the journey of doing assessment, but they're now putting up changes in their infrastructure to handle remediation, right? Things like, for example, consent management, thinks about things like dilation, like, it's going to be a very big deal to do, right? And so they are making advantageous changes to the infrastructure that they have, or the IT systems to manage it effectively. But I don't think there's any company which properly can claim that have got it right fully, from end-to-end, right? So I think that's happening. Now, how are we addressing? I think the first and foremost thing, first of all we need to assess the majority of the customers, or the organization. Like BHD, because we talk to them first and understand, we understand, right? Usually we have various ways of doing it, we can have a chit-chat, and meet the person responsible in that company, it could be a Chief Data Officer of a company, it could be a CIO of a company, it could Chief Operating Officer of a company, it could be a CSO of a company, depending on who has a baton in the sea of suites, to kind of handle this problem. >> So it's different per company, right, so every company has their own hierarchy or need, or entry point? >> Data companies have different entry points, but we are seeing more of the CSOs and CIOs playing a role in many of the large organizations, and our, you know our clientele is very large companies, as you know. But we see most of these players playing that role, and asking for help, and asking for having a meeting, and starting with that. In some cases, they have not invested initially, we talked to them, we assess them very quickly, very easy, quick as it's in, you know, probably in a couple of days or day, and tell them that, let's get into a, what we call is, assessment as step one, and that takes four to six weeks, or eight weeks, depending on the size of their application suite, and the organization. And we do it quite fast, I mean initially, we were also learning. If you were to have asked me this question 12 months back, we had an approach. We've changed that approach and evolved that approach now. We invested hugely in that approach itself, by using a lot of machine learning to do assessment itself. So we have now a concept called data discovery, another concept called knowledge graph. >> And that's software driven, both with, it's all machine learning or? >> Sanjeev: It's largely computer driven. But obviously human and computer work together, but it's not only human. A traditional approach would happen to do only with humans. >> John: Yeah, and that've been takin' a long time. >> And that has changed, that has changed with the new era, and technology advancement, that even for, things which are like assessment, could now be done by machines as well, machines are smart enough to do that work, so we are using that right now. But that's a step one, and after that, once we get there, we build a roadmap for them, we ensure that they're stakeholders are agreeing with the roadmap, they actually embrace the roadmap! (laughing) And once that's done, then we talk about remediation to their systems. >> So, you mention voracity, one of the, and you also mentioned, for example, the idea of the, because of GDPR, deletion, which is in itself a voracity thing, so you, it's also having a verifiable actions on data. So, the challenge that you face, I think, when you talk to large customers, John mentioned Toyota, is, the data's there, but sometimes it's not organized for new classes of problems, so, and that's an executive issue 'cause, a lot of executives don't think in terms of new problem, new data, new organization. You guys are speaking to the top executives, CSOs, CIOs often but, how are you encouraging your clients, your customers, to think differently, so that they become data-first? Which is, kind of a predicate for digital business transformation anyway. >> So I think it's a great question. I think it depends again on, who you're talking to in the organization. I have a very strong perspective, my personal view is that data is an intersection of business and technology, it is not a technology, it's not a business, right? It's an intersection of both, especially this topic, it has to be done in collaboration within business and technology. Very closely in terms of how, what is the, how you can drive metadata out of your data, how can you drive advantage out of your data? And, having said that, I think the important thing to note down is that: for every, when you talk about data voracity, the single comment I will make that it is very, very, very contextual to business. Data voracity is very, very contextual to the business that you're running. >> Well, but problems, right? Because, for example, going to Toyota, so, when the Toyota gentleman came on, and this is really important, >> Absolutely. >> the manufacturing people are doing a great job of using data, lean is very data-driven. The marketing people were doing a great job of using data, the sales people were making a great job of using data, the problem was, the problems that Toyota faced in 2008, when the credit crunch hit, were not limited. They were not manufacturing problems, or marketing problems, or sales problems, they were a wholistic set of problems. And he discovered, Toyota discovered, they needed to say, what's the problem, recast the problem, and what can we do to get the data necessary to answer some of these crucial questions that we have? >> So, I think you hit the nail, I can tell, I mean, I think you're spot on, and the one way we are doing right now, addressing that is through, what we call our liquid studios, >> John: I'm just going to-- >> Peter: I'm sorry what? >> Liquid studios. >> Peter: Liquid studios. >> We have this concept called liquid studios. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And actually, this concept we started, I don't know if you heard about this from Accenture before? we started this thing couple of years back-- >> John: Well take a minute to explain that, that's important, explain liquid studios. >> Okay, so liquid studios, so what, when we were thinking about these things where, we talked to multiple clients, they called us, exactly the point, they may be working in silence, and they may be doing a great job in their department, or their function, but they are talking across enterprise. As to how they can, if you are doing great work, can I use your work for my advantage, and vice versa, right, because it's all sharing data, even inside enterprise, forget outside enterprise, and you will be amazed to know how much sharing happens today, within enterprise, right? And you're smiling, right, so? So what we did was, we came to this concept, and the technologies are very new and very advanced, and many of the technologies we are not using beyond experimentation, we are still in the COE concept, well that's different than enterprise ready deployment. Like, if we talk about ERP today, that's not a COE, that's an enterprise ready deployment, in most of the companies, it's all there, like, you run your finance on ERPs right, most of the companies, big companies. So we felt that, technology's advancing, the business and technology IOs, they all have to still agree on a concept, and define a problem together. And that's where the studio comes in, so what we do is, it's actually a central facility, very innovative and creative space, it's unlike an office, it's very much like, new, new thing, it's like very, differently organized structure to generate creativity and good discussion. And we bring in core customers there, we have a workshop with them, we talk about the problem for one or two days, we use design thinking for that, a very effective way. Because one thing we've learned, the one thing that brings our table to agreement on a problem. (laughing) (John and Peter laugh) In a very nice manner, without confronting, in a very subtle manner. So we, through this timeframe, we get to a good problem situation, a good problem definition and then, the studio can actually help you do the POC itself. Because many times people say, well I understand the problem, I think I kind of get your solution, or what your proposing, my people also tell me something else, they have a different option to propose. Can we do it together? Can I get the confidence that, I don't want to go in enterprise ready deployment and put my money, unless I see some proof of pudding, but proof of pudding is not a power point. It's the actual working mark. >> Peter: It's not?! >> It's not! (all laughing) and that's where the studio comes in picture because, you wouldn't believe that we do these two days of workshop without any Powerpoint, like we aren't on a single slide. >> So it's creative, it's very agile, very? >> It's more white boarding, come and talk, it's more visitation, more visitation now, more human interaction, and that's where you open up everybody saying: what is your view, what is your view? We use a lot of post-it stickies to kind of get the-- >> I think the business angle's super important, I want to get your thoughts. 'Cause there's a lot of problems that can be solved once you identify them. But we're hearing terms like competitive advantage, 'cause when you solve some of these problems, these wholistic problems, that have a lot of interplay, where data's shared, or where there's internal, and or external with APIs and cloud-native, you start thinking about competitive advantages, being the data-first company, we've heard these terms. What does that mean to you guys? When you walk into an executive briefing, and they say look, you know, we've done all this work, we've done this engineering, here's where we're at, we need help, but ultimately we want to drive top-line results, be more competitive, really kind of move with the shift. This is a, this is more of a business discussion, what do you guys talk about when you have those conversations? >> I think we, so first of all, data was always a technical topic, do you agree? Like if you just go back, 10 years back, data was always a CIO discussion. >> Well, >> Unless you're in a regulated industry like financial services or, >> Or I guess I'd say this, that the, that the notion of getting data out of a system, or getting data into a system, was a technical discussion. But there was, you know, we've always used data, from market share growth, etc. But that was relatively simple, straight-forward data, and what you're talking about, I think, is, getting into considerably greater detail about how the business is really operating, how the business is really working. Am I right? >> You're right, considering data as an asset, in a discussion in terms of, how can you leverage it effectively, that's what I was saying and, so it is, it's definitely gone up one more level upstaged or into the discussion that is, into the companies and organizations. And what we're saying is, that's where the business comes in effectively and say that, helping them understand, and by the way, the reason I was making that comment is because, if you have ever seen people expending data 10 years back, it is very complex explanation. >> Schemas, this, that, and the other thing. >> You got it, yeah. And it's very hard for a business guy to understand that, like if I'm a supply action lead, I don't get it, it's too complex for me. So what we did, I'm just letting you know how we started the discussion. The first and foremost thing is, we tell them, we're going to solve the business problem, to your point, that's what we think, right? And, every company now-a-days, they want to lead in their industry, and the leadership position is to be more intelligent. >> Yeah, and it's got to hit the mark, I mean, we had Graeme Thompson on, who's the CIO, here at Informatica, and he was saying that if you go to a CFO and ask them hey where's the money, they'll go oh, it's over here, they get your stuff, they know where it's stored, at risk management, they say, where's they data? You mentioned asset, this is now becoming a conversation, where it's like, certainly GDPR is one shot across the bow that people are standing up, taking notice, it's happening now. This data as a asset is a very interesting concept. When I'm a customer of yours, say, and I say hey Sanjeer, I have a need, I got to move my organization to be data-first but, I got to do some more work. What's my journey? I know it's different per customer, depending on whether it's top-down, or bottom-up, we see that a lot but. How do you guys take them through the journey? Is it the workshop, as you mentioned, the assessment, take us through the journey of how you help customers, because I'm sure a lot of them are sittin' out there goin' now, they're going to be exposed with GDPR, saying wow, were we really setup for this? >> Yeah, so I think in the journey, it's a very good question that you asked. The journey can start depending on the real, the biggest pain they have, and the pains could be different on the majority of that particular organization, right? But I can tell you what client position we are having, in a very simplified manner, so that you understand the journey, but yes, when we engage with them, there's a process we follow, we have a discovery process, we have a studio process, together have a workshop, get into a POC, get into a large-scale deployment solution en route. That's a simple thing, that's more sequential in nature, but the condition is around four areas. The first and foremost area is, many companies actually don't have any particular data strategy. They have a very well articulated IT strategy, and when you go to a section of IT strategy, there's a data component in that, but that's all technology. About how do you load, how do you extract those things. It talks about data architectures, and talks about data integration, but it doesn't talk about data as a business, right? That's where it's not there, right? In some companies they do have, to your point, yes, some companies were always there in data, because of regulatory concerns and requirements, so they always had a data organization, a function, which thought of data as different from other industries. And those industries have more better strategy documents or, or they're more organized in that space. But, guess what, now companies are actually investing. They're actually asking for doing help in data strategies, that's one entry point which happens, which means, hey, I understand this, I understand governance is required, I understand privacy's required, and I understand this is required, I also understand that I need to move to new infrastructure, but I can't just make an investment in one or two areas, can you help my build my strategy and road map as to what should be my journey from now til next three years, right, how does it look like? How much money is required, how much investment is required, how do I save from something and invest here, help me save internal wealth, right? That's a new concept. Right, because I don't have so much that you're asking for, so help me gain some savings somewhere else. That's where cloud comes in. (laughs) So, that's one entry point, the second entry point is totally on, where the customers are very clear, they actually have thought through the process, in terms of where they want to go, they actually are asking, very specifically saying, I do have a problem in our infrastructure, help me move to cloud. Help me, that's a big decision right, help me move to cloud, right? But that's one, which I call is, new data supply chain, that's my language. Which means that-- >> John: I like that word actually. >> Yeah? I'm making your supply chain and my supply chain in business terms, if I have to explain business, it's different, technically it's different. Technology, I can explain all the things that you just mentioned, in business I explain that there are three Cs to a supply chain, capture it, curate it, consume it, and they so, oh I get it now, that's easy! >> Well, the data supply chain is interesting too, when you think about new data coming in, the system has to be reactive and handle new data, so you have to have this catalog thing. And that was something that we saw a lot of buzz here at the show, this enterprise catalog. What's your take on that, what's your assessment of the catalog, impact to customers, purpose at this point in time? >> I think it's very important, especially with the customers and large companies, who actually have data all over the place. I can share, as an example, we were talking to one of the customers who had 2600 applications, and they want to go for GDPR, we had a chat with them, and we said look, they were more comfortable saying, no, no, let's no use any machine. Because when you talk about machine, then you have to expose yourself a bit, right? And I said look, the machine is not going to be in my place, it's going to be in yours, your boundaries of firewall. But they were a little more concerned, they said let's go with a manual approach, let's do that, I said fair enough, it's your call, we can do that as well. But guess what? 2600 applications, you can't discover manually, it's just not possible. >> John: Yeah, you need help. A lot of data streaming and-- >> I guess I'm just letting you know it's very, I'm just answering your question. The data catalog is extremely important, if you really want to get a sense of where the data is residing, because data is not in one or two applications, it's all over the place. >> Well I'm impressed by the data catalog positioning, but then also, when you look at the Azure announcement they had, that Informatica had. You're essentially seeing hybrid cloud playing out as a real product. So that's an easy migration, of bringing in some of those BI tools, bringing some democratization into the data discovery. Rajeev, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, love the work you do, and I just want you to take a minute, just to end the segment out. Explain the work that you do, you have two roles, real quick, explain your two primary roles. You've got the, you incubate new stuff, which is hard to do, but, I'm an entrepreneur, I love the hard problems, but also you're doing talent. Take a minute to kind of explain, real quickly, those two roles, for, super important. >> well, the first one is basically that I, my role, I look at any ideas that are, that we can incubate as a business, and we can work within Accenture, different entities within Accenture to make sure that we go to clients in a much more quiescent manner, and see how we can have an impact to our top line. And that's a big thing, because our, we are a service as a business and, we have to be very innovative to come to know how do we increase our business. >> Any examples that you can share, of that stuff that you worked on? >> So, one is, right now, I'm spending a lot of my time in, on fueling our data business itself. We just recently launched our data business group, right? We have our market way in this position, is called applied intendance, which you may be aware, which includes data, analytics, advanced analytics, and then artificial intelligence, all put together, then we can solve these problems. >> And you guys got a zillion data scientists, I know that, you guys have been hiring really, really strong people. >> It's a very strong team. But on that, what I feel is that, the data is a critical foundation, really critical foundation for an intelligent enterprise. You can become and intelligent enterprise unless you have right data, to your point. And right data means curated data, in the set, in the fashion that can help you become, draw more insights from your enterprise. And that's possible if you invest in data strongly, and selection of data so strongly, but that's why we are fueling that, so I'm just letting you know that I'm spending most of my time right now to enhance our capability, you know, enhance our power in on that, and go to market with that. The second thing which I am investing right now, which is, there is a few more ideas, but one more, which could be very useful for you to know, is, while companies are moving to the new, they have to also, they have to rely on their people. Ultimately the companies are made of people. Like us, right? And if you can, if you are not retooling yourself, you cannot reimagine the future of your organization as well. >> You're talking about the peoples, their own skills, their job functions, okay-- >> So I'm working on a concept called workforce of the future right, how can 44 companies, large companies, how can they transform their talent, and their, even leadership as well, so that they are ready for the future and they can be more relevant. >> Yeah, and this is the argument we always see on theCUBE, oh, automation's going to take jobs away, well, I mean certainly automating repetitive tasks, no one wants to do those, (laughing) but the value is going to shift, that's where the opportunities are, is that how you see that future workforce? >> Absolutely, it's one of the complimentary, we have Paul Daugherty, whom you know, who's the Chief Technology Officer of Accenture Technology. Accenture, Accenture as a firm, he, he's a Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for Accenture He has recently written a book called Human + Machine, exactly talked about the same concept that, we actually all believe, very, very strongly that, the future is all about augmenting humans together. So there are tasks which machines should be doing, and there are tasks where humans should be doing, and there are tasks which both of them do collaboratively, and that's what we are trying to boast. >> Cloud world, we're doing it here in theCUBE, here at Informatica World. Rajeev, thanks so much for spending time-- >> Sajeev. (laughing) Sajeev, I mean, thanks for coming on. Sorry my bad, a little late in the day. But we're bringing it out here at Informatica World, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, here with Accenture inside theCUBE, here at Informatica World in Las Vegas. Be right back with more coverage, after this short break. Thank you. (bubbly 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)