(ambient music) >> Narrator: From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto studios. During this quarantine, crew doing all the interviews, getting all the top story especially during this COVID pandemic. Great conversation here Jitesh Ghai, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Management with Informatica, CUBE alumni multi time. We can't be in person this year, because of the pandemic but a lot of great content. We've been doing a lot of interviews with you guys. Jitesh great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, great to see you again. We weren't able to make it happen in person this year, >> but if not in person, >> virtually will have to work. >>In our past conversations on theCUBE and through all the Informatica employees it's always been kind of an inside baseball, kind of inside the ropes conversation in the industry >> about data. >> Now more than ever, with the pandemic, you starting to see people seeing it. Oh, I get it now. I get why data is important. I can see why Cloud First, Mobile First, Data First strategies and now Virtual First, is now this transformational scene. Everyone's feeling it, you can't help not ignore it. It's happening. It's also highlighting what's working, what's not. I have to ask you in the current environment Jitesh what are you seeing as some of those opportunities that your customers are dealing with approach to data? 'Cause clearly, you're working with that data layer, there's a lot of innovation opportunities, you've got CLAIRE on the AI side, all great. But now with the pandemic, it's really forcing that conversation. I got to rethink about what's going to happen after and have a really good strategy. >> Yeah, you're exactly right. There's a broad based realization that, I'll take a step back. First, we all know that as global 2000 organizations or in general, we all need to be data driven, we need to make fact based decisions. And there is a lot of that good work that's happened over the last few years as organizations have realized just how important data is to innovate and to deliver new products and services, new business models. What's really happened is that, during this COVID pandemic, there is a greater appreciation for trust in data. Historically, organizations became data driven, we're on the journey of being increasingly data driven. However, there was some element of Oh, gut or experience and that combined with data will get us to the outcomes we're looking for, will enable us to make the decisions. In this pandemic world of great uncertainty, supply chains falling apart on occasion, groceries not getting delivered on time et cetra, et cetra. The appreciation and critical importance on the quality on the trust of data is greater than ever to drive the insights for organizations. Leaders are less hesitant or sorry, leaders are more hesitant to just go with your gut type of approaches. There is a tremendous reliance on data. And we're seeing it in particular, more than ever, as you can imagine in the healthcare provider sector, in the public sector with federal state and local, as all of these organizations are having to make very difficult decisions, and are increasingly relying on high quality, trustworthy governed data to help them make what can be life or death decision. So a big shift and appreciation for the importance and trustworthiness in their data, their data state and their insights. >> So as the GM of data management and Senior Vice President at Informatica, you get a good view of things. I got to ask you love this data 4.0 concept. Talk about what that means to you because you got customers have been doing data management with you guys for a while, but now it's data 4.0 that has a feeling of agility to it. It's got kind of a DevOps vibe. It feels like a lot of automation being discussed and you mentioned trust. What is data 4.0 mean? >> So data 4.0 for us is where AI and ML is powering data management. And so what do I mean by that? There is a greater insight and appreciation for high quality trustworthy data to enable organizations to make fact based decisions to be more data driven. But how do you do that when data is exponentially growing in volume, where data types are increasing, where data is moving increasingly between Clouds, between On-premises and Clouds between various ecosystems, new data sources are emerging, the internet of things is yet another exploding source of data. This is a lot of different types of data, a lot of volume of data, a lot of different locations, and gravity of data where data resides. So the question becomes how do you practically manage this data without intelligence and automation. And that's what the era of data 4.0 is. Where AI and ML is powering data management, making it more intelligent, automating more and more of what was historically manual to enable organizations to scale, to enable them to scale to the breadth of data that they need to get a greater understanding of their data landscape within the enterprise, to get a greater understanding of the quality of the data within their landscape, how it's moving, and the associated privacy implications of how that data is being used, how effectively it's protected, so on and so forth. All underpinned by our CLAIRE engine, which is AI and ML applied to metadata, to deliver the intelligence and enable the automation of the data management operations. >> Awesome. Thanks for taking the time to define that, love that. The question I want to ask you, I'll put you on the spot here because I think this is an important conversation we've been having and also writing a lot about it on siliconangle.com and that is customers say to us, "Hey, John, I'm investing in Cloud Native technologies, using Cloud data warehouse as a data lakes. I need to make this work because this is a scale opportunity. I need to come out of this pandemic with really agile, scalable solutions that I can move fast on my applications." How do you comment on that? What's your thoughts on this because, you guys are in the middle of all this with the data management. >> I couldn't agree more. Increasingly, data workloads are moving to the Cloud. It's projected that by 2022, 75% of all databases will be in the Cloud, and COVID-19 is really accelerating it. It's opening the eyes of leadership of decision makers to be truly Cloud First and Cloud Native, now more than ever. And so organizations, traditional banking organizations, highly regulated industries that have been hesitant to move to the cloud, are now aggressively embarking on that journey. And industries that were early adopters of the Cloud are now accelerating that journey. I mentioned earlier that, we had a very seamless transition as we moved to a work from home environment, and that's because our IT is Cloud First Cloud Native. And why is that? It's because it's through being Cloud First and Cloud Native that you get the resiliency, the agility, the flexibility benefits in these uncertain times. And we're seeing that with the data and analytics stack as well. Customers are accelerating the move to Cloud data warehouses to Cloud data lakes, and become Cloud Native for their data management stack in addition to the data analytics platforms. >> Great stuff which I agree with hundred percent. Cloud Native is where it goes but you aren't they're (laughs) yet. Still on Hybrid and Multi-cloud is a big discussion. I want to get your thoughts >> Completely. >> On how that's going to play up because if you put Hybrid cloud and Multi-cloud I see Public cloud it's amazing, we know that. But Hybrid and Multi-cloud as the next generation of kind of interoperability framework of Cloud services, you're going to have to overlay and manage data governance and privacy. It's going to get more complicated, right? So how are you seeing your customers approach that piece, on the Public side, and then with Hybrid, because that's become a big discussion point. >> So Hybrid is an absolutely critical enabling capability as organizations modernize their on premise estate into the Cloud. You need to be able to move and connect to your On-premise applications, databases, and migrate the data that's important into the Cloud. So Hybrid is an essential capability. When I say Informatica is Cloud First Cloud Native, being Cloud First Cloud Native as a data management as a service provider if you will, requires essentially capabilities of being able to connect to On-premise data sources and therefore, be Hybrid. So Hybrid architecture is an essential part of that. Equally, it's important to enable organizations to understand what needs to go to the Cloud. As you're modernizing your infrastructure, your applications, your data and analytics stack. You don't need to bring everything to the Cloud with you. So there's an opportunity for organizations to introduce efficiencies. And that's done by enabling organizations to really scan the data landscape On-premise, scan the data that already exists in the various Public clouds that they partner with, and understand what's important, what's not, what can be decommissioned and left behind to realize savings and what is important for the business and needs to be moved into a Cloud Native analytic stack. And that's really where our CLAIRE metadata intelligence capabilities come to bear. And that's really what serves as the foundation of data governance, data cataloging and data privacy, to enable organizations to get the right data into the Cloud. To do so, while ensuring privacy. And to ensure that they govern that data in their new now Cloud Native analytics stack, whether it's AWS, Azure, GCP, snowflake data, bricks, all partners, all deep partnerships that we have. >> Jitesh, I want to get your thoughts on something. I was having a Zoom call a couple weeks ago, with a bunch of CXO friends, people, practitioners, probably some of them are probably your customers. It was kind of a social get together. But we were talking about, how the world we're living in pandemic, from COVID data, fake news, and one of the comments was, finally the whole world now realized what my life like. And in referring to how we're seeing fake news and misinformation kind of screw up an election and you got COVID's got 10 zillion different data points and people are making it to tell stories. And what does it really mean? There's a lot of trust involved. People are confused, and all that's going on. Again, in that backdrop, he said that that's my world. >> Right. This is back down to some of the things you're talking about, trust. We've talked about metadata services in the past. This authenticity, the duck democratization has been around for a while in the enterprise, so that dealing with bad data or fake data or too much data, you can make data (laughs) into whatever you want. You got to make sense of it. What's your thoughts on the reaction to his comment? I mean, what does it make you feel? >> Completely agree, completely agree. And that goes back to the earlier comment I made about making fact based decisions that you can have confidence in because the insight is based on trusted data. And so you mentioned data democratization. Our point of view is to democratize data, you have to do it on a foundational governance, right? There's a reason why traffic lights exist, it's to facilitate or at least attempt to facilitate the optimal free flow of traffic without getting into accidents, without causing congestion, so on and so forth. Equally, you need to have a foundation of governance. And I realized that there's an optical tension of democratized data, which is, free data for everybody consume it whenever and however you want, and then governance, which seems to imply, locking things down controlling them. And really, when I say you need a foundation of data governance, you need to enable for organizations to implement guardrails so that data can be effectively democratized. So that data consumers can easily find data. They can understand how trustworthy it is, what the quality of it is, and they can access it in easy way and consume it, while adhering to the appropriate privacy policies that are fit for the use of that particular set of data that a data and data consumer wants to access. And so, how do you practically do that? That's where data 4.0 AI power data management comes into play. In that, you need to build a foundation of what we call intelligent data governance. A foundation of scanning metadata, combining it with business metadata, linking it into an enterprise knowledge graph that gives you an understanding of an organization and enterprises data language. It auto tags auto curates, it gives you insight into the quality of the data, and now enables organizations to publish these curated data sets into a capability, what we call a data marketplace, so that much like Amazon.com, you can shop for the data, you can browse home and garden, electronics various categories. You can identify the data sets that are interesting to you, when you select them, you can look at the quality dimensions that have already been analyzed and associated with the data set. And you can also review the privacy policies that govern the use of that data set. And if you're interested in it, find the data sets, add them to your shopping cart, like you would do with Amazon.com, and check out. And when you do that triggers off an approval workflow to enable organizations to that last mile of governing access. And once approved, we can automatically provision the datasets to wherever you want to analyze them, whether it's in Tableau Power BI, an S3 market, what have you. And that is what I mean by a foundation of intelligent data governance. That is enabling data democratization. >> A common metadata layer gives you capabilities to use AI, I get that, There's a concept that you guys are talking a lot about, this augmentation to the data. This augmented data management activities that go on. What does that mean? Can you describe and explain that further and unpack that? This augmented data management activity? >> Yeah, and what do we mean by augmented data management, it's a really a first step into full blown automation of data management. In the old world, a developer would connect to a source, parse the source schema, connect to another source, parse its source schema, connect to the target, understand the target schema, and then pick the appropriate fields from the various sources, structure it through a mapping and then run a job that transforms the data and delivers it to a target database, in its structure, in its schema, in its format. Now that we have enterprise scale metadata intelligence, we know what source of data looks like, we know what targets exist as you simply pick sources and targets, we're able to automatically generate the mappings and automate this development part of the process so that organizations can more rapidly build out data pipelines to support their AI to operationalize AIML, to enable data science, and to enable analytics. >> Jitesh great insight. I really appreciate you explaining all this concept and unpacking that with me. Final point, I'd love you to have you just take a minute to put the plug in there for Informatica, what you're working on? What are your customers doing? What are some of the best practices coming out of the current situation? Take a minute to talk about that. >> Yeah, thank you, I'm happy to. It really comes down to focusing on enabling organizations to have a complete understanding of their data landscape. And that is, where we're enabling organizations to build an enterprise knowledge graph of technical metadata, business metadata, operational usage metadata, social metadata to understand and link and develop the necessary context to understand what data exists, where how it's used, what its purpose is and whether or not you should be using. And that's where we're building the Google for the enterprise to help organizations develop that. Equally, leveraging that insight, we're building out the necessary that insight and intelligence through CLAIRE, we're building out the automation in the data quality capabilities, in the data integration capabilities, in the metadata management capabilities, in the master data management capabilities, as well as the data privacy capability. So things that our tooling historically used to do manually, we're just automating it so that organizations can more productively access data, understand it and scale their understanding and insight and analytics initiatives with greater trust greater insight. It's all built on a foundation of our intelligent data platform. >> Love it, scaling data. It's that's really the future fast, available, highly available, integrated to the applications for AI. That's the future. >> Exactly right. Data 4.0, (laughs) AI power data management. >> I love talking about data in the future, because I think that's really valuable. And I think developers, and I've always been saying for over a decade now data is a critical piece for the applications, and AI really unlocks that of having it available, and surface is critical. You guys doing a great job. Thanks for the insight, appreciate you Jitesh. Thank you for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. >> You couldn't do it in person with Informatica world but we're getting the conversations here on the remote CUBE, CUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, you're watching CUBE conversation with Jitesh Ghai Senior Vice President General Manager, Data Manager at Informatica. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(ambient music) >> Narrator: From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto studios. During this quarantine, crew doing all the interviews, getting all the top story especially during this COVID pandemic. Great conversation here Jitesh Ghai, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Management with Informatica, CUBE alumni multi time. We can't be in person this year, because of the pandemic but a lot of great content. We've been doing a lot of interviews with you guys. Jitesh great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, great to see you again. We weren't able to make it happen in person this year, but if not in person, virtually will have to work. >> One of the things, I'm a half glass half full kind of guy but you can't look at this without saying man, it's bad. But it really highlights how things are going on. So first, how are you doing? How's everyone Informatica doing over there? You guys are doing okay? >> We are well, we are well, families well, the Informatica family is well. So overall, can't complain can't complain, I think it was remarkable how quickly we were able to transition to a work from home environment for our global 5000 plus organization. And really, the fact that we're Cloud First Cloud Native, both in our product offerings, as well as an IT organization really helped make that transition seamless. >> In our past conversations on theCUBE and through all the Informatica employees it's always been kind of an inside baseball, kind of inside the ropes conversation in the industry about data. Now more than ever, with the pandemic, you starting to see people seeing it. Oh, I get it now. I get why data is important. I can see why Cloud First, Mobile First, Data First strategies and now Virtual First, is now this transformational scene. Everyone's feeling it, you can't help not ignore it. It's happening. It's also highlighting what's working, what's not. I have to ask you in the current environment Jitesh what are you seeing as some of those opportunities that your customers are dealing with approach to data? 'Cause clearly, you're working with that data layer, there's a lot of innovation opportunities, you've got CLAIRE on the AI side, all great. But now with the pandemic, it's really forcing that conversation. I got to rethink about what's going to happen after and have a really good strategy. >> Yeah, you're exactly right. There's a broad based realization that, I'll take a step back. First, we all know that as global 2000 organizations or in general, we all need to be data driven, we need to make fact based decisions. And there is a lot of that good work that's happened over the last few years as organizations have realized just how important data is to innovate and to deliver new products and services, new business models. What's really happened is that, during this COVID pandemic, there is a greater appreciation for trust in data. Historically, organizations became data driven, we're on the journey of being increasingly data driven. However, there was some element of Oh, gut or experience and that combined with data will get us to the outcomes we're looking for, will enable us to make the decisions. In this pandemic world of great uncertainty, supply chains falling apart on occasion, groceries not getting delivered on time et cetra, et cetra. The appreciation and critical importance on the quality on the trust of data is greater than ever to drive the insights for organizations. Leaders are less hesitant or sorry, leaders are more hesitant to just go with your gut type of approaches. There is a tremendous reliance on data. And we're seeing it in particular, more than ever, as you can imagine in the healthcare provider sector, in the public sector with federal state and local, as all of these organizations are having to make very difficult decisions, and are increasingly relying on high quality, trustworthy governed data to help them make what can be life or death decision. So a big shift and appreciation for the importance and trustworthiness in their data, their data state and their insights. >> So as the GM of data management and Senior Vice President at Informatica, you get a good view of things. I got to ask you love this data 4.0 concept. Talk about what that means to you because you got customers have been doing data management with you guys for a while, but now it's data 4.0 that has a feeling of agility to it. It's got kind of a DevOps vibe. It feels like a lot of automation being discussed and you mentioned trust. What is data 4.0 mean? >> So data 4.0 for us is where AI and ML is powering data management. And so what do I mean by that? There is a greater insight and appreciation for high quality trustworthy data to enable organizations to make fact based decisions to be more data driven. But how do you do that when data is exponentially growing in volume, where data types are increasing, where data is moving increasingly between Clouds, between On-premises and Clouds between various ecosystems, new data sources are emerging, the internet of things is yet another exploding source of data. This is a lot of different types of data, a lot of volume of data, a lot of different locations, and gravity of data where data resides. So the question becomes how do you practically manage this data without intelligence and automation. And that's what the era of data 4.0 is. Where AI and ML is powering data management, making it more intelligent, automating more and more of what was historically manual to enable organizations to scale, to enable them to scale to the breadth of data that they need to get a greater understanding of their data landscape within the enterprise, to get a greater understanding of the quality of the data within their landscape, how it's moving, and the associated privacy implications of how that data is being used, how effectively it's protected, so on and so forth. All underpinned by our CLAIRE engine, which is AI and ML applied to metadata, to deliver the intelligence and enable the automation of the data management operations. >> Awesome. Thanks for taking the time to define that, love that. The question I want to ask you, I'll put you on the spot here because I think this is an important conversation we've been having and also writing a lot about it on siliconangle.com and that is customers say to us, "Hey, John, I'm investing in Cloud Native technologies, using Cloud data warehouse as a data lakes. I need to make this work because this is a scale opportunity. I need to come out of this pandemic with really agile, scalable solutions that I can move fast on my applications." How do you comment on that? What's your thoughts on this because, you guys are in the middle of all this with the data management. >> I couldn't agree more. Increasingly, data workloads are moving to the Cloud. It's projected that by 2022, 75% of all databases will be in the Cloud, and COVID-19 is really accelerating it. It's opening the eyes of leadership of decision makers to be truly Cloud First and Cloud Native, now more than ever. And so organizations, traditional banking organizations, highly regulated industries that have been hesitant to move to the cloud, are now aggressively embarking on that journey. And industries that were early adopters of the Cloud are now accelerating that journey. I mentioned earlier that, we had a very seamless transition as we moved to a work from home environment, and that's because our IT is Cloud First Cloud Native. And why is that? It's because it's through being Cloud First and Cloud Native that you get the resiliency, the agility, the flexibility benefits in these uncertain times. And we're seeing that with the data and analytics stack as well. Customers are accelerating the move to Cloud data warehouses to Cloud data lakes, and become Cloud Native for their data management stack in addition to the data analytics platforms. >> Great stuff which I agree with hundred percent. Cloud Native is where it goes but you aren't they're (laughs) yet. Still on Hybrid and Multi-cloud is a big discussion. I want to get your thoughts >> Completely. >> On how that's going to play up because if you put Hybrid cloud and Multi-cloud I see Public cloud it's amazing, we know that. But Hybrid and Multi-cloud as the next generation of kind of interoperability framework of Cloud services, you're going to have to overlay and manage data governance and privacy. It's going to get more complicated, right? So how are you seeing your customers approach that piece, on the Public side, and then with Hybrid, because that's become a big discussion point. >> So Hybrid is an absolutely critical enabling capability as organizations modernize their on premise estate into the Cloud. You need to be able to move and connect to your On-premise applications, databases, and migrate the data that's important into the Cloud. So Hybrid is an essential capability. When I say Informatica is Cloud First Cloud Native, being Cloud First Cloud Native as a data management as a service provider if you will, requires essentially capabilities of being able to connect to On-premise data sources and therefore, be Hybrid. So Hybrid architecture is an essential part of that. Equally, it's important to enable organizations to understand what needs to go to the Cloud. As you're modernizing your infrastructure, your applications, your data and analytics stack. You don't need to bring everything to the Cloud with you. So there's an opportunity for organizations to introduce efficiencies. And that's done by enabling organizations to really scan the data landscape On-premise, scan the data that already exists in the various Public clouds that they partner with, and understand what's important, what's not, what can be decommissioned and left behind to realize savings and what is important for the business and needs to be moved into a Cloud Native analytic stack. And that's really where our CLAIRE metadata intelligence capabilities come to bear. And that's really what serves as the foundation of data governance, data cataloging and data privacy, to enable organizations to get the right data into the Cloud. To do so, while ensuring privacy. And to ensure that they govern that data in their new now Cloud Native analytics stack, whether it's AWS, Azure, GCP, snowflake data, bricks, all partners, all deep partnerships that we have. >> Jitesh, I want to get your thoughts on something. I was having a Zoom call a couple weeks ago, with a bunch of CXO friends, people, practitioners, probably some of them are probably your customers. It was kind of a social get together. But we were talking about, how the world we're living in pandemic, from COVID data, fake news, and one of the comments was, finally the whole world now realized what my life like. And in referring to how we're seeing fake news and misinformation kind of screw up an election and you got COVID's got 10 zillion different data points and people are making it to tell stories. And what does it really mean? There's a lot of trust involved. People are confused, and all that's going on. Again, in that backdrop, he said that that's my world. >> Right. This is back down to some of the things you're talking about, trust. We've talked about metadata services in the past. This authenticity, the duck democratization has been around for a while in the enterprise, so that dealing with bad data or fake data or too much data, you can make data (laughs) into whatever you want. You got to make sense of it. What's your thoughts on the reaction to his comment? I mean, what does it make you feel? >> Completely agree, completely agree. And that goes back to the earlier comment I made about making fact based decisions that you can have confidence in because the insight is based on trusted data. And so you mentioned data democratization. Our point of view is to democratize data, you have to do it on a foundational governance, right? There's a reason why traffic lights exist, it's to facilitate or at least attempt to facilitate the optimal free flow of traffic without getting into accidents, without causing congestion, so on and so forth. Equally, you need to have a foundation of governance. And I realized that there's an optical tension of democratized data, which is, free data for everybody consume it whenever and however you want, and then governance, which seems to imply, locking things down controlling them. And really, when I say you need a foundation of data governance, you need to enable for organizations to implement guardrails so that data can be effectively democratized. So that data consumers can easily find data. They can understand how trustworthy it is, what the quality of it is, and they can access it in easy way and consume it, while adhering to the appropriate privacy policies that are fit for the use of that particular set of data that a data and data consumer wants to access. And so, how do you practically do that? That's where data 4.0 AI power data management comes into play. In that, you need to build a foundation of what we call intelligent data governance. A foundation of scanning metadata, combining it with business metadata, linking it into an enterprise knowledge graph that gives you an understanding of an organization and enterprises data language. It auto tags auto curates, it gives you insight into the quality of the data, and now enables organizations to publish these curated data sets into a capability, what we call a data marketplace, so that much like Amazon.com, you can shop for the data, you can browse home and garden, electronics various categories. You can identify the data sets that are interesting to you, when you select them, you can look at the quality dimensions that have already been analyzed and associated with the data set. And you can also review the privacy policies that govern the use of that data set. And if you're interested in it, find the data sets, add them to your shopping cart, like you would do with Amazon.com, and check out. And when you do that triggers off an approval workflow to enable organizations to that last mile of governing access. And once approved, we can automatically provision the datasets to wherever you want to analyze them, whether it's in Tableau Power BI, an S3 market, what have you. And that is what I mean by a foundation of intelligent data governance. That is enabling data democratization. >> A common metadata layer gives you capabilities to use AI, I get that, There's a concept that you guys are talking a lot about, this augmentation to the data. This augmented data management activities that go on. What does that mean? Can you describe and explain that further and unpack that? This augmented data management activity? >> Yeah, and what do we mean by augmented data management, it's a really a first step into full blown automation of data management. In the old world, a developer would connect to a source, parse the source schema, connect to another source, parse its source schema, connect to the target, understand the target schema, and then pick the appropriate fields from the various sources, structure it through a mapping and then run a job that transforms the data and delivers it to a target database, in its structure, in its schema, in its format. Now that we have enterprise scale metadata intelligence, we know what source of data looks like, we know what targets exist as you simply pick sources and targets, we're able to automatically generate the mappings and automate this development part of the process so that organizations can more rapidly build out data pipelines to support their AI to operationalize AIML, to enable data science, and to enable analytics. >> Jitesh great insight. I really appreciate you explaining all this concept and unpacking that with me. Final point, I'd love you to have you just take a minute to put the plug in there for Informatica, what you're working on? What are your customers doing? What are some of the best practices coming out of the current situation? Take a minute to talk about that. >> Yeah, thank you, I'm happy to. It really comes down to focusing on enabling organizations to have a complete understanding of their data landscape. And that is, where we're enabling organizations to build an enterprise knowledge graph of technical metadata, business metadata, operational usage metadata, social metadata to understand and link and develop the necessary context to understand what data exists, where how it's used, what its purpose is and whether or not you should be using. And that's where we're building the Google for the enterprise to help organizations develop that. Equally, leveraging that insight, we're building out the necessary that insight and intelligence through CLAIRE, we're building out the automation in the data quality capabilities, in the data integration capabilities, in the metadata management capabilities, in the master data management capabilities, as well as the data privacy capability. So things that our tooling historically used to do manually, we're just automating it so that organizations can more productively access data, understand it and scale their understanding and insight and analytics initiatives with greater trust greater insight. It's all built on a foundation of our intelligent data platform. >> Love it, scaling data. It's that's really the future fast, available, highly available, integrated to the applications for AI. That's the future. >> Exactly right. Data 4.0, (laughs) AI power data management. >> I love talking about data in the future, because I think that's really valuable. And I think developers, and I've always been saying for over a decade now data is a critical piece for the applications, and AI really unlocks that of having it available, and surface is critical. You guys doing a great job. Thanks for the insight, appreciate you Jitesh. Thank you for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. >> You couldn't do it in person with Informatica world but we're getting the conversations here on the remote CUBE, CUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, you're watching CUBE conversation with Jitesh Ghai Senior Vice President General Manager, Data Manager at Informatica. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Host: Live from Midtown Manhattan it's The Cube! Covering Big Data New York City 2017, brought to you by Silicon Angle Media, and its Ecosystem sponsors. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live, The Cube in New York City for Big Data NYC, this is our fifth year, doing our own event, not with O'Reilly or Cloud Era at Strata Data, which as Hadoop World, Strata Conference, Strata Hadoop, now called Strata Data, probably called Strata AI next year, we're The Cube every year, bringing you all the great data, and what's going on. Entrepreneurs, VCs, thought leaders, we interview them and bring that to you. I'm John Furrier with our next guest, Greg Sands, who's the managing director and founder of Costa Nova ventures in Palo Alto, started out as an entrepreneur himself, then single shingle out there, now he's a big VC firm on a third fund. >> On the third fund. >> Third fund. How much in that fund? >> 175 million dollar fund. >> So now you're a big firm now, congratulations, and really great to see your success. >> Thanks very much. I mean, we're still very much an early stage boutique focused on companies that change the way the world does business, but it is the case that we have a bigger team and a bigger fund, to go do the same thing. >> Well you've been great to work with, I've been following you, we've known each other for a while, watched you left Sir Hill and start Costanova, but what's interesting is that, I can kind of joke and kid you, the VC inside joke about being a big firm, because I know you want to be small, and like to be small, help entrepreneurs, that's your thing. But it's really not a big firm, it's a few partners, but a lot of people helping companies, that's your ethos, that's what you're all about at your firm. Take a minute to just share with the folks the kinds of things you do and how you get involved in companies, you're hands on, you roll up your sleeves. You get out of the way at the right time, you help when you can, share your ethos. >> Yeah, absolutely so the way we think of it is, combining the craft of old school venture capital, with a modern operating team, and so since most founder these days are product-oriented, our job is to think like product people, not think like investors. So we think like product people, we do product level analysis, we do customer discovery, we do, we go ride along on sales calls when we're making investment decisions. And then we do the things that great venture capitalists have done for years, and so for example, at Alatian, who I know has been on the show today, we were able to incubate them in our office for a year, I had many conversations with Sathien after he'd sold the first two or three customers. Okay, who's the next person we hire? Who isn't a founder? Who's going to go out and sell? What does that person look like? Do you go straight to a VP? Or do you hire an individual contributor? Do you hire someone for domain, or do you hire someone for talent? And that's the thing that we love doing. Now we've actually built out an operating team so marketing partner, Martino Alcenco, and Jim Wilson as a sales partner, to really help turn that into a program, so that they can, we can take these founders who find product market fit, and say, how do we help you build the right sales process and marketing process, sales team and marketing team, for your company, your customer, your product? >> Well it's interesting since you mention old school venture capital, I'll get into some of the dynamics that are going on in Silicon valley, but it's important to bring that forward, because now with cloud you can get to critical mass on the fly wheel, on economics, you can see the visibility faster now. >> Greg: Absolutely. >> So the game of the old school venture capitalist is all the same, how do you get to cruising altitude, whatever metaphor you want to use, the key was getting there, and sometimes it took a couple of rounds, but now you can get these companies with five million, maybe $10 million funding, they can have unit economics visibility, scales insight, then the scale game comes in, so that seems to be the secret trick right now in venture is, don't overspend, keep the valuation in range and allows you to look for multiple exits potentially, or growth. Talk about that dynamic, because this is like, I call it the hour glass. You get through the hour glass, everyone's down here, but if you can sneak through and get the visibility on the economics, then you grow quickly. >> Absolutely. I mean, it's exactly right an I haven't heard the hour glass metaphor before but I like it. You want to basically get through the narrows of product market fit and the beginnings of scalable sales and marketing. You don't need to know all the answers, but you can do that in a capital-efficient way, building really solid foundations for future explosive growth, look, everybody loves fast growth and big markets, and being grown into. But the number of people who basically don't build those foundations and then say, go big or go home! And they take a ton of money, and they go spend all the money, doing things that just fundamentally don't work, and they blow themselves up. >> Well this is the hourglass problem. You have, once you get through that unique economics, then you have true scale, and value will increase. Everybody wins there so it's about getting through that, and you can get through it fast with good mentoring, but here's the challenge that entrepreneurs fall into the trap. I call it the, I think I made it trap. And what happens is they think they're on the other side of the hourglass, but they still haven't even gone through the straight and narrow yet, and they don't know it. And what they do is they over fund and implode. That seems to be a major trap I see a lot of entrepreneurs fall into, while I got a 50 million pre on my B round, or some monster valuation, and they get way too much cash, and they're behaving as if they're scaling, and they haven't even nailed it yet. >> Well, I think that's right. So there's certainly, there are stages of product market fit, and so I think people hit that first stage, and they say, oh I've got it. And they try to explode out of the gates. And we, in fact I know one good example of somebody saying, hey, by the way, we're doing great in field sales, and our investors want us to go really fast, so we are going to go inside and we, my job was to hire 50 inside people, without ever having tried it. And so we always preach crawl, walk, run, right? Hire a couple, see how it works. Right, in a new channel. Or a new category, or an adjacent space, and I think that it's helpful to have an investor who has seen the whole picture to say, yeah, I know it looks like light at the end of the tunnel, but see how it's a relatively small dot? You still got to go a little farther, and then the other thing I say is, look, don't build your company to feed your venture capitalist ego. Right? People do these big rounds of big valuations, and the big dog investors say, go, go, go! But, you're the CEO. Your job is analyze the data. >> John: You can find during the day (laughs). >> And say, you know, given what we know, how fast should we go? Which investments should we make? And you've got to own that. And I think sometimes our job is just to be the pulling guard and clear space for the CEO to make good decisions. >> So you know I'm a big fan, so my bias is pretty much out there, love what you guys are doing. Tim Carr is a Pivot North doing the same thing. Really adding value, getting down and dirty, but the question that entrepreneurs always ask me and talk privately, not about you, but in general, I don't want the VC to get in the way. I want them, I don't want them to preach to me, I don't want too many know-it-alls on my board, I want added value, but again, I don't want the preaching, I don't want them to get in the way, 'cause that's the fear. I'm not saying the same about VCs in general, but that's kind of the mentality of an entrepreneur. I want someone who's going to help me, be in the boat with me, but not be in my way. How do you address that concern to the founders who think, not think like that, but might have a fear. >> Well, by the way, I think it's a legitimate fear, and I think it actually is uncorrelated with added value, right? I think the idea that the board has certain responsibilities, and management has certain responsibilities, is incredibly important. And I think, I can speak for myself in saying, I'm quite conscious of not crossing that line, I think you talk. >> John: You got to build a return, that's the thing. >> But ultimately I would say to an entrepreneur, I'd just say, hey look, call references. And by the way, here are 30 names and phone numbers, and call any one of them, because I think that people who are, so a venture capital know-it-all, in the board room, telling CEOs what to do, destroys value. It's sand in the gears, and it's bad for the company. >> Absolutely, I agree 100% >> And some of my, when I talk about being a pulling guard for the CEO, that's what I'm talking about, which is blocking people who are destructive. >> And rolling the block for a touchdown, kind of use the metaphor. Adding value, that's the key, and that's why I wanted to get that out there because most guys don't get that nuance, and entrepreneurs, especially the younger ones. So it's good and important. Okay, let's talk about culture, obviously in Silicon Valley, I get, reading this morning in the Wymo guy, and they're writing it, that's the Silicon Valley, that's not crazy, there's a lot of great people in Silicon Valley, you're one of them. The culture's certainly an innovative culture, there's been some things in the press, inclusion and diversity, obviously is super important. This whole brogrammer thing that's been kind of kicked around. How are you dealing with all that? Because, you know, this is a cultural shift, but I think it's being made out more than it really is, but there's still our core issues, your thoughts on the whole inclusion and diversity, and this whole brogrammer blowback thing. >> Yeah, well so I think, so first of all, really important issues, glad we're talking about them, and we all need to get better. And to me the question for us has been, what role do we play? And because I would say it is a relatively small subset of the tech industry, and the venture capital industry. At the same time the behavior of that has become public is appalling. It's appalling and totally unacceptable, and so the question is, okay, how can we be a part of the stand-up part of the ecosystem, and some of which is calling things out when we see them. Though frankly we work with and hang out with people and we don't see them that often, and then part of which is, how do we find a couple of ways to contribute meaningfully? So for example this summer we ran what we called the Costanova Access Fellowship, intentionally, trying to provide first opportunity and venture capital for people who traditionally haven't had as much access. We created an event in the spring called, Seat at the Table, really, particularly around women in the tech industry, and it went so well that we're running it in New York on October 19th, so if you're a woman in tech in New York, we'd love to see you then. And we're just trying to figure-- >> You're doing it in an authentic way though, you're not really doing it from a promotional standpoint. It's legit. >> Yeah, we're just trying to do, you know, pick off a couple of things that we can do, so that we can be on the side of the good guys. >> So I guess what you're saying is just have high integrity, and be part of the solution not part of the problem. >> That's right, and by the way, both of these initiatives were ones that were kicked off in late 2016, so it's not a reaction to things like binary capital, and the problems at uper, both of which are appalling. >> Self-awareness is critical. Let's get back to the nuts and bolts of the real reason why I wanted you to come on, one was to find out how much money you have to spend for the entrepreneurs that are watching. Give us the update on the last fund, so you got a new fund that you just closed, the new fund, fund three. You have your other funds that are still out there, and some funds reserved, which, what's the number amount, how much are you writing checks for? Give the whole thesis. >> Absoluteley. So we're an early stage investor, so we lead series A and seed financing companies that change the way the world does business, so up and down the stack, a business-facing software, data-driven applications. Machine-learning and AI driven applications. >> John: But the filter is changing the way the world works? >> The way, yes, but in particularly the way the world does business. You can think of it as a business-facing software stack. We're not social media investors, it's not what we know, it's not what we're good at. And it includes security and management, and the data stack and-- >> Joe: Enterprise and emerging tech. >> That's right. And the-- >> And every crazy idea in between. >> That's right. (laughs) Absolutely, and so we're participate in or leave seed financings as most typically are half a million to maybe one and a quarter, and we'll lead series A financing, small ones might be two or two and a half million dollars at the outer edge is probably a six million dollar check. We were just opening up in the next couple of days, a thousand square feet of incubation space at world headquarters at Palo Alto. >> John: Nice. >> So Alation, Acme Ticketing and Zen IQ are companies that we invested in. >> Joe: What location is this going to be at? >> That's, near the Fills in downtown Palo Alto, 164 staff, and those three companies are ones where we effectively invested at formation and incubated it for a year, we love doing that. >> At the hangout at Philsmore and get the data. And so you got some funds, what else do you have going on? 175 million? >> So one was a $100 million fund, and then fund two was $135 million fund, and the last investment of fund two which we announced about three weeks ago was called Roadster, so it's ecommerce enablement for the modern dealerships. So Omnichannel and Mobile First infrastructure for auto-dealers. We have already closed, and had the first board meeting for the first new investment of fund three, which isn't yet announced, but in the land of computer vision and deep learning, so a couple of the subjects that we care deeply about, and spend a lot of time thinking about. >> And the average check size for the A round again, seed and A, what do you know about the? The lowest and highest? >> The average for the seed is half a million to one and a quarter, and probably average for a series A is four or five. >> And you'll lead As. >> And we will lead As. >> Okay great. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now that gets you excited? It doesn't have to be a portfolio company, but the research you're doing, thing, tires you're kicking, in subjects, or domains? >> You know, so honestly, one of the great benefits of the venture capital business is that I get up and my neurons are firing right away every day. And I do think that for example, one of the things that we love is is all of the adulant infrastructure and so we've got our friends at Victor Ops that are in the middle of that space, and the thinking about how the modern programmer works, how everybody-- >> Joe: Is security on your radar? >> Security is very much on our radar, in fact, someone who you should have on your show is Asheesh Guptar, and Casey Ella, so she's just joined Bug Crowd as the CEO and Casey moves over to CTO, and the word Bug Bounty was just entered into the Oxford Dictionary for the first time last week, so that to me is the ultimate in category creation. So security and dev ops tools are among the things that we really like. >> And bounties will become the norm as more and more decentralized apps hit the scene. Are you doing anything on decentralized applications? I'm not saying Blockchain in particular, but Blockchain like apps, distributing computing you're well versed on. >> That's right, well we-- >> Blockchain will have an impact in your area. >> Blockchain will have an impact, we just spent an hour talking about it in the context our off site in Decosona Lodge in Pascadero, it felt like it was important that we go there. And digging into it. I think actually the edge computing is actually more actionable for us right now, given the things that we're, given the things that we're interested in, and we're doing and they, it is just fascinating how compute centralizes and then decentralizes, centralizes and then decentralizes again, and I do think that there are a set of things that are fascinating about what your process at the edge, and what you send back to the core. >> As Pet Gelson here said in the QU, if you're not out in front of that next wave, you're driftwood, a lot of big waves coming in, you've seen a lot of waves, you were part of one that changed the world, Netscape browser, or the business plan for that first project manager, congratulations. Now you're at a whole nother generation. You ready? (laughs) >> Absolutely, I'm totally ready, I'm ready to go. >> Greg Sands here in The Cube in New York City, part of Big Data NYC, more live coverage with The Cube after this short break, thanks for watching. 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