>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2018, brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone, this is theCube, exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2018, live in Las Vegas at the Venetian Ball Room here. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, analyst here at theCUBE, with Peter Burris, analyst and also my co-host these past two days. Our next guest is Bruce Chizen, who is the executive chairman of Informatica, one of the leaders of the company. Great to have you back, good to see you. >> Good, great to be here, guys. >> It's like an annual pilgrimage. We get together here, and hear the perspective. Also, we had Jerry Held on yesterday, board member, very senior in the industry. You guys are legends. You've been there, done that. You've seen how many waves, how many waves have you seen? >> Yeah, I was just sharing with somebody, I was at Microsoft in 1983, so I guess I go back a little while. >> You've seen a lot of waves. Okay, so this wave is interesting, because we were talking about the keynote and talking about the timing of how data, super important, there's no debate on the role of data, but timing in the industry, you got cloud, multi-cloud, you've got things like containerization, Kubernetes, you're starting to see that microservices model appear. The role of virtualization is not as prominent as it once was, given what's happening in the stack, but certainly, data is super-strategic. GDPR, this Friday, goes into action. So, shot across the bow with GDPR, data at the center. Explain the phenomenon. >> Yeah, so, look, what's happening is, more data is being generated today than ever before. I think Anil Chakravarthy, CEO, said this morning during his keynote, it's increasing twofold every six months. It's just an amazing amount of data that's occurring, both through data warehouses, as well as realtime data through things like IoT and other streaming types of mechanisms, and at the same time, every enterprise in the world is trying to figure out how to transform this business, leveraging that data, and that data exists across so many different platforms, whether it's on-premise, whether it's the cloud, whether it's a combination of both, whether it's multiple clouds. So, trying to homogenize all this data, or to be able to capture it and get it usable in one place for analytics, for decision making, is an incredible task. Fortunately, it plays into Informatica's strength. >> I want to get your thoughts on two dimensions to that, because I agree, that's all happening, but you add the pressure to scale with the cloud, okay, that is a huge deal, okay, as well as, build then new applications faster. So, this pressure, not just to kind of get it right in the data, you got to scale with the cloud, so there's a lot of big things being built out. >> Yeah, and it's not as simple as the cloud, it's the combination of leveraging on-premise workflows with the cloud, with new applications or new workflows, and how do you make sure you have data integrity between those two environments? And I'll add another layer to it, most enterprises don't want to be held hostage to one cloud infrastructure provider, and what you are seeing is, those enterprises leveraging multiple cloud infrastructures. So, between the data that's on-premise, the data that might be residing in Azure, data that might be residing in AWS, trying to make sure that there's one view of this data, and that it's secure, it's cleansed, it's of high quality, is a greater task than ever before. >> So, Bruce, let me build on that and see if you agree with this. It sounds to what you're suggesting is that we've got all this data, it's growing very fast, but we have to be able to do two things to it. We have to be able to organize it, and we have to turn it into objects or things that have business value so that we can generate returns on it, appreciable increasing returns on it. Is that kind of the centerpiece of what we're talking about here at Informatica World? >> Absolutely, and if you look at the quick success of the enterprise data catalog that was launched last year and the number of customers that have already adopted the platform, which really is a catalog of the metadata that sits across the data across the entire enterprise. The fact that so many customers have adopted a 1.O product that quickly is validation that they want to be able to leverage and take advantage of all of this data that's sitting in thousands and thousands of different entities within their own enterprise. >> So with your experience, you think the adoption's greater than what you've seen, but put it in comparison, compare the magnitude of that adoption. >> We expected a handful of customers to adopt it in the first year, we have hundreds of customers that have adopted it in the first year. >> John: So, well over the forecast. >> Well over our forecast. >> Well, they bought it. Are they adopting and changing the practices, evolving their organizations, imagining new ways of generating work, as a consequence of being able to discover and apply data faster? >> They know they want to analyze their data. They want to use tools like Power BI, tools like Tableau. What they haven't been able to do is use those tools as effectively as they would have liked to, 'cause they didn't a mechanism to capture all that data or to view all that data across their entire enterprise. The other challenge they had was there was no data integrity that existed, because the data in one repository was different than the data in a different repository. To be able to have one view of that data means that the information that they're analyzing is accurate, which didn't exist before. >> Alright, so what's next? That's table, not table stakes, but the first low-hanging fruit. Value proposition is, okay, I get a sense of the metadata, where is everything, so that's check. >> Yeah, so, there's two things in my mind, one is making sure that we make it easy for them to use any of the cloud platforms. So today, the company announced their relationship with Microsoft, with Azure, with Informatica's IPaaS running natively on Azure, in addition to what already exists with Amazon AWS. The second thing is to continue to add AI capability to that metadata, so instead of a person having to navigate and collect all of that information, is to use intelligence to be able to make sense of-- >> John: Machines. >> Machines. >> Streaming the data in faster, handling the volume. >> And being able to throw out garbage and use only what's really-- >> That's what I want to push you on, so everybody said, oh, we're going to apply AI, but they don't say what the AI is going to do, and I think specifically, as it relates to MDM, as it relates to catalogs, replaces some of these other things, it's identifying patterns, identifying inconsistencies in data objects, it's identifying how it feeds different workflows commonly. That kind of stuff. Are there other things that we're really trying to apply this AI to to improve data quality, data consistency, data flows, usability? >> It's going to do all of that, which is what was, it required a human to do in the past. In addition, as the machine, as the AI engine or the machine learns, the ability to do this more quickly is going to become apparent. So, with this massive amount of data being exposed, the last thing you want to do is to have the decision maker being slowed down. So AI is just going to speed it up significantly. >> Bruce, talk about the state of the company. Obviously, we've had Bruce on, we tried to get a little teaser out of him on what's going on with the board level, stock option, grants, so on and so forth. I'm only kidding. Obviously a valuable company, we've been watching it and covering you guys and pointing out, actually earlier on than others, the benefits of the data. Certainly it's become a very valuable private company. Once public, now private. You were involved in that journey, outcome for an offering soon, or bankers must be licking their chops, prospects, not saying when are they going public, I don't want to ask that question, but there's obviously a trajectory. What's the company's position, vis-à-vis the financial health and growth? >> Informatica will be one of those rare instances in the world of private equity, where a sponsor has come in and decided on a growth model top line revenue versus bottom line profitability. >> You mean shedding the parts? >> Shedding the parts, really squeezing the company for maintenance revenue, for cash. What Permira and CPP, the two investors, have done has really helped the company to continue to focus on growth. So, when we look at R&D expenditures, they're close to 200 million dollars, which is well above industry average as a percentage of revenue. >> So they came in to build the company. >> Came in to build it, and more importantly, grow it. It's exceeded our expectations, haven't determined a timeline to go public, there is a possibility you could see an offering sometime in 2019. >> And we talked with also Jerry and others yesterday about this notion of timing, right? Timing's everything in life. You couldn't ask for a better time to be the Switzerland, or whatever domicile you want to call that's neutral to multiple platforms. Certainly, the data layers' a nice position, you've got companies like NetApp underneath, having a nice layer, storage, so you've got the data fabric there, you guys are playing across multiple clouds. This makes it a unique opportunity. Now, why is this time for being the Switzerland of data important, and how should customers look at this timing of the movement for Informatica vis-à-vis the industry trend? >> Yeah, enterprises want to make sure they don't get held hostage to any one vendor. That happened in the past with the likes of an SAP for ERP. They don't want to fall into that trap. They want to be able to move their workflows between Azure, between AWS, between Oracle, and continue to have legacy workflows on-premise where necessary. So, they want someone, they want a provider who's going to provide them with a solution that's not biased and is not going to show any preference towards any one provider. Many years ago, I had the privilege of being the CEO of Adobe, and if you think about it, PDF, Acrobat, was the Swiss solution, or the Switzerland of documents. And the reason why PDF became so popular and became the standard was because nobody was comfortable with .DOC being that solution. The same is true-- >> Because of the incompatibility of the operating systems? >> .DOC, two reasons, one is nobody wanted to be held hostage to Microsoft, they already felt uncomfortable with Windows and Office. >> Ended up becoming hostage to Microsoft anyway, but that's all good. >> And, at the same time, .DOC showed preference towards a Microsoft environment. >> Peter: And it was the wrong technology. >> And it didn't work across platform. >> Exactly. >> In the case of Informatica, Informatica is the only scaled provider in the data business that has a solution that works across all environments, all vendors, all providers, hybrid, on-premise, cloud, multiple infrastructure providers. >> So, my summary of what everything you said Bruce is that Informatica today is a company that's going to help you organize your data, so you can put more data to work. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, Bruce, thanks for coming on. Great to see you, always a pleasure. We've got to do it again in the studio in Palo Alto, get you in, get some information out of you on what's going on with the public offering. (Bruce laughs) Great company, congratulations, it's been a fun ride, I can't wait to hear all the war stories when it's all said and done, great job. Switzerland of data here. At Informatica World, it's theCUBE, out in the open, sharing you the data here in Las Vegas. More live coverage, stay with us, Be right back. (techno music)