>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Hello welcome back everyone, we're here for exclusive CUBE coverage here at The Venetian in Las Vegas, day one, getting setup for the exclusive pavilion opening kick-off party, we've been here all day, for two days, I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE, with Peter Burris, analyst at SiliconANGLE, we keep on theCUBE, our next guest, Board Member of Informatica for 10 years now, CUBE alumni Jerry Held, industry legend, veteran, been there done that, seen all the ways of innovation, Jerry great to see you, thanks for coming on! >> Great to be here, nice to see you guys again! >> Ten years at the board for Informatica, a lot, that's like, how many waves can happen in 10 years, what's been the journey, what's been your view? You're in all the board meetings approving all the, all the hires and stock option grants, and all the action, you see in the front row what's happening, what's the story? >> Well, it's been a great ride, it's an interesting company, I've been on a lot of boards, I've lost count of how many, both startups and then big public company boards, but Informatica's been a really fun ride. When I joined, we're goin' through super growth, my really good friend Sohaib Abbasi was running the place, he had a phenomenal 10 year run, I think 36 quarters of record growth in profit, just unbelievable, took it from an ETL company back when it started, to a full data integration company, kind of went from the first phase of data to the second phase where it was more than just moving data to a data warehouse, but all phases of data integration, and that was terrific, and then we got a point where it was time for another phase, and lot of things were happening, not only in terms of where the company was going, but where the industry was going. >> And what year was that, when that happened? >> So that was about two and a half, three years ago, when we decided that the best route was actually to go private, because some of the transitions were going to be pretty profound, for instance, just the model of selling software going from license to subscription, requires a dip in revenue, it requires restructuring your field, a lot of changes. >> John: A lot of product work? >> Yeah, yeah, so, we did go very successfully, we went private, and I don't know for some reason, they asked me to stay on the board through that transition, (John and Peter laughing) >> and it's been interesting being on the private side, now that it's a private company, it's run differently, we have some great private equity firms who are the investors, owners of the company, the board makeup is completely different, and we have a lot of people with a financial look at the company, but they're growth investors, they're some PE firms, that come in, and take a company apart, just try to get the most they can out of it. Luckily the investors that we've found believed in the future of the company, it's a growth company, it just needed to go through some restructuring. We're also really fortunate, when Sohaib decided it's time to retire, to promote Anil to be the CEO, and he's turned out to be fantastic, and we've had a number of changes really bringing in some fresh blood, new people into positions, really strengthen the team, and in the last couple years of Sohaib's tenure, he put a real focus on innovation, because we had gone down a path of requiring a number of pieces, putting them all together, but the innovation had sort of slowed down, well he started the process, and it really picked up speed through this transition, so the company has come out with a series of really new, innovative, products. So now, Informatica's like one of the hottest pre-IPO companies in the industry, if you think about enterprise software companies, >> Yeah, and we talk, I mean we've been here, watchin' from three, four years ago, we talked to Anil before he was the CEO, and he was doing the products, they brought in some product people, and they did the work, they buckled down. Okay, so I got to step back, before we came, before you came on, you and I were talking about waves, and you've seen waves, the relational database wave, and our comment was, people tend to poo-poo them, well that's never going to happen, eh, it's never going to happen. So I got to ask you, take us through what the wave is right now, what're you excited about because certainly, there's no doubt that commerce on this scalable cloud has opened up a new, kind of a new aperture, if you will, of opportunity, and it's impacting everybody, data is not just a category, it's fundamental in the fabric of this next big wave, what is your vision of this wave, what's exciting you? Take us through that. >> Well as we were saying, I've been in this data management business for 50 years now, so I've seen a lot of waves, 'about every 10 years you get a big wave, and I was there back at the birth of the relational database client server, and web, and cloud, and SaaS, and all these, each one, when they start, people poof--ooh, it's very cool, but, never take off, and there's a lot of people who miss great opportunities at the beginning of a wave, now we're clearly well into the cloud wave, as I think most people realize it's for real, and there's a lot happening. The one that I'm most excited about right now is in what I would call, you know we've had DBMS, Database Management Systems, I'll make up a new term right here, I've never used this before, so this is a first on your show >> John: Exclusive. >> Instead of DBMS, how about DAMS, Data Asset Management System? That's what we need. We have got such a proliferation of data, relational databases, no sequel databases, hadoop databases, we've got structured, unstructured, text, image, every kind of data, but it's proliferating at an amazing rate, right, we've got all kinds of types of data, sources of data, users of data, people now want to use data, not just the IT people but end-users, but it's out of control. We have this asset, and everybody talks about it, you can see here at these session, what's going to transform your business? Data, data disruption. But it's out of control. Nobody knows where the data is. Ask the CFO where all the financial assets, they can show you the spreadsheets, they can show you the reports, ask the Chief Information Officer, Chief Data Officer, they can't tell you. So what we need to do is manage the data asset, and how are we going to do that? As far as I'm concerned the single-most exciting thing coming out of Informatica, and there's a lot of exciting things at this conference, far-and-away to me the most exciting thing Enterprise Data Catalog. That is a Data Asset Management System, it allows you to look across every type of data in the enterprise, on-prem, in the cloud, all kinds of data, and get your hands around it, and you need to do it for two big reasons. One: Risk reduction, and two is: Reward enhancement, in other words, you have a way to reduce risk, improve governance, and, where you can just look at the news everyday, Facebook, GDPR, which is coming-- >> Friday. >> this week, this week is very timely, Europe is way ahead of us here, they're forcing companies to get their act together, but how do you do it? You need to get your act together on managing the data asset it's not managing the actual data, it's managing the metadata, where is the data, who has access to it, what's the security, how many copies do you have, how many different views of a customer do you have that are inconsistent? The way you need to do that is through an enterprise data catalog, and Informatica has a super exciting product, the most exciting products in the 10 years I've been on the board, this is the single most exciting product the company's come out with. >> Sounds like your bullish on this one, so we'll put that as a check-mark on that one. Let me ask you a question just to kind of take that to the next level. Jerry, what is this order of magnitude impact, in your opinion, obviously it's a big wave, can you kind of just give us a perspective, waves have multi-year lives, sometimes 10 plus years, Pat Gelsinger, former intel, would always talks about waves, sometimes they're 10, 20 year waves, what is the impact of this one, specifically around the catalog, what's it going to impact, order of magnitude, share your color commentary on how you see it shaping out. >> Well it's going to have these two huge impacts, let's just talk about on the risk reduction side, on the governance side, I mean, think about the potential impact, to Facebook, of losing control of their data, that company could well get split up. I mean there's a lot of talk about splitting up, how big an impact is that? Pretty damn big, right? >> Pretty big, yeah. >> I mean, it's huge. >> Yeah, billions, trillions. >> Yeah, and those kinds of risks are out there, and they've reached a point where the public, the government, is no longer willing to put up with it. Now think about the rewards side of it, the positive side. If you can get control over your data, and now you're doin' all this great analytics, people create data lakes, you know what's in those data lakes? Most of them are data swamps. They put a lot of data in there, but they don't know what's there. If you could take all that data in the data lakes, plus the stuff you have in the cloud, plus stuff you have other places, and now you want to answer that hard question. Get your analysts to be way more productive. How important is it when you get that insight, how do you measure the business value? I'm sure on your show you've had dozens of people give you a specific instance of oh, look what I did with Tableau, great product, I did all this stuff, and I discovered this, and I changed my business, right? You've had that? >> Oh, insights, come out of the woodwork, everywhere. >> Okay, however, ask the question, How many insights didn't come out, because these analysts didn't know where the data is, they didn't have access to all this data? They did find something, but think about what they could have found if they had a complete view of all the enterprise data, and how it related to all the other data coming from social media and everything. So, what's the value of an enterprise data catalog? I think it's enormous, enormous! >> Peter: But Jerry it's, so I think that's an interesting game, thought experiment, but if I were to combine that with another thing that excites me about what I'm hearing this week, the reality is there aren't enough analysts in the world to find it all. When we start applying machine learning to the process of creating, maintaining, sustaining, the understanding of the data assets, reforming, reforging data assets, ensuring that we are, not dependent on a manual processes in a catalog, it's that combination that makes it possible to actually augment the way that human beings look at these things. Ultimately these types of systems are going to provide options to the business. >> Yeah, and you hit it on an absolutely key point, what does it take to have a great data catalog? There are a number of companies that are trying to do data catalogs, some of 'em are doing small pieces, cataloging bits and pieces of the enterprise, interesting, but the word enterprise is key, you need something that spans the entire enterprise. And when you get that complicated, the human brain can't deal with it, so, you've hit on maybe on the most important points, you must have an enterprise data catalog that's based around a AI, machine learning, at least tool assistant. You're going to still have people that are going to be curating, you're going to have people that are going to be adding glossaries and all kinds of things, but at the core, there's so much data that you need to take the machine learning technology that's moving along quite quickly, and try to figure out what are all these relationships? That is at a core component of it. >> So we talked, so I want to throw this at you, you tell me if you agree with me. What that comes down to is, if everybody talks about AI, you talked about it earlier, taking jobs away, doing the work, increasingly I think we're going to look at AI as a technology that provides humans options, better forged, better formulated, well structured options, based on data, and that increasingly the thing about creating data value is, is your system creating new classes of options for pursuing the value of data, and this combination thing, AI, augmenting, by presenting options to human decision makers so that they can look at all that range, all those possible vectors that they could be pursuing, and choose the ones that are most attractive. >> Yeah I think there's two things-- >> Does that make sense? >> So there's two parts to it, one: you're exactly right, you can augment and give choices, but before it does that, it can eliminate a massive amount of just grunge work, most analysts, this is a well documented fact, most analysts spend 80% of their time in data prep, and 20% in analysis, that's pretty well industry standard right now, if you're doin' better than that you're doin' great. And what you can do, if you do the right form of cataloging get the data organized and then you use things like MDM, and data quality to cleanse it. Now you get to the point where the analyst is doing analysis and they're doing things, number one: That are more interesting, number two: That are more productive, and number three: That are going to have a bigger effect on your bottom line. >> Peter: Right, right. >> Let's talk about the role of data when it comes to IOT Edge for instance, in the cloud, okay this is now, 'cause of the scale, you mentioned the scale with AI, that helps with the scale of data coming in, you got that, now a customer's looking at an architectural shift with cloud, multi-cloud, and IOT whether it's Edge, or whatever that's defined as. How does the cataloging and the data vision you put forth, impacted by that, accelerates it, does it change it radically for the buyer, the user, the enterprise, how does that enterprise customer think about--? >> Well, it's another important source, so we have all these different sources of data, and a growing source is going to be IOT data, and if it's streaming in, going in to some repository, it needs to be cataloged, and correlated, with the rest of the data in your enterprise. Right now, a lot of IOT data is just going into some system off to the side, not correlated with the mainstream data. The thing that, I think is the big shift, when you go from DBMS, Database Management System, we're focused typically on a single data, whether it's IOT data, or it could be accounting data, the focus was on just that data, the difference with Data Asset Management System is think about your data as a whole, across your whole enterprise. >> A portfolio. >> The whole, the whole of your data asset, how do you manage that, it's not the bits and bytes, it's the overall thing, it's not the actual data, it's actually the metadata that you're managing. >> Or it's the data as it's being used, and the metadata describes data that's being used, so data, like anything else, you apply it to work, it generates value. Metadata describes how it's being applied, and then the underlying data elements are given context and semantic richness by the metadata. >> Jerry: Exactly, exactly. >> Alright so here, I'll throw out the old, if I'm Joe six-pack out in the street, I hear catalog, I go whoa! >> Yeah, he's talkin' about this stuff all the time! (chuckles) >> I go whoa, catalog? In my mind I get a mental model of a centralized database, I think hacker! 'Cause you know, government and all the hacks goin' on, you know, decentralized data's probably better, distributed data? So I hear catalog, my mind goes centralized, is that the right way to think about it, or obviously, I mean share, because security's critical on this. >> Absolutely, and so as you bring this view of data, just like when you have your financial books, where you have a central view of all your financial assets, there needs to be security, you have to have, allow access for people for the appropriate level of information that they're going to pull out, the data asset is no different. So you want to have a full view of all of your data, and you want to have ways to allow and restrict access to the information, it's not the data, it's just where is the data, and each of the data systems have secondary-- >> So it's not centralized, it's just metadata for visibility and auditing-- >> I think there's an important point, and I want to test this on you, 'cause you're askin' a great question. The information model from IBM, we used to, we've had catalogs with databases, we've had catalogs all over the place, highly stylized processes, stylized data, stuck in a catalog. One of the things that's especially interesting, is not the idea that we're going to start with a whole bunch of designs and put them in the catalog, but we're going to discover stuff about our data, and the catalog will emerge out of the attributes of data, and how it's working and how it's being used. >> If you, let's rewind back-- >> John: So the answer is no not centralized? >> Well, but it's not-- >> Peter: The metadata may be so much centralized, but the data's not. >> It's not a, we're not trying to do a centrally-designed architecture, so let's rewind 50 years, and go back to the beginning of relational databases, we had schemas, and back in the '70s, people were talkin' about, oh, let's come up with the schema for the corporation, we'll have one group go off, and they'll design everything: failed. Then they had data dictionaries where they were going to put it all in place: failed. And all of these things, where there was an attempt to centrally define and control the structure of data around the enterprise: failed. That is not what we're talking about. Data exists in all forms, with all sorts of schemas and definitions, and all types of databases in Oracle and SAP, and everything all we're doing is taking the metadata and relating it-- >> Peter: Allowing it to merge! >> So that we have a view of where everything is, that data's different than this data, it's managed by different software, but we have one view so that now, when an analyst wants to know how do I get the latest information on customer preferences for purchasing this? I can go here, here, and here, and I'll correlate those, and I'll pull 'em together with some tool. >> Final question, final question for you. If you think that to next level, you're implying, or actually saying, that philosophy of a catalog, implies that it's okay to have a zillion databases, I might have a post-risk database on this application, I might have an unstructured database over here, so in the future world, where we're living in a tsunami of data, apps need databases. So the idea of-- >> And they got to be different. >> And they're going to be a zillion, yeah, a lot of different databases proliferating is not a bad thing under your model. >> Absolutely, and we've tried having one answer, it doesn't work. And even if you ever could get a company, a large company you can't do it, but if you get a company that'd get one form, then they do an acquisition, and now they got other forms. That concept just doesn't work, it has to be a heterogeneous world, and you have to have a way to pull the pieces together, and that's why, just as a final point, I think what Informatica has done with this data enterprise data catalog, which is a phenomenal product, still early days, but growing at a phenomenal rate, fastest growth of any product ever. You need a company that's independent, that's not a stack company, it's not an Oracle or an SAP, it's not a cloud company, or an AWS, or an Azure, or Google, it's not a SaaS company, it's somebody who is the Switzerland of data, who can take data from every place, and just collect that metadata, and it has to be a company that understands machine learning and AI, that can use it to pull it together. >> And they got to work with the clouds too, they got to work with all the clouds. >> And it has to be a company that has interfaces to everything, which is what Informatica is, so it's a perfect fit. >> And it's not going to try to then use that to exact significant control over how everything operates. >> Exactly, and it's not trying to sell you an application, or a database, so, you need that Switzerland, and I think that's why, to me, in the 10 years that I've been on the board, I haven't seen a more exciting product, nor have I seen a customer reaction as dramatic as this, every customer's talking about EDC, and if they haven't before this conference, they will after this conference. (laughs) >> And the timing is critical on this too, talk about timing, the tailwinds for this movement right now, more than ever, sometimes timing is-- >> This week is a, I mean GDPR is a big deal, a big deal, >> It's a signal. >> And what's goin' on with Facebook and others is a big deal so, the timing is appropriate, and the product is fantastic, and I think it's going to be, when we look back next year, and we do this show. >> (laughing) That's great, we have nine years of history, you go back and say hey, 'member you said that? Right? Data is the central strategic asset not some corner case, GDPR is a signal, it's a shot across the bow, for all companies to get in the center. We coined the new term Database Asset Management System. >> No Data Asset Management System. >> Data Asset Management System. >> And we actually have research on that from a couple years ago. >> Okay, well we here, exclusive on theCUBE here, Data Asset Management System, asset is data, it's going to be worth money, it's going to be on the balance sheet soon. theCUBE is here, out in the open, Informatica World 2018. Jerry Held, Board Member, bringing his insight, thank you for sharing the data on theCUBE, we'll be back with more, stay with us, after this short break. (bubbly music)