>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante with theCUBE and welcome to this conversation. With me is Anil Singhal, who is the CEO of NETSCOUT. Anil, it's a pleasure to speak with you today. Thanks so much for coming on the program. >> Thank you. >> So I want to talk a little bit about NETSCOUT. We're kind of at theCUBE, we're sort of enamored by founder-led companies. I mean, you started NETSCOUT right around the same time that I entered the tech business, and you remember back then it was an industry dominated by IBM, monolithic systems were the norm, in the form of mainframes, you had mini computers, PCs, and things like PC local area networks, they were in their infancy. In fact, most of the PCs, as you remember, they didn't even have hard disks in them. So I want to start with, what was it that you saw 35 years ago that led you to start NETSCOUT and at the time, did you even imagine that you'd be creating a company with a billion dollars worth of revenue and a much larger market cap? >> Well, certainly I had not imagined where we'll be right now, and we didn't know that this'll be the outcome. I mean, we just happened to be at the right place at the right time, but we did have a vision. Some of you had the feeling, we are enamored by networking, and we thought that network will be the business. In fact, our business card in 91 said, "Network is the business." And so somehow we got that right, and we said, these things will be connected. And overall, we found then that the IP convergence first in the enterprise in 90s, and then internet, and carriers moving from analog to digital, (indistinct) talk about digital transformation in last few years, but this has been going on for the last 30 years. And as we add what we were doing, become relevant to more and more people over time. For example, now even power companies use our product. And we have IoT devices coming in. So basically what we do is we said we are going to provide visibility through looking at the traffic, through the lens and the vantage point of the network. A lot of people think we are just doing network monitoring or had been doing that. But actually we use the network as a vantage point, which other people are not doing, most of the people have accidental data from devices as the basis of visibility. And that turned out to be very successful, but at some point, different points in our life, we became responsible for the market, not just for NETSCOUT. And that changed the shape of the company, and what we did and how we drove the innovation. >> I want to get into some of that, but I'm still really enamored of and fascinated by the beginnings. I mean, I worked for a founder-led, a chairman, a guy named Pat McGovern who built a media empire. He had these 10 sort of core principles, he used to test us on 'em, we'd carry around little note cards, things that today still serve us. You know, stay close to the customer, you know, keep the corporate staff lean, promote from within, respect for individuals, things that are drilled into your head. I wonder, you know, what are the principles that, you know, sometimes they become dogma, but they're good dogma. I don't mean that as a pejorative. What are the things that you built your business on, the principles that you're sort of most proud of? >> Well, I think there is, so there are five, in fact, we call some of these tenets our five tenets. We call this high ambition leadership, which is more than just about making money. And just like the US is the leader of the free world, we have a responsibility beyond US. Same way, NETSCOUT has a responsibility beyond our own company and revenue and our stakeholders. So with that in mind, we have these five things, which I think I wouldn't have been able to articulate that 20 years ago, like this. But they were always there. So firstly, there's guardians of the connected world, which you see it on our website, guardians care about their asset, it's not just about money. We are going to solve problems in the connected world, which nobody else is able to solve, or have the passion or have the resources and willpower to do it. So that's the overall theme of the company. Guardians of the connected world, connected world is changing, new problems are coming. Our goal is there are pros and cons of every new thing. Our goal is to remove all the cons so you can enjoy the pros. So that's guardian of the connected world. Then our mission is accelerate digital transformation, meaning remove the roadblocks. People are looking at enablers, but there are barriers also. How do you remove the barriers for our customers, so they can improve the fruits of digital transformation? For example, going to the cloud allows you to outsource some of us, especially in these times of agility and dependency, you can cut your costs, but that comes with a price that you lose control. So our product brings the control back. So now you can enjoy the pros and the cons and I call it sometimes how do you change the wheels of your car while driving? If you change four wheels, then car is going to fall down, but how do you put one wheel in the cloud? Well, that's what our vision is. Visibility without borders. We'll give you the same information, which is the third part. That's why we have this tagline and therefore the company. And then we have the mission, accelerating digital transformation, but our vision is visibility without borders. When you run your application, no matter where you run, we'll give you the same piece of information. That allows the people to make this migration transparent from a monitoring and visibility point of view. And then the fourth area is about our technology. We call it smart data technology, and the whole world is talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning. But what are you going to learn, is your AI really authentic or is it truly artificial? And that comes from smart data. Data is the oil of the new industry. That's the oil, and people are not focusing on that. They're saying, "I have lots of data," but you don't have the data which we have. In the past, we said, we are not going to share the data with third parties. And recently we have changed that, and say, "Yeah, there is a price for that. We'll do that." So we are branding ourselves as a smart data company, where the whole industry is talking about smart analytics. And I said, "We make smart people smarter." And lastly, the value system of NETSCOUT is called lean, but not mean, okay? Anybody can get lean. If you get fat, you can get the operation. But how do you do lean decision making so you never have to be in mean? Like NETSCOUT never had to lay off in the last 35 years, we have ups and down, our stock has gone to $3 and has gone to $40, but companies continued to invest, and that's why we have this reputation we have, whether it's (indistinct). The tenure at NETSCOUT is 10, 15 years minimum, even in sales, and people don't realize the power of that because some of our customers tell us, "Hey, your salespeople are around longer than our employees." And that (indistinct) builds a franchise of loyalty in the customer base. We underestimate that, this continuity part. So that in many aspect of not, what is the definition of not being mean, that lean and mean is sort of people are very proud of that. And I think you can be lean without being mean. And then how do you become lean, is don't hire when in good times, unless you need them. The reason people are able to do it, is because they think "I can fire anytime, so let's build up the fat." So there a lot of decision-making we do around this, and that's what I talk about in the book, it's not about technology, and this is, I would say is just one of the five tenets, but it's probably one of the most important ones. And it's one of the biggest differentiators of NETSCOUT. >> Well, it's obviously served you well, I mean, no layoffs in 35 years, the retention metric is very impressive. I mean, again, I go back to my experience. I was at IDG for 15 years. My passion was always to start my own company, but I didn't want to leave 'cause it was such a great culture, and it seems like you've created something similar. You know, I talk to CIOs and CTOs a lot too about, it's always people, process, technology. And of course we want to talk about tech 'cause we love talking about tech, but they always tell me, "Look, tech comes and goes," it's the processes that you put in place, the culture that you have in place, we could deal with the tech, and it sounds like you've created a similar dynamic. And I think back again, when you started, there were proprietary networks, it was IBM SNA, DEC network, every mini computer had its own network. Then, you know, TCP/IP came in and the whole world changed and exploded. But yet you said guardians of the connected world, and that's kind of been your focus from really day one. You know, I loved what you said about the business. The network is the business. Remember the network is the computer that Scott McNealy popularized. So really kind of a similar dynamic there. So it seems, Anil, that that framework that you just laid out, those core principles, have actually allowed you to ebb, to flow, to deal with stock prices and still retain people for very long periods of time. >> Maybe one more thing to add there is that on the lean but not, many talk about generalities. We don't look any different. Like everyone cares about happy customers. They care about happy employees and they care about happy stakeholders, shareholders. Everyone, including us. But what's the order? Where do you start? So we start with employees. We say happy employees, then we get happy customers. And then because of that, they buy more stuff and we create happy shareholders. Whereas if you start with happy shareholders, you may not get happy employees. And so all I'm saying is that everyone probably believes in what we are saying or what I'm saying, but how they implement it, and then like really walking the talk is the most important part. >> Well, I think you're right. I mean, I think the financials is a by-product of happy employees, which drive happy customers. If you take care of employees and customers, then good things will happen. If you start with trying to micromanage the finances. Of course, we all attempted to do that. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about, so just to bring it forward a little bit, we're talking about how NETSCOUT has essentially from a cultural standpoint, been able to withstand the ups, the downs, I mean, you've seen since, you know, it's over 35 years, a lot of the downturns and the tech softness, the tech bubbles, the great recession. Obviously now we're in the middle of a pandemic. And I wonder if you could talk to that specifically. So the data that we have from our survey partner, ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, shows that before the pandemic around 16% of employees worked from home, we're talking about truly remote workers, not, you know, a couple of days a week. And when we talk to CIOs today, they tell us it's well over 70% now, but they fully expect that when, you know, the world comes back to the new abnormal, I call it, that number's going to, that 16% is going to double to, more than double to 34%. So it puts stress on the network. It changes the direction of the traffic. It changes the security emphasis. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that just in terms of how you are helping your customers respond, specifically. >> So I always talk about like, is this a new problem or is the bad problem getting worse? So I contend that bad problem getting worse. So if you make the bad to zero, then you can't multiply. So I think it's highlighting some of the problems which are already there, are being highlighted by, a lot of people are telling, "Are you seeing more attacks?" No, we are becoming more conscious of the attacks we always had. We have more time, by the way, hackers have more time too, because they're also sitting at home doing things. So what I feel is that, two parts. One is that I think people should not, when the new normal comes, or new abnormal, then I think people should not make people work from home for the wrong reason. Certain people are saying, "Oh, I can save money." That's the wrong reason. But if it's efficient, we should do that. So we are doing some interesting things for home users to feel how they can feel that they're really working from the office. And so, yeah, there are some new challenges on how we monitor, because when the user complains now about the performance to IT, because they can't get their work, they don't know whether it's our network or is the ISP, or is their wifi network. So we try to provide the root cause analysis as quickly as possible, which we call mean time to know. And one of the things I didn't mention earlier, about what is the uniqueness of our technology when we use the network vantage point to drive visibility, it's almost like the blood test. When you have a problem, if you tell the doctor, I say "Hey, what is my problem?" And they start looking at all kinds of things. It's going to take forever. But if I take the blood test, I will know what the next thing to do. So in a way, we are doing the blood test of the user experience, security problems. And when we do that, we can come up with some very unique things. So we think that we'll be moving on into other areas, or the visibility is the means to an end, the end could be performance management, could be visibility, troubleshooting, and could be security forensics. Like blood tests can be used for DNA evidence also. And so we have all the technology, so we are moving on, as we move to the home user, we are applying that our techniques, not just for service assurance or end user experience monitoring, but also for security forensics. And one example I give you the, I always talk more than you'll see that in my book, being different before being better. First be different, get the ear flecks out of the ideas before you tell the story. And you don't do that, even though we are very big, we are very small compared to a lot of companies in the industry, compared to big players like Cisco, IBM, and all those. So the new thing which we are looking at in security is, the security industry is catching the act. We are going to catch the actors. If I can get into the, what they were doing before the act, before they did the ransomware, what were they doing? Well, that requires continuous monitoring of the traffic. And that's what we do. So when we do catch the actor, catching the thief, not what they're stealing, then you're preventing tomorrow's attack. And that's basically the innovation part of NETSCOUT, which we have been pushing for. But we somehow decided not to apply that to security because we had other problems to be solved as guardians of the connected world from a monitoring point of view. And so those are some of the things we'll be applying as we move forward. And I feel that those are equally applicable before the pandemic and after the pandemic. And it's just polarized more, because more people are working from home. >> It's interesting what you're saying about the blood test. That's a great analogy because it kind of eliminates the guesswork, and removes the opaqueness. It goes right to sort of the heart of the matter, you called it mean time to know. And it's interesting too, to look at productivity. I mentioned some of the survey work, when we talk to organizations, they say to us that actually productivity has gone up since the pandemic. And my response to that is, "Yeah, no kidding. 'Cause people are working 15 hour days." You can't keep that up. And the silent killer of productivity is the not, having an elongated mean time to know, and having to guess. And so my premise is that this productivity gain, if in fact it exists, is not sustainable because we're doing it on the backs of our employees and it's going to burn 'em out. >> I'm not sure whether it's real also, see, there are both sides. It's not possible, practical, as you are saying, because for example, you are a salesperson and you are working six, seven hours and you're traveling six hours. You can't be on the phone for 12 hours with a customer right now. So I don't talk and then be productive, there are both sides going, some people are overworked. And so definition of productivity itself is in question. And how do you measure that? And so that's what we'll have to look, I think basically all I'm saying is we should do it, whatever we do after the pandemic is over, about how many people work from home, should be based on your business model, your expectation, not just based on cost. And a lot of people are looking at once again, "Oh, this is another cost saving exercise." And that should not be the reason, that's the wrong reason, because then they're measuring the productivity in terms of reduced cost, not everything else. Plus at least in NETSCOUT, is a company which, I mean, every meeting I go to, I use chalkboard, and it's very very hard for other companies, somebody like IBM, where most of the people work, there are 50 offices. What is the easy transition? It's not easy for NETSCOUT. And so right now we focus on safety, but we need to come up with a good hybrid model later on, and different people will set up differently. But what we do will be relevant in all cases. >> Yeah, but I think you're making a good point that it's not some kind of mandate to drive costs down. Or we saw last decade, there were a couple of prominent companies that were mandating actually working in the office, eliminating work from home. So obviously the wrong side of history, you know, they didn't know a pandemic was coming, but so how will you make that decision? Will you, is it really a discussion case by case with the employees or what's the framework for you guys to decide that? >> Well, I think so right now, our focus is on safety. So it's completely optional. In fact, we don't even allow more than 20%, and that's only in the headquarters, other places, we have less than 5% people coming, and only essential workers, manufacturing and all those. So right now it's completely optional. But my personal preference when there is no risk is people should come to work like they were coming before. We like to make it as close as possible to the old normal, but that's not going to be the case for other companies because they're bigger in size, they have other things at play, but certainly we are not going to do it, "Oh, because it's cheaper for NETSCOUT, when people work from home." And so we we'll see how it goes. I think it will be a transition, but I can see going back to new normal in a year from now, if things start winding down in six months, within a year or so, we should be getting back to some normalcy. But that doesn't mean going to be true for our customers. So from a product point of view, we are doing several things so we can help the customer through this transition. And by the way, one other thing I wanted to mention earlier, when we talk about the blood test, how does it relate to guardians of the connected world? If you believe in that, what did the industry do? They made sure needles were not painful. That blood test was reliable. There is no hygiene issues or no issues like that. The cost has come down. As the guardian of the connected world, because we do that, that's what we have been doing. We are removing the barriers to a great idea, but not all other companies give up. And then they have different strategies and some of them are successful, some are not. So as the guardian of the connected world, our goal is to continue to make this practical use. Imagine if blood test industry had not done that, where we'll be right now. And that's what I meant by guardian of the connected world. This is not easy to do and sustain that for a period of 20, 30 years. But we have been able to do that, and we get a lot of challenges from naysayers, "Oh, this will not work at high speed." When I started NETSCOUT, it was 10 megabit internet. Now we have 100 gig internet, and we are still able to handle it. And nobody had thought in those days that you can even get to 100 megs. People were questioning us. But what happens is other things keep working in the market. Intel is making improvements, lot of people are doing work to solve the problem, and we leverage that. And that's how we are able to sort of sustain this guardian of the connected world team. >> The other key aspect of the guardian of the connected world, and again, not to overdo the blood test analogy, but the time to results is very important. If you have an issue and you have to wait weeks for the results and your doctor, you can't get ahold of her. And so you're successfully dealing with that in real time or near real time, and that to me is critical. >> Very important point, thanks for reminding because I forgot today, that's one of the things I say all the time, "Hey, this one of the big thing we have done, and blood test industry has done it. How long take to get results?" Nowadays you can get results done in like two hours, and doctors can get a report in couple of hours. That's what we had done. That's like mean time to know, which we talked about. With our technology, I think we had basically all the issues, you can't even breathe without doing something on the network. So if you're listening to the traffic or hearing what the conversation, you can form an independent view of what is happening. And that's the smart data, which then becomes the basis of analytics, whether analytics in the security space or not. And so that one thing we have not changed, this technique. Now, the outcomes are different. What are we doing with our visibility is different. Is keep changing the number of customers and the type of customers are different. But ultimately that part interestingly has not changed. >> I wonder if I could ask you, I'd like to ask CEOs, especially those that are technologists and business leaders, their thoughts on the cloud. I mean, our data shows that the public cloud is growing in the 30% plus range annually, the big three public cloud players now account this year, probably for close to $75 billion in revenue, maybe even a little bit more, what do you see driving this growth? What does it mean for your customers? >> I think first of all, we have a big announcement coming out called smart cloud monitoring to address this. But what's the meaning of that? I think what our customers are looking for is that it's not all or nothing. It's not that everything is in the cloud or everything is in the on-prem, it could be private cloud, public cloud, (indistinct), the way VPNs are laid out. So they want to make sure that they can use our technology to do this (indistinct) and analytics, regardless of what decision they make. And even five years from now, there'll be enough non-cloud stuff, okay? So that's what we are striving to do. That's what is visibility without borders, and when they do that, they're saying that helps them decide what's the best mode of operation for them, for what application. Moving blindly to the cloud is a problem. Not going into that area is also a problem. But I think this, the two new things that have happened recently, I will say one is sort of, because of this crisis, people don't want to own, like the hospitality industry. This would, I mean, they're obviously having big issues with them, but if they own a lot of the infrastructure, they could have turned off some of that. And so that's driving more movement to the cloud, but I think there is now other choices available, about a year or two ago, I think affordable pricing model, multiple choices, not just AWS, and technology maturing where you can really implement and have a good experience. I think those have become big enablers. And so I think now it is possible to get to massive movement to the cloud, but then they want to make sure that I'm outsourcing my problem, but I'm not outsourcing my vision to the cloud vendors, because previously the way in the IT industry, a lot of problems were solved is, it was called the war room. Let's get everyone who reports to me and everyone who reported to you, but now everyone doesn't report to you. So how do you maintain the control? Man, I complain to my CIO, "Hey, my WebEx is slow," or "Office (indistinct)," and how do they resolve that problem? Because they cannot tell me, "Oh, we outsourced them, so I can't tell you that," well, we should not have outsourced them to the cloud. So how do you drive this collaboration between the providers and the consumers? Is going to be key to accelerating this transformation. Because otherwise the cost of CapEx cost of a deduction of moving to the cloud will be offset by the increase in OpEx and customer satisfaction for the customer. And so if we can help deal with one of the parts, industry is already doing the other big part of making cloud work, I think then we'll have the best chance of success. >> Yeah. And of course the security has implications on the security model. You were talking earlier about that, as an opportunity, people sometimes think, "Oh yeah, I put my data in the cloud. I'm good on security." But there's a shared responsibility. Again, we talked about different traffic patterns. You've got work from home going on. And it's interesting when you juxtapose the sort of industry narrative on security, which is it gets harder and harder and harder, and you hear some of the cloud players say, "Hey, the state of security is really good," but when you talk to CISOs, they'll talk about the lack of talent, the challenges they have, the tools creep, the fact that they spend more, but the adversaries just keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger. It's a really serious problem. I mean, maybe we close there. I mean kind of, how do you see it from your vantage point? >> Let's look at the blood test. So I look at, if you do the technique which we are talking about, at least in the dimension of security monitoring, then you are going to do a lot of little things, because you're doing little things, you're going to be (indistinct) tool creep, and because of that, you have a talent issue. And I think if we can make the right stuff work, then you will not have this talent issue, and I feel that we are always looking at solving yesterday's problem, okay? Because we are not watching what led to the attack. We are just dealing with the attack as an incident, a security issue. So I think continuous monitoring of traffic allows you to look at the deviation of the normal. So signature-based security is a big portion, but how do you know the signature of tomorrow? And while you know that because you know the normal, but the only way you know normal is if you have been monitoring what was going on, not for a specific event, but deviation from normal. That's what our approach is going to be, anomalous behavior detection through our smart data. And then you apply machine learning and AI algorithms to that. I think that would be Nirvana. But we don't have all the smart people for analytics, but we can feed our data to those smart people. And that's something we are going to bring up, and the reason I feel it will be successful because this idea has been wildly successful for NETSCOUT in the non-security space. >> Yeah. I think you're bringing up another point that I've talked about a lot, which is the industry has gone from sort of an industry of products to platforms, and now ecosystems is really driving a lot of the innovation. That's exactly what you're talking about. Feeding data to other partners, data partners. Now you start thinking about IoT and the edge, and machines talking to machines. I mean, I put video cameras up in my house to make my environment more secure, but of course I'm scared to death that those things could get hacked. It's a very complicated situation, and the power of many is going to trump the resources of one. And so I'm glad you brought that out. Maybe give us your final thoughts, Anil. It really has been a pleasure talking to you. >> Well, I think one of the things people ask me is, "Why didn't you start another company?" Especially in Silicon Valley, I say, "We did start many companies, but they all happen to be called NETSCOUT." NETSCOUT 1.0 or 2.0 or 3.0, actually, we are into the 4.0. I sometimes say, "You know George Foreman's four sons, they're all called George Foreman." So every time we do something different, and now we are in the process of launching NETSCOUT 5.0, it was partly because, maybe accelerated because of what's going on with the pandemic, because there are some new challenges which (indistinct), and we are entering the security space. So I'm very excited about repeating what we did in the traditional monitoring space, service insurance space, both for enterprise and carriers, to the security space. And people will question us how come it took so long. Well, we were solving other problems, which are more interesting than this for NETSCOUT. And now we want to bring that technology and all of our tenets, guardian of the connected world, smart data, to the security space. And also, I mean, people are around for long term, we are also building the next generation of leaders at NETSCOUT. And so we have our hands full over the next two, three years, in building the next generation of NETSCOUT, solving some of the problems the industry is facing, without abandoning our tenets and the culture. And if we can do that, I think there'll be, we'll be going to the next level, in terms of NETSCOUT branding and leadership. >> Well, given the guiding principles that you shared with us earlier, the fundamental technology that you have around visibility, I think that's served you very well. And I think there's no shortage of opportunity for NETSCOUT. So, Anil, thanks so much for sharing your story and coming on theCUBE. >> Good. Thank you. >> And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. 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from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hello everyone this is dave vellante with the cube and welcome to this conversation with me is anil singal who is the ceo of netscout anil it's a pleasure to speak with you today thanks so much for coming on the program thank you so i want to talk a little bit about uh netscout we're kind of at the cube we're sort of enamored by founder-led companies i mean you started net scout right around the same time that i entered the tech business and you remember back then it was an industry dominated by ibm monolithic systems were then with a norm in the form of mainframes you had mini computers pcs and things like pc local area networks they were in their infancy in fact most of the pcs as you remember they didn't have hard disks in them so i want to start with what was it that you saw 35 years ago to let you let that led you to start net scout and at the time did you even imagine that you'd be creating a company with a billion dollars worth of revenue and a much larger market cap well certainly i'd not imagine where we'll be right now and uh we didn't need we didn't know that this will be the outcome where i mean we just happened to be at the right place at the right time but we did have a vision some of you had the feeling we are enamored by networking and we thought that network will be the business in fact our business card in 91 said network is the business and so somehow we got that right and and we said these things will be connected and overall we found then that with the ip convergence first in the enterprise in 90s and then internet and then carriers moving from analog to digital we call talk about digital transformation in last few years but this has been going on for the last 30 years and as we add what we were doing become relevant to more and more people over time for example right now even power companies use our product okay and we have iot devices coming in so so basically what we do is we we said we're going to provide visibility through looking at the traffic through the lens and the vantage point of the network a lot of people think we're just doing network monitoring or have been doing that but actually we use the network as the vantage point which is other people are not doing most of the people have accidental data from devices at the basis of visibility and that turned out to be a very successful and but at some point different points in our life we became responsible for the market not just for netscope and that changed the shape of the company and what we did and how we drove the innovation yeah now i want to get into some of that but i i i'm still really enamored of and and fascinated by by the beginnings i worked for a founder led a chairman a guy named pat mcgovern who built the media empire he had these 10 sort of core principles we he used to test us on him we'd carry him around a little little note card things that today still serve us you know stay close to the customer uh you know keep the corporate staff lean promote from within respect for individuals the things that are drilled into your head i wonder you know what are the principles that you know sometimes they come become dogma but they're good dogma i don't mean that as a pejorative what are the things that that you built your business on the principles that you're sort of most proud of well i think there is so there are five in fact we call um uh some of the standards so five tenants we have we call we call this high ambition leadership which is more than just about making money and as just like the us is the leader of the free world we have a responsibility beyond u.s same way netscout has a responsibility beyond our own company and and revenue and our stakeholders so with that in mind we have these five things which i think i wouldn't have been able to articulate that 20 years ago like this and but they were always there so first is this guardians of the connected world which you see it on our website guardians care about their asset it's not just about money we are going to solve problems in the connected world which nobody else is able to solve or have the passion or have the resources and willpower to do it so that's that's the overall theme of the company guardians of the connected world connected world is changing broad new problems are coming our goal is there are pros and cons of every new thing our goal is to remove all the cons so you can enjoy the pros so that's guardian of the connected world then our mission is accelerate digital transformation meaning remove the road blocks people are looking at enablers but there are barriers also how do you remove the barriers for our customers so they can improve the fruits of digital transformation for example going to the cloud allows you to outsource some of the stuff especially in this time of agility and and dependency you can cut your cost but that comes with the price that you lose control so our product big bring the control back so now you can enjoy the pros and the cons and i call it sometime how do you change the wheels of your car while driving well if you change the four wheels then carve is going to fall down but how do you put one wheel in the cloud well that's what the our vision is visibility without water we'll give you the same information which is the third part so we have this uh tagline and for the company and then we have the mission accelerating digital transformation our vision is visibility without border when you run your application no matter where you run we'll give you the same piece of information that allows the people to make this transparent transparent migra that's migration transparent from a monitoring and visibility point of view then the fourth area is about a technology we call it smart data technology the whole world is talking about artificial intelligence machine learning but who are you going to learn for is your ai really authentic or is it truly artificial and that comes from smart data data is the oil of the new industry that's the oil and and people are not focusing on that they're saying i have lots of data but you don't have the data which we have in the past we said we are not going to share the data with third parties so in recently we have changed that you say yeah we'll there is the price for that we'll do that so we are branding ourselves as a smart data company where the whole industry is talking about smart analytics and i said we make smart people smarter and lastly uh the the value system of netscout is called lean but not mean okay and uh anybody can get lean if you get fat you can get your operation but how do you do lean decision making so you never have to be in me like net score never had delay in the last 35 years we have ups and down our stock has gone to three dollars and has gone to forty dollars but company continued to invest and uh and that's why we have this reputation we have with this tom here or steve here the tenure at netscout is 10 15 years minimum even in sales and people don't realize the power of that because some of our customers tell us hey your sales people are around longer than our employees and that how it builds a franchise of loyalty in the customer base we underestimate that this continuity part so there are many aspects of not what is the definition of not being mean the lean and mean is is sort of people are very proud of that and i think you can be lean without being mean and how do you become lean is don't hire when in good times unless you need them the reason people are able to do it is because they think i can fire any time so let's build up the fact so there are a lot of decision making we do around this and that's what i talk about in the book it's not about technology and this is i would say it's just one of the five diamonds but it's probably one of the most important ones and is one of the biggest differentiator of netscope well it's obviously served you well i mean no layoffs in 35 years the the retention metric is is very impressive i mean again i go back to my experience i was at idg for 15 years my passion was always to start my own company but i didn't want to leave because it was such a great culture and it seems like you've created something similar you know i talk to cios and ctos a lot too about about you know it's always people process technology and of course we want to talk about tech because we love talking about tech but they always tell me look tech comes and goes it's the processes that you put in place the culture that you have in place we could deal with the tech and it and it sounds like you've created a similar dynamic and i think back again when you started there were proprietary networks it was ibm sna dec network every mini computer had its own network then you know tcpip came in the whole world it changed and exploded but yet you said guardians of the connected world and that's kind of been your your focus from really day one you know i i loved what you said about the business the the network is the business remember the network is the computer that scott mcneely popularized so really kind of a similar dynamic there so it seems anneal that that framework that you just laid out those core principles have actually allowed you to ebb to flow to deal with stock prices and still retain people for very long periods of time maybe one more thing to add there is that on the lean but not when you talk about generalities we don't look any different like everyone cares about happy customers they care about happy employees and they care about happy stakeholders shareholders everyone including us but what's the order what's uh what's where do you start so we start with employees we say if they're happy employees they create success happy customers and then because of that they drive they buy more stuff and we create happy shareholders whereas if you start with happy shareholders you may not get happy employees and so and so all i'm saying is that everyone probably believes in what what we are saying or what i'm saying but how they implement it and then like really walking the talk is the most important part well i think you're right i mean i think you know the financials is a byproduct of happy employees which drive happy customers if you take care of employees and customers then good good things will happen uh if you start with trying to micromanage the finances of course we all attempted to to do that um i i wonder if we could talk a little bit about so just to bring it forward a little bit we're talking about how netscout has essentially from a cultural standpoint been able to withstand the ups the downs i mean you've seen since since you know over 35 years a lot of the the the downturns and the the tech softness the tech bubbles the great you know recession obviously now we're in the middle of the pandemic um i and i wonder if you could talk to that specifically so the data that we have from our survey partner etr enterprise technology research shows that before the pandemic around 16 of employees worked from home we're talking about truly remote workers not you know a couple days a week and when we talked to cios today they tell us it's you know well over 70 percent now but they fully expect that when you know the world comes back to the new abnormal i call it that it's it's that number is going to that 16 is going to double to more than double the 34 so it's it puts stress on on the the network it changes the the direction of the traffic it changes the security uh emphasis maybe you could talk a little bit about that just in terms of how you you are helping your customers respond specifically so i always talk about like is this a new problem or is the bad problem getting worse and so i put it in that bad problem getting worse so if you make the bad to zero then you can't multiply it so i think it's highlighting some of the problems which are already there are being highlighted by a lot of people are telling are you seeing more attacks no we are becoming more conscious of the attacks we always had we have more time by the way hackers have more time too because they are also sitting at home doing things so what i'm saying what i feel is that two parts one is that i think people should not in the when the new normal comes or new abnormal then i think people should not make people work from her for the wrong reason certain people are saying oh i can save money that's the wrong reason but if it's efficient we should do this so we are doing some interesting things for home users to feel how they can feel that they're really working from the office and so yeah there are some new challenges on how we monitor because when a user complains now about a performance to it because they can't get their work they don't know whether it's our network or is the isp or is their wi-fi network so we try to provide the root cause analysis as quickly as possible which we call mean time to know and one of the things i didn't mention earlier about the what is the uniqueness of our technology when we use the network vantage point to drive visibility it's almost like the blood test when you have a problem if you tell the doctor i said hey what is my problem and they start looking at all kinds of things it's going to take forever but if i take the blood test i'll be able to do the i will know what the next thing to do so in a way we are doing the blood test of the user experience security problems and when we do that we can come up with some very unique things so in the we think that we'll be moving on into other areas so the visibility is the means to an end the end could be performance management could be visibility troubleshooting uh and could be security forensics like blood tests can be used for dna evidence also and so we have all the technology so we are moving on as we move to the home user we are applying that our techniques not just for service assurance or end user experience monitoring but also for security financing and one example i give you the i always talk about and you'll see that in my book being different before being be better first be different get the earplugs out of the audience before you tell the story and you don't do that even though we are very big we are very small compared to a lot of companies in the industry compared to big players like cisco ibm and all those so the new thing which we are looking at in security is the security industry is catching the act we are going to catch the actor if i can get into the what they were doing before the act before they did the ransomware what were they doing well that required continuous monitoring of the traffic and that's what we do so when we do catch the actor catching the thief not what they're stealing then you're preventing tomorrow's attack and that's basically the innovation part of netscout which we have been pushing for but we somehow decided not to apply that to security because we had enough problems to be sold as guardians of the connected world from a monitoring point of view and so those are those are some of the things we'll be applying as as we move forward and i feel that those are equally applicable before the pandemic and after the pandemic and it's just polarized more because more people are working from home it's interesting what you're saying about the blood test uh that's a great analogy because it kind of eliminates the guesswork uh and and removes the opaqueness uh goes right to sort of the hard heart of the matter you call it mean time to know um and and it's interesting too to look at productivity i i mentioned some of the survey work when we talked to organizations they say to us that actually productivity has gone up since the the pandemic and my response to that is yeah no kidding because people are working 15-hour days you can't keep that up and and the silent killer of productivity is is the the not has having an elongated mean time to know um and having to to guess and so my premise is that this productivity gain if in fact it exists is not sustainable because we're doing it on the backs of our employees and it's going to it's going to burn them out i'm not sure whether it's real also see there are both sides it's not possible practical as you are saying because for example you're a sales person and you're working six seven hours and you're traveling six hours you can't be on the phone for 12 hours with the customer right now right how can they be productive is there both sides going some people are overworked and so definition of productivity itself is in question and how do you measure that and so that's what we'll have to look i think basically what i'm saying is we should do it whatever we do after the pandemic is over about how many people work from home should be based on your business model your expectation not just based on cost and a lot of people are looking at once again oh this is another cost saving exercise and that should not be the reason that's the wrong reason because then they're measuring the productivity in terms of reduced cost not everything else plus at least in net stock is a company which i mean every meeting i go to i use chalkboard and it's very very hard as a for our company like somebody like ibm where most of the people were there 50 offices they were remote is the easy transition it's not easy for netscout and so right now we focus on safety but we need to come up with a good hybrid model later on and different people will set up differently but what we do will be relevant in all cases yeah but i think you're making a good point that it's not some kind of mandate to drive your costs down or we saw last decade there were a couple of prominent companies that were mandating actually working in the office eliminating work from home so obviously the wrong side of history you know who they didn't know a pandemic was coming but so so how how will you make that decision uh will you is it really a discussion case by case with the employees or how what's the framework for you guys to decide that well i think so right now our focus is on safety so it's completely optional in fact we don't even allow more than 20 percent and that's only in the headquarters other places we have less than five percent people coming right and only essential workers manufacturing and all those so right now is completely optional but my personal preference when there is no risk these people should come to work like they were coming before we like to make it as close as possible to the old normal but that's not going to be the case for other companies because they're bigger in size they have other things at play but certainly we are not going to do it or because it's cheaper for net scores because we when people work from home and so we will see how it goes i think it will be a transition but i can see we going back to new normal in a year from now if the things start winding down in six months within a year or so we should be getting back to uh some normalcy and but that doesn't mean it's going to be true for our customers so from a product point of view we are doing several things so we can help the customer through this transition and by the way one other thing i wanted to mention earlier when we talk about the blood test how does it relate to guardians of the connective connected world if you believe in that what did the industry do they made sure needles were not painful that blood test was reliable you could there is no hygiene issues or no issues like that the cost has come down as a guardian of the connected world because we do that that's what we have been doing we are removing the banners to a great idea but lot of other companies gave up and then they have different strategy and some are successful some are not so as a guardian of the connected wall our goal is to continue to make this practical use imagine if blood test industry has not done that where we'll be right now and that's what what i meant by guardian of the connected world this is not easy to do and sustain that in for a period of 20 30 years but we have been able to do that and we get a lot of challenges from naysayers or this will not work at high speed when i started mad scout it was 10 megabit ethernet now we have 100 gigs 100 gig ethernet and we are still able to handle it and nobody thought in those days that you can even get 200 likes people were questioning us but what happens is other things keep working in the market intel is making improvements a lot of people are doing work to solve the problem and we leverage that and and that's how we are able to uh sort of sustain this guardian of the connected world team yeah you know the other key aspect of the guardian of the connected world again not to overdo the blood test analogy but the time to results is very important if you if you have an issue and you have to wait wait weeks for the results and your doctor you can't get a hold of her and so you're you're successfully dealing with that in real time or near real time and that that to me is is critical a very important point thanks for reminding me because i forgot today that's one of the things i say all the time hey this one of the big things we have done if blood test industry has done it how long take to get results nowadays you can get results done in in like two hours and doctors can get a report in couple of hours that's what we have done that's like mean time to know which we talked about with our technology i think we're basically the all the issues that you can't even breathe without doing something on the network so if you're listening to the traffic or hearing that uh what the conversation you can form an independent view of what is happening and that could be the that's the smart data which then becomes the basis of analytics whether analytics in the security space or not and so that's uh and that one thing we have not changed this technique now the outcomes are different what are we doing with the visibility is different is keep changing the number of customers and the type of customers are different but ultimately that part has interestingly has not changed i wonder if i could ask you i'd like to ask ceos especially those that are technologists and business leaders you know their thoughts on on the cloud i mean our data shows that the public cloud is growing in the 30 plus range annually the big three cloud public cloud players now account this year probably for close to 75 billion dollars in revenue maybe even a little bit more you know what what do you see driving this growth what does it mean for your customers well i think so forth we have a big announcement coming out called smart cloud monitoring to address this but what's the meaning of that i think what our customers are looking for is that it's it's not all or nothing it's not that everything is in the cloud or everything is in the program it could be private cloud public cloud colos the way vpns are laid out so they want to make sure that they can use our technology to do this react and analytics regardless of what decision they make and even five years from now there'll be enough non-cloud stuff okay so that's what we are trying to do we want to that's what is visibility without water and when they do that they say that helps them decide what's the best mode of operation for them for what application moving blindly to the cloud is a problem not going into that area is is also a problem but i think this the two new things have happened recently i would say one is sort of because of this crisis people don't want to own uh like hospitality industry okay this would i mean they're obviously having a big big issues with them but if they want a lot of the infrastructure they could have turned off some of that and so that's driving more movement to the cloud but i think there is a lot of choices available about a year or two ago i think affordable pricing model multiple choices not just aws and technology maturing where you can you can really implement and have a good experience i think those have become big enablers and so i think now it is possible to get to massive movement to the cloud but then they want to make sure that i'm now i'm outsourcing my problems but i'm not also outsourcing my vision to the cloud vendors because previously the way in the iit industry a lot of problems were solved is it was called the war rule let's get everyone who reports to me and everyone who reported to you but now that everyone doesn't report to you so how do you maintain the control when i complain to my ci hey my webex is slow or office three seriously and how does it resolve that problem because they cannot tell me oh we outsource them so i can't tell you that well we should not have outsourced them to the cloud so how do you drive this collaboration between the providers and the consumers is going to be key to accelerating this transformation because otherwise the cost of capex cost of reduction of moving to the cloud will be offseted by the increase in operax and customer satisfaction for the customer and so if we can help deal with one of the parts industry is already doing the other big part of making cloud work i think then we'll have the best chance of success yeah and of course the security has implications on the security model you were talking earlier about that as an opportunity people sometimes think oh yeah i put put my data in the cloud i'm good on security but there's there's a shared responsibility uh again we talked about different traffic patterns uh you've got work from home going on uh so and it's interesting when you juxtapose a sort of industry narrative on security which is it's it gets harder and harder and harder and you hear some of the cloud players say hey the state of security is really good uh but when you talk to csos you know they'll talk about the lack of talent uh the challenges they have the tools tools creep the fact that they spend more but the adversaries just keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger it's a really serious problem i mean maybe we close there i mean kind of how do you see it from your your vantage point let's look at the blood test so i look at if you don't the technique which we are talking about at least in the dimension of security monitoring then you are going to a lot of little things because you are doing little things you are going to be do a tool creep and because of that you have a like a talent issue and i think if you can make the right stuff work then you will not have this this talent issue and i feel that we are always looking solving yesterday's problem okay because we are not watching what led to the attack we are just dealing with the attack as an incident a security issue so i think continuous monitoring of deviation traffic allows you look at the deviation of the north so signature based security is a big portion but how do you know the signature of tomorrow and well you know that because you know the normal but only way you know normal is if you have been monitoring what was going on not for a specific event but deviation from normal that's what our approach is going to be anomalous behavior detection through our smart data and then you apply machine learning and ai algorithms to that i think that could be nirvana and but we don't have all the smart people for analytics but we can feed our data to those smart people and that's something we are going to bring up and the reason i feel it will be successful because this idea has been widely successful for netscout in the non-security space yeah i think you're bringing up another point that i've talked about a lot which is we've the industry has gone from sort of an industry of products to platforms and now ecosystems is really driving a lot of the innovation it's exactly what you're talking about feeding data to other partners data partners and now you start thinking about iot and the edge and machines talking to machines i mean i put you know video cameras up in my house to to make my environment more secure but of course i'm scared to death that those things can get hacked um it's a very complicated situation and the the power of many is going to trump the the the resources of one and so i'm glad you you brought that out um maybe give us your final thoughts anil it really has been a pleasure talking to you well i think the vr one of the things people have asked me is uh is why did you start another company especially in silicon valley i said with this spot many companies but they all happened to be called netstar netscout 1.0 2.0 3.0 actually we we are into the 4.0 i sometimes say you know george foreman's four sons they're all called george foreman so it's like one and so every time we do something different and now we are in the process of launching netscore 5.0 it was partly because maybe accelerated because of what's what's going on with the pandemic because there are some new challenges which we then here for and we are entering the security space so i'm very excited about repeating what we did in the traditional monitoring space service assurance space both for enterprise and carriers to the security space and people will question us how come it took so long while we were solving other problems which were more interesting than this for netscout and now we're going to bring that technology and all the tenants guardian of the connected world smart data to the security space and also i mean people are around for a long time we are also building the next generation of leaders at netstar and and so we have our hands full over the next two three years in uh building the next generation of net scout solving some of the problems which industry is facing without abandoning our tenants and the culture and if we can do that i think uh there'll be uh we'll be going to uh to the next level in terms of netscore branding and leadership well given given the guiding principles that you shared with us earlier the the the fundamental technology that you have around visibility uh i think that's served you very well and i think there's no shortage of of opportunity uh for netscout so neil thanks so much for sharing your story and coming on thecube good thank you all right and thank you for watching everybody this is dave vellante for the cube we'll see you next time [Music] you

>> 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 2019 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host John Furrier. We are joined by Anil Chakravarthy. He is the chief executive officer at Informatica. Thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. >> Oh my pleasure, thanks for having me back on your show here. >> So, on the main stage this morning you said that AI and ML need data, but data needs ML and AI. >> That's right. >> Can you just elaborate on that, riff on that a little bit. >> Yeah, yeah. You know if you look at AI and ML, hot topic obviously, every company is trying to take advantage of new machine learning AI technologies. One of the key components of making that happen is the availability of the right data, because you have to train these machine learning algorithms, the data scientists have to be able to find the right data, and then they have to prepare the right data, make sure that they have access to the data, clean it up, and then put it into their AI models into their AI algorithms and so on. Because the training of the algorithms is very sensitive to the quality of the data. It's really garbage in garbage out. If you don't feed it the right data, the results will be skewed. And so, that's the key part of what we mean by when we say AI machine learning needs data. The flip side is in what we do and help customers, which is manage their vast complexity and scale of data. If you look at customers petabytes of data, thousands of databases, hundreds of thousands of cables, so how do they manage all of the data? Because the management of data is not just about availability of data or the performance of those systems and so on. All that is super important, but it's also the security of the data, the governance of the data, the availability of the data to the right users at the right time. Trying to do all that manually, you just can't keep up and that's where you need machine learning and AI to be able to do that for you in an automated manner. >> Anil, we've talked in the past multiple years ago. Every year, it's the same story. You guys had on that RightWave data everyone is now talking about what you were talking about four years ago. >> Yep. You're continuing to talk about it and adding to it. You also talk about being the Switzerland the neutral third party, because data needs to connect around >> Right from multiple sources. You had a lot of industry players up on stage today. How is that going? How are you continuing to be that role in the industry as more and more people come in? What's it say about the momentum and for Informatica strategy? >> Yeah, I think it's really because of what customers really want. Take any customer, any enterprise customer or government customer, of any scale, they're usually using a lot of different both on-premise and cloud, technology offerings. So it could be multiple software service offerings, multiple maybe public clouds, where they're running it as platform of service. A lot of different on-premise offerings et cetera. Which means that all of those offerings that they're using have a data footprint. From a customer's perspective, if they're using different tools to manage the data for each one of those well they have all the old problems they've always had. Data inconsistency, inability to manage it, and just who's going to learn, if you're a data administrator, are you going to learn four or five different tools to manage it? So that's does not really going to work. That's where customers are demanding hey, I need a data management platform that can help me manage the data consistently and that's where we come in, that's what helps us be the Switzerland of data. >> So data feeds machine learning, machine learning powers AI. This is the formula you guys talk about all the time. No data, no AI. But if data is constrained, from either infrastructure legacy, or a regulation, that's going to slow the feeder concept down >> Yeah. or maybe incomplete data. This is really about operationalizing AI so this is, you've got to solve that data problem first if you want to scale up operations around AI. What's the state of the art from Informatica? What are you guys doing in this area and where is the customers' progress in this new operationalizing of AI with data at the heart of it? >> Yes, from an operationalization perspective, what you need is, first of all, help your data scientists and others using AI to find the right data. Finding the right data, you do it through the catalog, for example, it'll tell you what data you can access and then what's the metadata around the data, what you can use the data for. Maybe there's some data that you say look, we have the data set but we don't have the customers opt-in to use that data. Fine, you can't use that data. That's the first step, finding the right data. Then getting access to that data that's what you get through an integration, the cloud tools, the big data tools, et cetera. Then you prepare the data. We have a number of tools to prepare the data to make sure that the AI and machine learning models can use them well. Then you feed the data. You run it, you get your result, but then the explain-ability is a big deal. Whether it's regulators or even your own internal executives. They say, oh that's the result of running the AI model but how did it come to that decision? You know, for instance, in financial services, if you're using AI to do, let's say, a decision on who gets to get a loan or not, well you have to make sure that there is no bias in that, right? In order to explain the result, you need to know where the source data came from. That's what we do as well, through our governance and lineage. >> Well we'd love talkin about SAS success you look at the cloud-native, born in the cloud, great examples how data has really been driving the new generation of innovation. The more enterprises we talk to around digital transformation, the more that we hear we want to be consumer-like. >> Yeah. With a SAS, whether it's an app for banking or an IoT app, or anything. SAS is kind of an unique data for that. How should a enterprise architect that solution? Because it's harder when you don't have clean, one cloud native so you got to bring in some cloud, you got to bring in the on-premise. Where does the data sit (laughs) in all this? How do you architect the data on-premise, in the cloud, or in general, so that the customers have a really, road map to a SAS solution? >> It's a great question, you know. What you see right now is the focus on building it through customer data platform. We obviously just acquired a company, AllSight, that helps build the get inside sort of the customer data platform. The way we think of it at Informatica is you have a customer data platform, well then the last mile of how you reach the customer, keeps changing and evolving. That last mile could be through a call center. It could be through a web application. It could be through a mobile app. It could be through a sales person, who is reaching the customer with a live interaction. It could be a lot of different ones and it could be all of them. That's where the omnichannel comes in. The way to do what you are asking for, John is to truly focus on building a customer data platform that can support multiple kinds of last mile when it comes to actually interacting with the customer. That's how you ensure a very good, consistent, customer experience. And then you take advantage of whatever the latest technologies. Tomorrow, like we were just talking about here, if there is AI enabled bots or something else that's a better way of interacting with the customer, you're still working off of the same consistent customer data platform. That's how we see it. >> I want to ask you about the skills gap. >> Yeah. >> We know that there is a great demand for people who are data scientists, experts in cloud and analytics, and yet there are so few qualified candidates. >> That's right. >> I want to hear your thoughts about it and then also what Informatica is doing to make sure you are recruiting and retaining the right employees. >> Yeah, I think one I completely agree with you on the skills gap and obviously that's also a great opportunity as well, because, in reality a lot of the younger folks are looking at what careers they want to pursue. With the right mindset and the right training these will be great careers for them. There's also, the other great thing about this is this is across the country and across the world so you don't have to be in a specific location to have a successful career as a data scientist or as a data steward, et cetera et cetera. I think from a training perspective we are actually working with a number of different universities. We actually started working with Indiana University to build a curriculum that can then be available online available to a lot of different folks. We obviously work with a lot of different system integrators and consulting partners who hire hundreds of thousands of people and they are starting to build some very very large practices around data science. That's another avenue for career growth there. And last, we're also starting at a much younger age. Last year we talked about the next 25 program and tomorrow, when Sally is back on stage, you will see an update on the next 25 program. Were trying to get kids at the middle school level interested in this as a career. >> Anil, real quick on the follow up on that is what curriculum specifically do you see in high demand? Is it machine learning? Is it analytics? Is it cognitive? What specific skills that you see in demand and for folks to start thinking about? >> I think what my advice to folks, in fact my daughter is a freshman in college too and I've been giving her the same advice because I think this is a great way to go, is when you think of skills development first think of a broad platform that will give you the right skills regardless of the changes in technology, because technology will keep changing. So what is that broad platform? The broad platform is, I think you need a background in statistics, you need a background in computer modeling and programming, and you need a broad platform in overall math. And again, I don't mean to scare anybody, it's not calculus level math, but it's math that helps you understand concepts et cetera. That's the broad foundation you need. Then you have a number of different new technologies whether it's Python, whether it's Math Lab. There are a lot of different ways of approaching and doing data science. But then, once you have that foundation, it's easy to pick this up. And the rest of it, just like in any other job, once you start doin it, you're going to pick up the rest of it and you'll become an expert there. >> Great. Amil Chakravarthy, thank you so much for coming back to theCUBE. >> Perfect, thank you so much for having me. >> Yeah, thanks for havin us. >> Thank you. >> You are watching theCUBE Informatica 2019. I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, stay tuned. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live, it's the Cube. Exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2018. It's our fourth year, exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, your co-host of the Cube, with Peter Burris, my co-host and chief analyst at Wikibon, and SiliconANGLE, and the Cube. Our next guest is the CEO of Informatica, chief executive Anil Chakravarthy, who's back again for his fifth Cube appearance. We went back all the way to 2014 at AWS Reinvent when cloud was on the horizon. Now you running a really high growth company. Congratulations. It's great to see you. >> Thank you. It's great to see you. Great to be back on the Cube again. I appreciate it. >> One of the things I want to point out, you know, we're independent, we want to point all the things that you guys should be working on, but I got to say, you guys have done an amazing job. Executing on the product front in a market that's growing and changing erratically with data, and not a lot of people got that. Amazon was early on we saw them executing. They were misunderstood. You guys are not misunderstood anymore. >> Yep, I appreciate that. >> Data is at the center. Congratulations. >> Thank you. I think one of the things that we've learned over the last 25 years, 25 years old this year, and you got that in the sign behind you, is there is a few things we are really good at. Data management is what we are really good at. Now, it just so happens data is everywhere in all kinds of platforms, and we want to make sure that wherever our customers are we are there as well to help them in data management. >> So, let's talk about what's going on. So first of all, a lot of interesting things here going on. One last year, we talked about, data lakes, data swamps. This year it's about the enterprise catalog and all the goodness, MDM, and the things you guys have done, kind of check check. The catalog brings in the notion of the full visibility. And then you got the multi-cloud hybrid-cloud adoption and the announcement of Azure. This is bringing in a new era. You called it data 3.0 up on stage. What is data 3.0? Can you take a minute to describe the vision and what does it mean for your customers. >> Yeah, data 3.0 is the name we are using to talk about the generational market disruption that's going on right now. If you think of what's changing in the data world, there are multiple trends happening at the same time. Volume of data doubling every year. You have a lot of new types. >> Six months. >> Well, for us too, the cloud is six months, but across the industry it's about a year every year. Still faster than computing in fact. Faster than Moore's law. Then, you have the variety of data, all kinds of data. You have the velocity of data, all the speed at which data needs to get processed. All the new techniques of processing data, like AI and advanced analytics and so on. And if any single one of these was happening that would be a big trend in itself. Everything happening at the same time, that's the generational market disruption and that's what we call, I said look, it would be easier if we gave it a name, and that's what we call data 3.0. >> So, you know, you just made a really great point. And I want to highlight it and suggest, again, looking at the board, where are the next generation of innovations going to come from? It used to be that we relied Moore's Law, double performance every 18 months, and in so doing we could put more software into it. But what you just described is doubling the amount of data every year, faster than Moore's Law. Means that it's inevitable. We have to move more of the innovation up into software, especially software that manages data. >> Absolutely, right. I think there's, just like you had said, the rate of growth of data being so much faster than even the rate of processing power growth means a couple of things happen. First of all, you're going to move more data into the cloud because in the cloud you can expand horizontally must faster, so than you can ever do in your own on-premise. So that's going to happen. The second big thing that's going to happen is as data gets into the cloud and people are using all these different types of new data processing techniques to your point about the catalog, if you don't have a fundamental catalog that tells you where your data is, who's using it, what it is for etc., you just lose control. You just cannot keep in control of your data. And so what people are realizing is as they do new business initiatives they got to have the data catalog. They got to put in place the data catalog and then let the catalog expand. >> A horizontally scalable cloud. That's a really significant point. And this has been a customer challenge, right? So, we're now in the obvious mode of the cloud is there. Azure, you mentioned Microsoft is growing significant. The shift has been made, everyone kind of gets cloud. But the cloud scale is still the pressure. Now you got data coming in, into the cloud scale, and you got things like GDPR, which is a shot across the bow saying okay, now you got to start thinking about compliance and management, and growth. Kind of a lot of things being juggled there. How do you see that unfolding, because it's challenging for customers? I mean there's a lot of things going. A lot of moving parts. >> The way I think about it is, think of this way. Customers have been working with databases for a long time. Over 50 years right now. And the first generation of databases, customers used to say, "Look, I just need a database "that runs all the time. "I can't have a database that crashes "every two hours or so." It just needs reliability as the first thing in a database. The next thing people started thinking about, once reliability was a solved problem, was they said, "I need scale and performance. "The number of records are increasing, etc." Once these became design principles databases started to become more and more robust. The only way to solve the kinds of problems that you mentioned today is every new database that you think of, whether it's for structured data, unstructured data, any kind of data. And you think of a database, think not only of reliability, performance, scale, also think of connectivity, governance, security, privacy. All these need to become design principles for whoever is thinking about the database, and that's what we mean by the catalog. It's the catalog helps you put the discipline in place. When you start a new database, register it in the catalog. That way you know what you are doing with the database. When you set up a copy of a database, put in the catalog. That's what we mean by the discipline. That way you can track. Tomorrow if you say, look I want to know where my European customer data is, just go to the catalog and it will tell you. >> So, I want to build on that. Actually, many years ago when I was first screwing around with databases, one of the things that was explained to me was bring in a database the application developer no longer has to know as much about the underlying infrastructure. >> That's correct. >> Because the data base administrator will take responsibility for how the data got spread on disc and access paths and all that other stuff so the developer could focus on the development. Now when we think about the cloud and all these other technologies and raising things up the catalog allows developers to increasingly focus on how they're going to use data. As opposed to the process that they are going to build. So we were talking about his earlier with a couple of different guests. Microsoft and when Rohan was here. >> Right. >> And the idea that ultimately we're talking about a data-first approach to thinking about how we create application value. >> That's exactly right. And to your point, I think the principles have not changed. What has changed is the way that you apply those principles. Which is you take a data-first approach, but then that's what the APIs let you do. The APIs expose the data to different applications and users. They don't need to know how the processing is happening. So today the data might be processed through Spark. Tomorrow you might say I got a new engine that processes it. They don't need to know it at the application level. At the application level, it's exposed through APIs, and the get to use the APIs. >> So, if you think about, from our perspectives, sorry John, when you think about it from our perspectives, we've always believed that digital business means something, and the difference between business and digital business is digital businesses use data as an asset. And a digital business transformation is the degree to which you are transforming, re-institutionalizing your work, reorganizing around data as an asset. >> That's right. >> So very, very important concept. Challenging for a lot of CEOs. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So look. Informatica's a software business, which means in many respects it has a whole bunch of data assets associated with it, but you're engagement model hasn't always been data, your service model hasn't always been data-oriented. As a CEO, is Informatica more of a digital business today, >> Absolutely. >> And if it is, how would you advise other CEOs to think about this kind of a transformation? >> Yeah, let me just give you the kind of the intelligent disruption we've gone through, because we were a software business, we're a cloud business today. And that's the transformation of the digital business-- >> Peter: Product to a services-oriented approach. >> And even in the product, our business model used to be that we basically said look our goal is to try to sell software upfront, go work with customers, make the business case for software, and sell the software upfront. Today we're selling a service which means we not only want to self the software, we want to know how customers are using the software, are they successful with the software, is it doing what they expected, and that is the most notion of land, adapt, expand, and then renew. And that's a much better approach, because it works for the customer, it works for us. There's less shelf ware in this process. So a lot of people, everybody's happy with that. But in order to make that happen, we got to collect a lot of data on whether customers are being successful. >> The business model and the product model's got to be aligned completely and that's really what you guys have done. And is that where people are making mistakes, in your mind, when you see people going to the cloud? That they kind of do it with the cloud, then forget to change their... >> And that corporate, that's exactly right. When you think of this digital transformation or digital business you got to do three things all in sync. The new customer engagement models like ours change from upfront to ongoing. And then there's new products and services, which is all the stuff that we have done around the cloud portfolio. And then there's new operating models, new processes, customer success is a new process that we did not have four years ago. Which is we proactively reach out to customers to find out what they're doing with our software, are they successful with it, et cetera. We used to wait for them to call us. Now we do it proactively. >> But isn't that also one of the businesses of taking a product to services approach, is because you're now establish a relationship with a customer that says, it's not just proactively, you're exchanging data on a continuous basis. In the form of updates on the one hand, but also utilization information et cetera, build a better product, better engagement. >> Exactly. In fact, you'll see one of the packed events here has been what we call the the Ops Insight, or Operational Insight, that's the product we built to do exactly what you said. Get the telemetry data, help customers use our products better. And that's the transformation from a product to a service. >> And we had Toyota on earlier, and they were very complimentary. But the big ah-ha for them was we had this crisis, we weren't connected, but we actually had the data. They just didn't connect at all. So they kind of had it, the answer, couldn't get it. >> And then we're using data excellently in each of the different functions. >> Then we did the transformation, and then they realized, had they gone down a different route, they wouldn't have been prepared for the tsunami of telemetry data coming from the cars. >> That's exactly it. >> So now, again, this is not going away. This is going to to be the pattern. There's going to be a new set of inbound data coming in. How should customers prepare for that? Is there an ingestion mechanism? Is that where you guys do the cataloging? This is kind of the important, headroom question. Where's the... >> There's different points depending on the style of the organization. I often ask questions, what is the nature of the culture of your organization? Do you guys work top-down better, bottom-up better, how do you work? So somebody who says looking at it, we actually work bottom-up really well, right? Top-down dictates don't work really well. Then I say to them, why don't you start and profile the top hundred data elements that really matter for your business. So if they're an insurance company, a policy number. That's one of the top hundred data elements. A claim number, that's one of the top hundred data elements. Just identify the top hundred data elements, and then just tell yourself that you have a consistent business definition for that data element, you have a consistent technical definition, you know where the data resides, et cetera et cetera. Just start bottom-up. For some companies that works really well. Other companies are more like, no no no. We work more better top-down. Then you start with what is your strategy as a business? How are you going to transform yourself, who is your competitive threats, and so on. And then you go through what are you doing in terms of transformation, new operating models, new customer engagement, et cetera? And then translate that into a data strategy, and that becomes a data architecture. So I think it depends on the style of the organization. Some of them are trying both and meeting in the middle, but what I tell customers is based on your culture, based on your style, there's different models that work. >> Great relationship with Microsoft announced here. Scott Guthrie's on stage. How's that relationship going? I know it just didn't start yesterday, because there's deep production integration, shipping, it's not GA but it's previewed shipping soon. Couple weeks coming, or months. By September, I think that estimate is. Ballpark. Where'd this come from, how you guys doing, can you just give some color to the Informatica, Microsoft, Azure relationship? >> Absolutely. The relationship with Microsoft itself has been going on for a very long time. We have over 2,000 common customers with Microsoft, so it's something that especially on-premise, has been something that we have been working with SQL server and other Microsoft products for a very long time. The relationship specifically with Scott and with the Azure team started in 2014. So we went up there to Seattle just to learn about what they were doing with the cloud and so on. We were actually pretty impressed. We said, look, this is clearly the new Microsoft. This is the Microsoft that wants to work with partners, that wants to be a true enterprise player, and we said, you know what, this is the kind of partner that we want to bet on. So we made a few proactive investments initially. We, at that point, which was not clear that Azure would take off like it did. But just like you mentioned with Reinvent, we said these guys are really clearly betting on it. So 2014 was when we started making the bets on Azure, SQL data wheelhouse, et cetera. And that was when it started growing. And in the last, we have obviously seen the hockey stick now. We have 200 or so enterprises. >> Yeah, completely top-down, said we're doing that in cloud. Everyone's in line, it's beautiful. The growth has been there, the stock was the... I remember when it was trading at 26. I think it might have been about that time. >> Well you look at it now, exactly. >> So you're really confident that this is going to be a positive impact for customers? >> A very positive impact. Because with them, you see both the on-premise, we have clear synergy and partnerships with them, and in Azure as well, we have the clear partnership and value proposition with them. >> And let's be honest. There are not a lot of times when betting against Microsoft turned out to be the right thing to do. Maybe with phones, but that's about it. >> There's some things there, but anyway. I want to get to the company question. You're the chief executive officer, you're leading now a growing team, growing company. Talk about the culture, because you guys have always had a culture of innovation. Although private equity took you over, there was a story there, but I really want to get at the key points in the company, and talk about the R&D. Because you talked about bets. You bet on Amazon. We were there in 2014 with you. We say you there, and we saw Azure. You guys sniffing out the good tech. You guys are smart. But you got to put the rubber to the road for investment. Where's your priorities? Talk about the R&D. >> Yeah. Just to set the context, when we went private, we went private with the clear understanding that we would transform the company. We saw the potential for the company but we also knew that changing from a software company to the cloud company that we just talked about, that was not easy to do as a public company. Obviously there's a lot of investment required, plus there's some unpredictability. >> Earnings, and... >> We said look, we went private with the explicit aim of transforming the company. And the investors, our sponsors, had the same goal as well. You know, sometimes there's a misperception that all PE is about cost cutting. >> But most are. >> Exactly, and that's just not true. It's like you have to look at every PE form and every PE deal, and a number of PE deals that are growth-oriented. Because they know that, hey, with the investments we're making, ultimately if you can get a company to grow, the valuation is way better than you can ever get through just cost cutting. They saw that potential in Informatica. We worked closely with them to define the plan that we've been executing on since 2015. By the way, Microsoft and Salesforce.com came in as strategic investors, so when we went private that was a good endorsement for us. And so we've been executing on that front. And so we've never stopped investing in R&D. As a public company we invested about 15%, 16% on R&D. This year we're actually investing 17% on R&D, so we've really done what it takes to be continually best of breed and integrated, that's-- >> And I'll count cloud subscription models there, what are some other priorities can you share? Some of the priorities for you guys in terms of key areas you're getting out front on being proactive. >> Yeah, so biggest priorities for the company are continue to be a clear best of breed product line in everything we do That we believe that we should never ask any of our customers to sacrifice anything when they buy Informatica. It is best of breed. Second clear priority for the company, make sure that we have an integrated product suite. That's not easy to do, when you're both best of breed and integrated. But that's why we invest as much as we do in R&D. The third clear priority for the company is the transformation journey that we're on. All the key parts of the transformation, product portfolio, go to market, business model, customer success, brand. They all have to work in concert. That's where I mentioned the values and the culture of the company. We've really have always been a customer-focused company. But we said look, what really will take us for the next 25 years is what we call the values that are real data. >> I really appreciate your time, I know you're super busy. I have one final question, cause it's pretty obvious. We were kind of speculating on our intros, at our editorial overview is your ecosystem is, I won't say massive 'cause you're growing, but we predict it's going to be pretty big. Given if this continues, the trend continues, it's going to be a matter of time before you start rolling in developers and all kinds of new partners, just global system integrators, on and on and on. What's the strategy for the ecosystem, do you guys have clear visibility on how that's going to play out? Where is global partners or customers? How are people engaging with you guys in the ecosystem? >> We already have over 500 partners, and that's where this focus on being an API-driven, micro-services driven architecture really helps us. That way when you scale new partners, you don't have to do custom work for each partner. And that really helps us scale much faster. In the past we have a 100+ OEMs, and each OEM is to take a little more work because it was all custom interfaces. Now in this new API, micro-services driven world, we can scale to the kind of volume that you're talking about, and I'm pretty confident with-- >> In many respects that is the definition of horizontal scaling. >> Exactly. >> Horizontal scaling, it's the magic of the cloud. Certainly opening up and changing the game. Certainly changing the infrastructure with cloud-native. You're starting to see a shift to a new infrastructure on the internet is all happening with data, cloud, and who knows. Maybe blockchain and crypto will be in the conversation soon. How do you do the MDM on that? That's a hard one, we'll get to that later. Anil, thank you for coming on the Cube. Really appreciate it. Great to see you. >> Thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. >> Alright, John Furrier, Peter Burris here, the CEO of Informatica at Informatica World 2018. We'll be back. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2017. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live in San Francisco for CUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier, SiliconANGLE. Our next guest, Anil Chakravarthy who's the CEO of Informatica, CUBE alumni multiple times, but the chief executive officer leading the charge of a great private company doing very well. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here, John. Thanks very much. >> We've got a couple of things to talk about, but I want to just jump in. Behind us you see the new logo, Informatica. Really kind of the last leg of the stool, if you will, you guys have gone private, >> Yep. >> Great product work over the years. You know I've been pretty complimentary of you guys, although we've had a critical analysis session yesterday. But all the big bets were very well done playing off. You've got a great product team, great leadership team, new CIO hire. But the last leg of the stool is the brand. >> Anil: That's right. >> You guys haven't been showboating much. Now you got to kind of brag and be humble about it and get the word out. New marketing program, what's that all about? >> Yeah that's exactly right. So you just said, the transformation that we are going through, three big steps is the transformation. The product portfolio transformation, we've been talking about that. This is all driven by cloud, by big data, and machine learning, and all of that. Then the transformation of the business model, from license to subscription and cloud services. And now the brand transformation. And we see the brand transformation as actually catching up to where the company actually was. We were just talking about that right before we got started. We actually have done a lot of things. Like for instance, did you know that we are doing 1 trillion transactions a month in the cloud? I mean, very few people knew about that. >> Yeah, what's more impressive on that, I found that out earlier it was 1 billion in January. >> Anil: It's unbelievable. It's-- >> I mean how do you do that? It's a growth hockey stick, straight up. >> It's a hockey stick, it's huge, it's huge growth, and that's driven by the fact that we are the leader in cloud data management for the biggest ecosystems, for Salesforce, for Amazon, for Azure, and that drives a lot of the data volume across the cloud. >> Before we get in the keynotes, on that note, one of the big bets you know I've been very impressed on is the cloud play, right? The data architecture of things, the winning formula. But you got cloud presses, you had Amazon Web Services. Google just announced span or horizontally scalable database, generally available. You were on the of the three data partners on the front end of that. >> Anil: That's correct. >> And part of the launch of Google. >> That's correct, yeah. >> I didn't know that. >> So you know, the way we think of the world is from our customer's perspective. It really is the best way to think about it is as the enterprise cloud. Put it together. All the data you have in the enterprise that you have generated over the years, that's still very valuable data. And then the data you have in the cloud. And you can't think of those two things as separate. For instance, you could have customer data, the same customer. John, you're the customer of a retailer. Some of that data about you is in their on-premises systems, and some of the data may be in a cloud system, but it is all interconnected data and you can't have two separate silos. We believe that we are the only ones that can really manage that. And that's why we are supporting every major cloud platform or cloud system, just like we are supporting every major on-premises system. >> Yeah, you guys call it Switzerland. It was a great way to describe it. But really to me it puts bigger than that, is that you guys make data ready. And that's really the value of what I call the tier two data layer that's building, where you've got stuff in memory, I get that, it's some odyssey streaming stuff, and things going on there. But now, then you have third tier, archive, but data tier two is just like all the data: IoT, structured data. That's growing, but the cost of storage is getting lower and lower. Now companies are incented to store. How is that impacting your business? We heard that at DellEMC World over and over and obviously they're in the storage business, but the tier two storage is significantly growing. >> Well data is still growing at over 25% a year. That's a huge number given all the way the size that you have, so it's going to be within by 2020, it'll be over 15 zetabytes, and a zetabyte, for those of you who are interested, is 10 to the 21. That's a huge amount of data. And what we're seeing is, the value comes from being able to first of all see your way through the data, being able to understand what data is valuable and what's not, and then connect the data. If you have customer data, product data, location data, et cetera, being able to put all of that together. That's really where the value comes from. >> So I've got to ask you about your keynote. You talk about the digital transformation's unfolding and data is the critical foundation for digital transformation. Okay, we've heard digital transformation. I mean, I'm not to say it's played, I know you guys have your theme, but this business transformation going on. So digital transformation is a known trend, but it kind of is played in my mind. I want to know what's different about Informatica now. Why is it unfolding now versus two years ago when we started talking about digital transformation? What's the most relevant thing now? >> Well I think the biggest relevance is, two years ago, as you exactly said, people were talking about digital transformation. Now they're doing digital transformation. Now you're seeing, you know, we talk about our own customers like Tesla or GE or Amazon doing it, but lots of other customers are actually doing the digital transformation. Now when you first take the first step toward the digital transformation, that's when you realize, my data, I got to fix the data foundation. If I can't have a data foundation, then I just, you know, everybody cares about a good customer experience. If I can't tell all the interactions a customer has with my company, and that data is in different places, there is no way I can provide a good customer experience because the customer knows what they're doing with me and I don't know what they're doing with me. And that's really the foundation for the data foundation. >> I want you to take a minute to just re-explain that because this is something comes up all the time and I get different answers and people have different definitions. What does it mean to have a digital data foundation and what are some of the impacts to the customers when they do have that? >> Think of it the simplest way. Let's say you have a customer and a lot of the new customers are like that. You are a bank, and you have a customer who doesn't want to talk to anybody. They only want to do everything through a mobile application. They want to file a loan application through the mobile, they want to check their balance through mobile, they want to deposit a check through mobile, et cetera, et cetera. If they have a problem, they might talk to somebody through a chat on a mobile, but they don't really want to talk to a live person. And this is, by the way, a common scenario now. Now they are doing probably 20 different things through the mobile. But when you get into your back end, that's the front end. You can put 20 things on the mobile, but the back end you've got 20 different things. But you have to have a single picture across those 20 things. When did the customer interact with us? What did they do? What is the pattern of that customer? How do you profile what the customer is doing? If you don't have that picture, everything that you do with the customer is going to just appear disconnected to them. It's going to frustrate them even more. And that's really the reason we have to have the data foundation. >> Okay, so, that's kind of a data layer, I get that, and believe me, horizontally-scalable data, making it accessible only helps the apps. The question to you is, your reaction to people saying, "Hey, Anil, I got to be innovative. "I got to free the data up and I got to let it grow "and you know a thousand flowers bloom, all this goodness. "But hey, I got to control it." So that's a huge issue. I've got governance, I've got compliance, there's laws now. So am I stuck in the mud? I want to be innovative and go fast, but now I've got to govern it and control it. How do you answer that question? >> You can do both now and that's the reason why we're announcing CLAIRE and all these innovations that we announced this. The advent of machine learning and metadata let's you do both. You basically say, look, I can use all these new technologies to find out what data I have. It's not going to slow you down. In fact, if you set up something like an intelligent data lake, because it has the metadata layer, you are actually opening up the data you have to the end user without having to come through IT for every piece of data, which means they can go faster. That's where the innovation happens. So you can do both. >> John: So it's a control catalog, basically. >> It's exactly right. It's a controlled catalog and you basically get to define different levels of trust. You can say, this data is curated data, it's trusted data and we can vouch for it. And maybe other data that's just shared collaboratively, and you can just flag it and then that way the user knows, okay here's data that I'm getting from a central system and this is what I need to use when I'm talking about something like revenue. And I'm tying something like a trend of what's going on. I might be able to use other data and that's the key there. >> Talk about the trend around CLAIRE. A lot of buzz here at the show. CLAIRE stands for clairvoyant. It's got the word AI in it. It's a name. SAP's got Leonardo, Salesforce has Einstein, all these different terms, but it's a clever way to point to AI, augmented intelligence, and machine learning. >> Anil: Correct. >> What does that mean for Informatica as a company? Certainly it kind of humanizes it. >> Anil: Correct. >> Shows the access of data should be democratized. What does it mean for you guys and the customers? How does that play out in your mind as the CEO? What do you see CLAIRE doing? >> Well the three big points I'll make about CLAIRE. First of all, when we built CLAIRE, we did not invent the artificial intelligence or the machine learning. A lot of that is already available. So we took a lot of the best algorithms in machine learning and applied them to metadata and applied them to data management. That's the secret sauce. It's not the building the AI itself, it's the use of the AI for data management. That's number one. Second, we defined CLAIRE very clearly and we said it's not a product. It's an engine, it's an AI-powered engine. In fact, I call for CLAIRE, I say it's cloud-scale, AI-powered real time engine, that's CLAIRE. Right, so it's an acronym, but it's the engine that powers other products. The third big thing is we're telling customers, you're going to get the benefit of CLAIRE, but you don't need to deploy CLAIRE. When you buy any of our products that are powered by CLAIRE or any of our solutions that are powered by CLAIRE, that will automatically come in there. So it means once you have any product like our enterprise information catalog or our secured source or data governance, you're starting to use CLAIRE and then you can use CLAIRE for other use cases as well. >> What's been the reaction? You know, and obviously you get nervous, CEO, probably got these things out there, probably wonder what the reaction is. What's your take on the reaction? >> People are very intrigued. I know that's what they, they look at CLAIRE and go, what is CLAIRE? How are you guys using it? I think people are asking us, tell us a little bit more about how AI is being used in the world of data and data management. So it's absolutely the reaction we wanted. >> So I got to ask you this question. I asked Mark Hurd the same question at the Oracle media day a few weeks ago. I want to ask you the same question. Everyone's number one at everything now. You guys are number one in six quadrants. Oracle's number one, the Dell E's. Everyone's number one at something. So the question really is, not so much about being number one, congratulations, you've got some magic quadrant wins that was highlighted in the keynote. But you guys are going through a transformation. You're telling your customers that they're going through a transformation. Wouldn't it make sense that the transformation scoreboard looks different than the old way? And I want to get your thoughts on this because, not that we have the answer, but there's one answer in customer wins, but as this new world transforms and unfolds, what's the scoreboard look like? How, because it's not as clean to say, this is the category, you're starting to see a little blending, as you mentioned how data is evolving. What's the new scoreboard look like? >> Is it the scoreboard for us or for the customer? >> John: You guys, the industry. How do I know if you're doing well? Obviously customer wins is obviously number one. >> Yeah, I think the best way to. I'll give you a couple of metrics, financial and nonfinancial, okay. From a nonfinancial perspective, as you said, a couple of key metrics. One is customers. How many new customers, how many new customers, reference customers do we have? Second one that you want to look at is just mind share or when people think about digital transformation, do they think of, hey, Informatica, they have a key role in my digital transformation. Just looking at mind share and so on, because that's a good leading indicator. In terms of the nonfinancial, or the financial metrics for us, obviously as more customers do what we call enterprise cloud data management, you're going to see our subscription revenue grow dramatically and you know, that's something that when you look at our subscription revenue, you'll see that impact of the enterprise cloud data management. >> And you guys made the move to subscription, obviously went private. Bruce Chizen and Jerry Held, your board members talked about this. You can do a lot of things 'cause it doesn't, it impacts the P&L but that it's still baking out, it's evolving, you're private, not public, but you want to get it right before you go public. >> That's correct. >> How do you feel about the progress on that front now? >> Oh we're making fabulous progress. We're very pleased with where we are. From my perspective, we are ahead of where we thought we would be by this time. I think customer buying behavior has converged really nicely with where we are in terms of where we want to go. So I think that's definitely been a big plus. >> Sally Jenkins, your new CMO, you got to feel good about her coming on the board-- >> Anil: Oh she's done a great job. >> High impact. She said on theCUBE that you guys are the hottest privately held pre-IPO startup. >> Anil: That's right. >> Twenty years in the making, whatever. I mean, but you guys are private. >> Billion dollar startup. >> But you act like a startup, which is why we like you guys a lot. You guys are like a very hustling like a startup. But now you're growing and you're getting beyond the 200 million, over a billion dollars now. When's the IPO coming? >> Yeah, I mean, you know look, I can tell you the factors that will be the lead to the perfect timing for the IPO. When those factors come together, I don't have a crystal ball right now, but I can tell you it weighs both on us and the market. From our perspective, we are making this big shift in the business model. We want to make sure that we can say, hey look, now the shift is very clear and stable and we can see where they where you know we'll be able to project out our own forecast for the next three, four quarters. So that's one key indicator for us. The second key indicator that we look at is the total revenue growth of the company and what percent of the growth of the revenue is recurring revenue for us. So we're going to be looking at those two factors. And of course from the market perspective, we want to make sure that the market wants to, continues to be. >> If you wait four years til we have a new president, and then heard all the politics from the Kara Swisher thing was, got a lot of people stirred up, in the conversation. But in all seriousness now, you also have private equity so you have to make the company worth money after they go public so you've got to have some growth left in you, right, I mean you guys are, you feel good about the? >> Oh we really do because you know, we look, that's where these six categories that we talked about make a lot of sense. You look at data integration, data quality, master data management, these are all categories that are well established. We know the patterns and we are seeing very good growth in those categories. Then you look at the new categories: cloud, big data management, data security. Those are all coming into their own right now. So that's why when you look at our portfolio, you go, wow, there are some that you already have great, well established and going well. These other ones, they're well established but they also have a lot of promise and future growth. >> Great chatting with you. You're a great, insightful, and inspiration. You guys have done a great job. But I've got to ask you the question because I think you have an interesting role. I mean, you have, you're acting like a startup, but you're not a startup. You went private from a public company. You've got a great board of directors. You've got Jerry Held and Bruce Chizen on there, but you've also got private equity sharks on the board. So, that's my definition, I won't say you said that. >> No, no, but I was actually in the private equity world, to my pleasant surprise, I've seen the whole spectrum of investors and our guys on the board are very much growth-oriented. They know that the value gets created for them through growth so it's well aligned. >> Yeah, but you're not sitting back having pizza and drinking wine. These PE guys, they're financially driven. >> Anil: That's right. >> So the question is, advice to other startups, whether they're venture backed or other companies going through innovation strategy. How do you manage the success of having such good product excellence? I know you've got good people, so that's an easy one answer. How as a CEO do you maintain the disciple to have the cadence of the financial performance? Because those guys look, they're probably not going to give you, hey how we doing? Numbers matter, but you're transforming technology and products. >> That's right, so what we do is-- >> How do you do it? >> We have a scorecard which has both the short term and the longterm metrics and we look at both of those. You know, we do monthly business reviews. So the pulse of the company has definitely quickened. We're operating at a new level of intensity. But when we look at the scorecard, it's not just the immediate financial metrics. It's things like, for example, are we building the back end infrastructure to be a subscription company? That doesn't get done in a month. >> John: That's an IT challenge, right? >> That's an IT challenge, a process challenge, it takes 12 months, 18 months, the kind of things that you talk with Graeme about. But that is an example of, you can have a scorecard. You don't necessarily have to look at a scorecard just for the short term metrics. You look at it for both short term and what makes you successful over the longterm. And that's, you know, that's what we're doing is just keep our eye on the ball, focus on a few things, both short term and longterm, and make sure we're doing them well. >> How about customer wins? To me, that's the scoreboard ultimately as we look at it at our team. How are you doing on customer wins? Can you share some, I see you have a lot of great customers. I met a few last night, obviously big wigs, big names. >> Anil: Yeah, exactly. >> What are some of the big wins look like and why are you winning? >> Well you know, we have 7,000 plus customers. We have a great customer base. Just at this show we've had 85% of our sessions here at the show have had customer or partner speakers. That gives you a sense of customers want to talk about us. A couple of ones that I would highlight for example, which are fairly recent for example, Amazon is one. They just spoke at the show and in fact the CMO of Amazon was here, Ariel Kelman. And he spoke about he is a customer of Informatica and how he's using Informatica for his own marketing systems and the marketing data analytics that he is doing. Another example is Tesla. You know, we talked about them at the show. >> I got a test drive on Friday with one. >> There you go, exactly, and then they are using us for the Tesla and the Solar City acquisition and driving synergies there. So lots of great examples. >> John: Tough customers, by the way, very, very finicky. >> Oh they are very demanding, very demanding customers and we are really proud to be serving them. >> Okay, final question, Anil. What's next? How do you look forward. Obviously this event, congratulations on getting the branding out. Peggy and the team did a great job. Sally and the team did a great job. What about next? What's next? >> Yeah, you know, what's next for us is simply work with customers to first of all get our story out, understand their priorities, and make sure that they understand that we can be a great partner for them. So we believe that this is the beginning of that journey. We talked about digital transformation and how we help them. Now we take the show on the road to our customers, make sure that we help them at their pace to transform. >> So bring the message out, build the brand. >> Absolutely. >> That's the key priority. >> And then continue. >> Product side, what's going on the products? >> Well on the product side, for instance, you saw a teaser of all the big trends. Machine learning, cloud, big data, security, all of these have full-fledged roadmaps that we're going to be working on over the course of the next six months. >> Anil, great to see you. Congratulations, you can tell, you're still intense. You've got the intensity, it's not going to stop by the way. >> Anil: No it's not. >> It's not like you're not going to get more intense as you guys grow. And congratulations. >> Thank you for having me on your show. >> We are here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017 with the CEO here, Anil Chakravarthy, inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more coverage from Informatica World after this short break. (techno music)

live from Orlando Florida it's the kue covering sapphire now headline sponsored by ASAP Hana cloud the leader in platform-as-a-service with support from console Inc the cloud internet company now here's your host John furrier hey welcome back and we are here live in sapphire now in orlando florida this is the cube silicon angles flagship program we go out to the events and extract the signal noise want to thank our sponsors SI p HANA cloud platform and console inc at consoled cloud our next guest is an eel cebu vp of business development at fred balboni who is the GM of IBM here on the cube together SI p time you book them back of the cube good to see you guys like when is down so microsoft's up on stage ibm's here with SI p this is the old sav no real change of the game in terms of you guys have been multi-vendor very partnering very eco system driven but yet the game is changing very rapidly in this ecosystem of multi partnering with joint solutions i mean even apple your announcement earlier so is this kind of like a bunch of Barney deals as we used to say in the old days or what is the new relationship dynamic because data is the new currency it's the new oil it's the digital capital data is capital data is a digital asset partnerships are critical talk about this dynamic partnerships are critical and I think what we're doing is we are going deeper than we've ever gone with these partnerships with IBM we announced last month we announced the joint ASAP IBM partnership for digital transformation what does this do so what we've been doing traditionally with IBM we've had siloed partnerships with different IBM brands right we had a partnership with a power brand we had a partnership with the cloud team we are a partnership with GBS what we've done now with the digital transformation is bringing it all together so we have a CEO level discussion that's driven this partnership and I think that's really the differentiation so we have moved away from the so-called Barney deals because our customers expect bill talked about it in the keynote today he says when it's a multi partner situation customers expect that you're going to have one voice you're going to be a line you're going to provide value to those customers that's what we're trying to do and that's what this partnership is all right I want to get your thoughts on this I mean I'm Barnum's reference to the character you know I love you you love me kind of like a statement of mission but really not walking the talk so to speak but but I want to get your thoughts because you have a look at the analytics background at IBM when you built that business up there's a conflict in a way but it's also a great thing in the market apps are changing in very workload specific at the edge with its IOT or a mobile or whatever digital app they have to be unique they have to have data they got to be they have to be somewhat siloed but yet the trend is to break down the silos for the customer so how do you guys is it the data that does that because you guys doing a lot of work in this year you want to build great apps and be highly differentiated yet no silos how do you make that ok so it is its first of all it's very exciting and a confronting but also exciting for not only our companies but also for our customers it's all enabled really simply because of a couple of major technology shifts that have happened number one technology shift is the cloud the cloud without question is driving driving all of this in addition to your notion about data readily available data and the algorithms and software that can you know make cognitive sense of that is both driving of this whole change last but not least and I think Hana really enables this you know embodies this is the architectural change so you put those three things together availability of data cloud which means the capital investment required to build the infrastructure is inexpensive and then finally Hana which is the technology platform that rapidly allows you to take using you know a generic term api's and wire them to different sources allow you to dynamically reconfigure businesses now there's one last thing I think is really important here that we don't want to underplay and this is the social phenomena of the consumerization of IT and this has been going on for many many years but we've really seen it accelerate in the last 3 to 4 100 ala dated yeah absolutely and when you see a device like this becomes the system of engagement and oh by the way if you don't like if you don't like dark skies weather app well then go to the weather channel's weather app and if you don't like their weather I've go to one of 40 other weather apps so therefore this consumerization of IT is bombarding our CIOs what's exciting is that cloud cognitive insight a flexible core with great social engagement allows a CIO to really rapidly reconfigure so that's why these partnerships are rising that's very important you just said to about this relationship now about consumerization of IT is a complete game changer on the enterprise software business because now the relationship to the suppliers I'm the CXO or CIO I had a traditional siloed as you use that word earlier relationship with my my vendors one pane of glass like that IT Service Management down here I got the operations I up changed my appt every six months or six years the cadence of interaction was very inside the firewall absolutely so the relationship has changed with the suppliers expand on that because that really hits a whole nother thread I'm the buyer i don't want complexity you don't and what you do want is time to value so combining that with the beautiful user experience that you know thanks to devices like the one that Fred showed you know are an absolute necessity they it's it's understood now it's an expectation that customers have and customers of customers also have so i think that is impacted us in multiple ways what you heard and build scheme out you heard that with our supplier Network you heard our president for ASAP Arriba Alex talk about it he is that the change within that organization itself with our different vendors with the fact that we have to provide choice to our customers i think that is that has changed the way we do business and it's interesting to just I mean this is right now a moment in history as a flashpoint not that's a big of event but it's been seeing this trend happening over the hundreds of cube events that we've been to over the past few years is that now in just today highlights it the Giants of tech are here ASAP IBM or I mean Microsoft Office state's atty Nutella the apple announcement you guys have a similar deal with Apple these are the Giants okay working together now iBM has bluemix you have HANA cloud platform you have on a cloud everyone's got cloud so this kind of highlights that it's not a one cloud world absolutely and so this really kind of changes the game so I got to ask you given all that how do you guys talk to the ecosystem because they're our total transistors going on at capgemini Accenture pwc CSC it's an outside-in dynamic now how is that change for you guys as you guys go to market together in a variety of things in a coop efficient some faces how does that dynamic change with it for the partners that have to implement this stuff so co-op edition is is a reality i think we've asap we've learnt this probably from a partner that does the best which is IBM they probably they practically invented cooperation in the enterprise software space so i think here's how here's the way we look at it right so so we are looking at with with hana with HANA cloud platform we're really morphing into a platform and applications company and and we have the strategy of essentially later thousand apps blue so what are we doing on HANA cloud platform in such a short time so we have two about 2600 plus customers we have I think the more important part is that our ecosystem around HANA cloud platform is 400 + partners so that's an advantage visa V say Oracle for instance which is waves to have an ecosystem they lot of people there too I think I think the DNA of SI p isn't being an open company we've had that for ages so we work closely with Barton's and by the way I used to be at Oracle I was there for seven years and I know the difference its it's stuck Oracle's got a different strategy we've got a very very different very open strategy so I think what we're doing is we coalescing around these key assets right our digital Korres for Hana Hana cloud platform as the key platform for our customers okay so a nice watching out there and looking out over the next year so what execution successes do you put out there that's a to prove that you guys are are open and you guys are doing good deals what success kpi's key indicators would you say look for the following things to happen so number one available availability of AP is I think if you look at the different api's they access to the variety of SI p systems what you did see is that there's a digital core there's all of the different assets we've got in the cloud easy access to those I think customers can look for that right how can they rapidly develop an essay p successfactors extension or how can they extend ASAP arriba very quickly integrating that with the s100 digital core I think that's number one number two is the HCP App Center so we have probably about a thousand plus apps out there and by the way I do need to give a shout out here because we've got three apps that three iOS apps that IBM pour it onto HANA cloud platform in the last six weeks was it Fred six weeks we're talking about you know an incredibly short amount of time that are now highlighted on HANA cloud platform app center Fred talk about IBM right now because this isn't a game finished shift I've noticed more aggressively the three years ago I saw the wave coming at IBM and now remote past two years it's just been constant battering on the beachhead iBM has been donating a ton of IP with open sores everyone's behind blue bluemix has gone from you know a fork of cloud foundry to a now really fast they're moving very very quickly yes sir writing apps you're partnering is this part of the strategy just to kind of keep humbling the Markowitz assets like this is that's open the more open IBM and how is open mean to for you guys today well because I think at the end of the day we got to realize that I mean us to question a couple couple questions ago and I Neal answered it quite well which is customers are going to make the choice customers want to be flexible in their choice so understand I want to first of all shout outs IV to Apple excuse me to sav a shadow tennis AP here which is s ap has always been about partnering an ecosystem and so that's a court that's a core belief of theirs so when you look at what they've technically done here with the HANA cloud platform you know one of the many strategists can put this on a board enjoys well this is what this is what they should be doing but the reality of it is is the reason companies stay with existing service providers the reason companies say with existing technologies is because they've already got it it's what they know how to do and so and what they want to do is very hard so the Hana architecture in the hunting club platform was probably drawn on a board ten years ago the fact that it's real and here now now mace clients the ability to actually make these kind of ships IBM's move to the cloud moving assets to the cloud because we recognize clients are actually going to want to pick and choose and build these things in a dynamic fashion and we want our workloads to be on the IBM cloud every single show I go to down basically feels like a cloud in a data show even amplify which is kind of a commerce show sure it's all about data and the cloud so I we got to get we got to get wrapped up I want to get one final thread in with you guys and that is unpardonable Apple just spent the billion dollars with the uber clone and China so you see their partner strategy they did partner with you guys and now SI p this is a really interesting strategy for Apple to go into the enterprise they don't have to get over their skis and over-rotate on this market that can come in pre existing players and extend out versus trying to just have a strategy of rolling products out so it seems that Apple is partnering creating alliances as their way into the enterprise similar to what they're doing in in China with who were just a random example but which is impressed this week is that the Apple strategy I mean you guys both talk to Apple I mean you guys have both of deals share some color on Apple's partnering and alliances their joint venture not your invention for joint development seems to be very cool so I it's not I I I want you know when I look at what we're doing with that you know we have a goal and our goal is we believe that we can transform the enterprise you know we I BM we IBM and SI p we IBM and our partners including Apple we want to transform enterprise Apple signed on to that because Apple realized that they were changing consumers lives and and then they woke up and they said well actually but many people spend a large part of their waking day at work so if I can change a consumers life I can also change an enterprise employees life and that is the work that we are setting about doing and so therefore the partnership IBM understands enterprise really well SI p was Bill statistic today seventy-three percent of the world's transactions run through an essay peak or so yeah Apple's very obviously very delivered in picking their partners we're thrilled with the mobile first for iOS worked in Swiss great programming language has great legs is so elegant and sweet it's like see but more elegant absolutely I think again when you look at what Apple's mission has been and you look at sa peace mission right we talked about helping companies run better and transforming lives so i think i think the missions actually do intersect here and and I think SI p is a very different company than we were you know 20 years ago so for us now that user experience and product while agent by the way absence proc solid quality absolutely so I think I i think you know we converge on those areas so I would say that it's a it's a very natural farming from Apple's a brilliant strategy because it's interbred and it prizes hard you guys to live that every day it's not easy and we see venture-backed startups try to get into the enterprise and the barriers just go up every day with dev ops and you know integration now is mrs. Ann we could talk about another segment with a break but we haven't gone to the whole what does it mean to integrate that's a whole nother complex world that requires orchestration really really interesting and you just write that over the weekend and a hackathon absolutely and I think now with the tools that we're making available on our cloud platform as part of a platform as a service I think again that's the way where we can get the user interface the experience that apple provides combined with the enterprise solid stuff that we do that's awesome I'll give you guys both the final word on the segment and a bumper sticker what is this show about this year what is s AP sapphire 2016 about what's the the bumper sticker what's the theme I you know what I love builds words today I think it's about empathy it's about making it real for customers I think you'll see you know our demos are joined demos as well both in an essay p IBM Joint Center here as well as in the IBM boat you see real life solutions that are real that customers can touch that they can use so I'd like to go with that predicate real hey listen to me it's a really simple to two simple words digital reinvention every single company in the world is trying to become a digital company I think about my Hilton app when I checked into my hotel yesterday and I opened my door with my iPhone my hotel my room door you know it is every company is endeavoring to become a digital company and what what sapphire is about this year is everyone realizes at the core of every company is that platform that s AP gahanna or ECC platform and every major enterprise that's waking up to that suddenly realizes we've got to do something an essay p nibm our partner here to help thanks guys so much for sharing your insight digital reinvention going on for real here at sapphire this is the cube you're watching the cube live at sapphire now we'll be right back thank you

welcome everyone to thecube virtual i am your host rebecca knight today we are talking about cyber security and health care our guest is ken checker he is a problem solver at netscout thanks so much for coming on the show ken oh my pleasure thank you for having me i love your job title a problem solver tell our viewers a little bit about netscout and about your role there sure no i appreciate that uh yeah netscout's been around since 1984 uh and the the gentleman starter company two gentlemen starter company uh anil sengal is still our ceo he's very passionate about what we do believes in what we do and our focus really is is really service triage and making sure that important customer services and none more important than health care are are up and running and functional and so our focus is really they're really protecting we call ourselves guardians of the connected world uh we take that very seriously uh because when you think about the the technology uh the complexity and how we all really the reliance on everything that we do and how we uh rely on technology as a just a society um we really our focus is protecting that so the applications the services the network uh that's all part of the the service chain for that well we know that healthcare organizations and hospitals are under tremendous strain and pressure because of the covet-19 pandemic but also recently hospitals all over the country have been hit and targeted in a scourge of ransomware attacks can you tell our viewers a little bit about what you're seeing and what's what's happening right now oh yes it's uh it's really sad uh it's just an interesting uh it's an interesting time in the world obviously uh but we are seeing a very heavy increase in the number of attacks on from a cyber security perspective really an extortion and ransomware and there's a there's a slight difference between the two um but effectively what's happening the we'll call them the uh the bad guys are going after healthcare organizations that have some some vulnerabilities uh where you know they have some they have some areas where they can be attacked and effectively what happens is they will either launch a denial of service attack which is really a lot of robot type computers launching just directed attacks at these particular caregiving organizations these hospitals uh and then so they're trying to take down services um and that's one thing and so that's really more of a ransomware where they hey we showed you we can do it now we're going to extort money from you until you pay the other one is more of a ransomware where they've already penetrated the what we'll call defenses of the of the hospital and then now they're they're saying okay we've already we've already taken control of your system and they lock you out until you pay the ransom both we're seeing lots of attacks in that realm so what is the upshot in terms of patient care i mean this this sounds awful what are patients seeing what are doctors seeing well it's a really good point uh especially in today's world with the pandemic but really any time for health care we all have you know children aunts uncles moms dads nobody wants to be in the hospital for extended periods of time and when they're in the hospital we want to make sure that you know from a healthcare organization they want to make sure they give the best care possible and the caregiver so the nurse the doctor has the opportunity to do what they do and focus on what their their caregiving and not on the technology so when things like ransomware extortion or any particular uh impact on performance for a particular application it just impacts the caregiver which is you know and it affects us because these are people that you care about you don't want them in the hospital you don't want them in pain and the caregivers there you know these are passionate people that do what they do obviously they're dedicated to it so when there's an impact from a cyber security perspective or a application or network issue that affects health care that affects our loved ones and you just you know you really put yourself in that position we uh especially netscout we like to view we partner with our customers so and we don't take that lightly that's something that we mean and it's heartfelt and the reason for that is we look at ourselves as an extension of their team this is what healthcare organizations offer to their to their patients and they're there for for care to get well we want to make sure they have every opportunity to do that and because those healthcare organizations rely so much on technology networks applications and really protection from bad guys in cyber security uh we just want to make sure that those services are assured and that's why that's where our focus is so this i mean there are lives in the balance as you're describing this is a technical challenge but it's also one of resources a lot of these organizations just simply do not have the resources to deal with these problems effectively great point that's a great point i mean especially in today's world the the actual industry for healthcare has really taken a beating because it really had to focus their their whole uh all of their funds frankly and all of their uh the resources towards the pandemic which would be personal equipment mobile hospitals and that's that's taken a tremendous toll and they've also from just a revenue perspective they've really taken a beating frankly on on what happens from their revenue cycles because elective surgeries are way down so when you start looking at you take that into consideration so they've got very very tight resources and cyber security in general is a just a thankless job they're under attack every single day no matter what their industry is so when you look at the at the current situation to get tight resources cyber security is under a lot of stress and oh by the way here come the ransomware and extortion attacks it's just it's just a it's terrible what's going on but this is an area where where we feel this is a spot where we can really help number one our focus is really on network and service assurance so the applications in the network and that's what we're very good at and been doing it for many years but the the upside and the place where we really feel we can help uh is really twofold and that is that same solution the same deployment that we have for network and application really can be leveraged by cyber security folks as well mainly towards the areas of denial of service mainly towards areas of voice over ip we think of telecommunications and telemedicine that's all being leveraged and heavily leveraged right now specifically by healthcare organizations well again if i'm a bad guy and i know you're trying to use your telemedicine to take care of your patients and have that interaction with the doctor and the patient and i take those services down well now i've impacted patient care though that all runs over unified communications protocols voice and video things that we can monitor not only for performance but also when we see cyber type issues and that's a it's a really big uh i would call it a bit of a hole at the moment because that's a spot where cyber security teams are so strapped so resource strapped as well uh from from what they're trying to deal with every day that's a spot we can help with and help with immediately and as i mentioned the other part is really the denial of service pieces which is that's part of what we do as part of our our framework of what we deliver for services so you're describing an exceedingly complex caregiver chain on so many different levels in terms of cyber security in terms of telemedicine um and you also said that netscout really partners with its clients talk a little bit about netscout solution and how it helps clients and or healthcare organizations grapple with these challenges no that's a great question well the the one thing uh right off the bat is we look at network traffic and that means application traffic so while we plug in on the network and take traffic from taps and spans and whatnot we take traffic into our appliances so that we can then we crunch that the data through our smart data we call adaptive service intelligence that's our patent and we run it through that engine and that creates smart data and that smart data then can be leveraged for muji is my problem with my network is my problem with my application is it something like a service enabler like dns or dhcp or ldap which is really the basic uh basic building box for active directory for authentication uh so when you look at a complete as you mentioned a complex chain uh an electronic medical records application uh an emr that's really the that's really the go-to application for for a hospital uh because it's scheduling that's billing that's diagnosis that's that's history that's patient history it's just so it's so integral to what they do and when there's an impact with that that affects patient care and no one ever wants to hear oh my goodness we we log we had a bad outcome with the patient because of a complete a computer glitch you know network application what have you uh and so what we do is the ability to take all that data in crunch it through our engine and then and then display that in dashboards that are very easily consumable by not just network people but really application even management cyber security unified communications folks and and the focus here is we want to get the problem set we know they're going to be problems it happens every day and you know networks and applications are complex the idea is when we have an issue like that let's get the problem to the right team so that they can then go through their service restoration process and again the whole point here is keep services up and running but the the challenge becomes in a complex application team set up where you've got dns dhcp ldap radius so you've got service enablers then you've got web servers application server database servers load balancers firewalls when somebody says oh my goodness the emr is down or we're having issues with our network that's a very tough chain to try and pinpoint it's almost needle in a haystack so what we do and this is kind of our our bailiwick in the world is really we take all of that different traffic and we expose uh where where the hot spots where's the latency where are the error codes where do we see protocols that aren't behaving well where are we seeing things that are we're seeing authentication failures and the big win for the for the healthcare organization on that and that standpoint is i can see all of my traffic all of my applications and then i can pinpoint where i'm having issues so that i can restore services very quickly what are some of the best practices that have emerged in terms of the company in terms of the organizations and hospitals that are doing this well what would you say that they're doing right one thing they want a partner so they recognize the fact that number one you know they've got limited staff uh and they actually want to partner with netscout and what that means is we actually go in and we'll design solutions that will address their specific requirements that's that's very important what we do but when we do so we take uh you know we different product sets but our infinite stream our infinite stream next generation isng is our data collector and that's really the the workhorse of our solution it processes all the packets from you know we'll get technical here for a second one gig to 100 gig and that's a lot of data to to to process and because we can just get to the point with the process to the smart data engine and get to the problem show me where my latency is show where my problems are showing my protocols uh pulling that up through our packet flow which engine which kind of facilitates us collecting from multiple hops of the network uh a lot of times uh iit folks will ask us well we want hop to hop views of this i'm like great let's do that we can do it right now we just need to sit down design it but we really design towards their their use cases and in healthcare it's very common you can have dmz's you're going to have people accessing their electronic medical records through their dmz uh and things like that and as it goes through the back end services we basically take a traffic feed from all those different hops of the network or in cases there that make the most sense uh the primary spartan choke points and then take that data in and then we do what we do we expose the data and expose the performance information and most customers and it's like this in the world people usually don't call you up to say hey rebecca you're doing a great job today i want to buy you a cup of coffee especially in i.t they call up to say hey things aren't working hey fix it hey i can't do something and so our our job is to help facilitate with those customers and really partner with them to design solutions so that they can not only view that information uh but also triage it really quick and the word triage makes a great deal of uh sense in health care for example if you have a you know you hurt your finger they're not going to take an x-ray of your foot it makes no sense because they've already triaged that that's not your problem we do the same thing but we do it more from the network and application side to see where the hot spots are you are the it triage so talk a little bit about about this you are a problem solver and so right now we have a crisis on our hands of monumental proportions do you think that it has forced healthcare organizations and hospitals to innovate more quickly at this time or do you think that there is still just so much uncertainty taking place right now that it is hard to see the forest for the trees what what are you seeing that's a that's a really good question uh we're seeing both uh just to put it just very so one of the biggest changes that really the the pandemics had on everybody is the switch to everybody went from i have 10 maybe 20 of my workers working remotely over vpn contractors uh things like people are there just can't be in the office for a reason they switched from 10 to 20 to 70 80 90 percent so it was an overnight change so think of the impact on that the caregivers are at the hospital they're actually you know the frontline workers they're at the hospital you know serving their p their their patients but people in the administration accounting i.t other things that are important to the organization all had to switch to work from home obviously for safety reasons so the impact on just the internet link number one huge impact before it was used for outbound hey i'm gonna go check you know i'm gonna go do some research i'm gonna go check a website i'm gonna you know see what's what's uh what sports activities going on today now all the traffic is coming inbound on the internet and number so that's number one number two big change vpns vpns took an enormous beating that maybe they were size for for that type of scalability overnight and maybe they weren't so the organizations that were kind of prepped for it not such a big change and we've seen some good results from that but there are also organizations that immediately had to switch to oh my goodness i need to upgrade my vpns and my internet links because i wasn't prepared for this um so the the larger organizations sometimes have a little more uh capabilities to make that change quick the smaller organizations that's a tough call so they really have had to innovate quite a quite a bit on that side of it but when you add the that stress on things that also puts shows that the internet and the vpn is really points where the bad guys are going to target which again we're seeing we're starting to see that in the ransomware and the extortion attacks so it has forced innovation certainly um but you bring it to the point of force through the trees uh there's still a lot of work to be done uh so that's that's where we're really uh putting a lot of our focus especially in health care right now because it's got the the biggest impact uh well frankly to society right now and the religious uh the companies so as company as healthcare organizations are navigating this period of new normal and of course we've had some positive vaccine news so we can say that that perhaps there is going to be an end to this pandemic uh in the coming year but how are they planning ahead i want you to close us out here with how healthcare organizations are thinking about the next 12 to 24 months and if you have any advice for them i'm sure they would be all ears uh yeah i think we could all use some good advice right now on that one short answer is you know i don't know either right now in healthcare it is a big challenge because of that as mentioned earlier the impact on on on the personal protection equipment mobile hospitals and and frankly where they've had in the revenue laws so it's become a you basically have to do more with less right now uh which is one of the things that we do uh and really it's kind of our message for customers anyway i'm a big proponent of use what we have what if you have our solution use what you have and use it to its fullest extent uh especially while times are lean you know we just don't the wallets aren't as big right now so we're gonna have to really focus yet i mean has there been a bigger time in healthcare ever than right now i can't think of one so our focus right now and our message to our customers and anyone else is if you've got our types of solution use it to its fullest capability so that you can triage and so that you can you know not have patient impacting issues and on top of all the other things you have to deal with you bring up the point about the vaccines one of the things that we've seen especially for what's called healthcare organizations that are more research focused is um the bad guys aren't very nice so the bad guys are going to go after organizations where they can have a big we'll call it splash or they can steal something so research hospitals that that are working on vaccines or something in that realm have been huge targets again ddos for ransomware and extortion my message for anyone in healthcare right now is you know bless you first of all and second of all use what you have to its fullest extent which means a solution like ours yes use it for network monitor use it for application monitoring but but please use it to protect yourself for cyber security type visibility uh we typically in a lot of cases uh we'll see uh traffic that that some cyber security tools don't and not because they're bad tools but because we're installed in places that they sometimes aren't so that might be uh where they're typically installed maybe on the perimeters of network and endpoints we actually are instrumented through that service chain so not only the outbound internet the wide area network links the vpns and dmzs and and vdi and all those acronyms that i'm throwing out those are typical spots for us as well as though virtualization so that can be cloud or private cloud so effectively we have areas of visibility that can be leveraged in big bigger and better ways even really on the cyber security and unified communication sides of the fence so my message would be to be just use the what you have to its fullest capability uh especially when times are lean and uh keep up the good fight excellent leverage what you got ken checkout problem solver at netscout thank you so much for coming on thecube thank you for having me been a pleasure i'm rebecca knight stay tuned for more of the cube virtual you

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBEconversation. >> Hi brother, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBEconversation. We're going to talk about a topic that is obviously top of mind in a lot of people situations right now, which is ensuring business continuity, business resiliency. Given this work from home pivot is something that a lot of people are focused on. Many CIOs have told us that business resiliency was way too focused on disaster recovery. And we're going to talk about this in the context of VPNs. Now I've got a love-hate with VPNs. I mean, on the one hand they provide safeguards. They give us privacy, they give us protection, everything's encrypted, but they can bring forth performance problems. There could be service quality issues, video or audio. And so the problem with VPNs is a lot of times they're a black box. You don't know what's going on inside. There are different types of VPNs, and it's actually a pretty complicated situation and with me to talk about that is Paul Barrett, the CTO of Enterprise at Netscout, Paul, good to see you. >> Great to be here. >> Yeah, so what did you see with regard to the trends that hit with COVID? Obviously there was this very rapid work from home pivot, VPNs had to be deployed for remote workers who typically would come into the office, what did you see? >> So with Netscout, we service the largest, most complex organizations, both in the US and globally. But for many of these organizations, the VPN services they provided really was for quite a small subset of their workforce. People working on the road, maybe they had a small subset of their employees working from home. And as you say, obviously, as we all understand, almost overnight, everyone's found themselves struggling to work from home. And quite frankly, most organizations VPN configurations were just never architected to deal with this kind of situation. One of the perhaps most important distinctions between the different types of VPN is whether you have a so called full VPN service or a split VPN service, because that really impacted the ability of organizations to deliver VPN. >> So what does that mean full versus split? I know there's sometimes free VPNs. You kind of get what you pay for, what does that mean, split versus full? >> So with a full VPN connection, every thing that you connect to on the internet or any business service has to go over your VPN connection. You can't make any direct connections from your PC to the internet, has to go through your enterprise network. So if you think about it, if you suddenly moved tens of thousands of employees to working from home, every single communication activity performed by those employees goes through your VPN concentrators. With a split VPN, and for example, I use a split VPN, only when I need to connect to business services that are provided over my enterprise network do I actually go directly to my enterprise network over the VPN. If I'm just going to Google or any other regular internet resource, then I get a direct connection to that internet resource. And that really takes the pressure off the VPN concentrators. >> The split VPN gives you more flexibility. I can't tell you how many times I've sent a link to somebody and say, oh, I can't open it, it's got to be my VPN blocking it. You're saying it gives you this sort of you have your cake and eat it too, the split VPN. >> Well, right, yes. It just means that to say it's only the traffic that has to go into the corporate network, goes through the corporate VPNs. What we observe is, as I say, 'cause we deal with very large organizations, particularly regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare. There was a as just a requirement that hey, everything's got to come over the VPN. We don't want any traffic kind of leaking directly onto the internet. We want to have full control, so everything goes through our security stack. So one of the things we're sort of seeing now with three months into the COVID situation, I would say most of our customers have got through the worst of it. But a lot of them would say they're still running very hot. And those of who were previously offering full VPN, are saying, "Well, can I transition "to offering a split VPN service." But it's not a trivial thing to do because especially if you're highly regulated, you've got the compliance requirements, you've got to make sure that the traffic that has to go through your security stack does so, and that you're comfortable with any traffic that's going direct, SaaS services like Office 365, you have to make sure that you're comfortable with that traffic is going direct over the internet. So let's say it's the transition from full VPN to split it's quite a challenge and it's not trivial. >> Well, and I would imagine, I mean, if I'm the compliance officer I'm saying, "Go full VPN and I don't care if there's a restriction "and some handcuffs placed on the users." If you're a line of business head, you're saying, "Hey, I want more flexibility." So the brute force approach, it's a two edged sword. So how do you help solve that problem? I know you're focused on providing visibility, but explain where Netscout fits in the value chain. >> So yeah, everything Netscout does is about analyzing the traffic flag on networks. And we do it for helping customers ensure that the applications and services are healthy, that they're available, we have products that allow people to protect their applications against DDoS attacks, but in the case of VPN, it's really about understanding how the service is being used. If you actually look at the traffic coming on the enterprise side of your VPN concentrator, so often it's been decrypted, I can see who's accessing which business services, I can see, if for example, it's a full VPN connection, how I got users going to unimportant services like YouTube, which really isn't helping the situation. I can see whether, I might actually, 'cause typically large organizations have multiple VPN concentrators around the country and even around the globe. And you get situations where one set of the VPN concentrators are sitting there under utilized, whereas I've got another set of VPN concentrators that are sort of overwhelmed. And by getting this visibility of that kind of usage, I can actually think about getting some of my user groups to maybe use a different VPN concentrator. And as I was talking about the migration to a split VPN, having visibility of what applications are being used. Hey, I have this particular sensitive application and I need all that traffic to come through my security stack, but actually it turns out I didn't configure my split VPN correctly and it's all leaking directly over the public internet. Then I have the visibility I need to detect that kind of situation and to remedy it. >> So is the primary reason why people use Netscout in this use case really to, obviously to provide that visibility, but to make them more secure, is there a performance aspect as well in terms of what you guys are doing? >> Yeah, one of the, I would say the facets of the move to working from home is increased emphasis on services, such as unified communications, voice and video, the use of collaboration services, has greatly increased. Those types of service, particularly voice and video, they're real time services, they're very susceptible to poor network transmission. Things like latency and packets being dropped. And as I say, people working from home are becoming much more reliant on these types of service than they are when they're in an office. And so it's critical to understand whether problems with, for example, voice and video quality are arising in your own network, because for example, you've saturated your VPN concentrator or whether they're coming from your SaaS provider. So, to give an example, I find using, one of the well known collaboration services, if I've got problems in my own network and I'm introducing packet loss into my voice feeds, if I send all of this, because of already corrupted traffic to the collaboration service, and then that gets reflected to all of my other users, everyone will go, "Oh, hey, there's a problem "with the collaboration service." And you're going to waste time pointing your thing at the collaboration service provider, who let's be honest at the moment has got much better things to do than to go chasing phantom problems. When if you have visibility inside your own network, you can actually understand that, oh, hey, no, this is a problem of my own making. So I'm not going to waste cycles, pointing the finger at the other guy, I can actually get on with isolating the problem in my own network, figure out what I need to do and then remediate it. >> So Netscout, you guys are doing some dirty work. You like Navy Seals going in, and going deep into the network. So talk a little bit about the intellectual property behind this. How does it work? What's the secret sauce that Netscout brings to the table? >> So, our CEO and co-founder Anil Singhal, over 30 years ago, the company is 35 years old, he recognized the growing importance of the computer network and he recognized the need to understand what's happening on these networks. And of course now it's almost impossible to do anything without it involving a network of some kind. So, he persevered and continue to refine and refine the technology of analyzing what happens on a network, but converting that raw traffic into actionable data, we call that the data we produce, the metadata, Adaptive Service Intelligence, and we sometimes refer to it as smart data. And of course there's an emerging trend in the industry, of AIOps saying, what can I do if I start to apply machine learning algorithms to all the data that's coming out of my environment. It's like the old garbage in, garbage out, you could only perform high quality analytics if you have a high quality data source to work with. So that's really, that's always been our focus. How can we take all of that complex traffic on a network and map it to a very simple but actionable set of high quality data? >> So it always comes back to the data, doesn't it? In these types of things, but I wonder what is the diversity and variety of the data set? Is it a fairly narrow and well understood data set or are there sort of conflicting data that you also have to rationalize? >> Well, data model has multiple levels. Everything from reduce all the raw packets, and we're intelligent how we do that. We have all the parts that you really need, and we store rich data relating to individual transactions. That's very useful for troubleshooting, but what we were also able to do, is to actually for most network protocols, we actually can map it to a common data model. And that's extremely powerful because it means that in a single pane of glass, I can get insight into all of the different applications and protocols running on my network. >> So you've sort of addressed the data quality problem in that way, I wonder, I mean, as a CTO, I would imagine you spend a fair amount of time with customers, are there any sort of examples that you can give? Either, name names or anonymous, just in terms of the 100 days, how you've helped customers, some of your favorite examples, perhaps? >> Well, as I say, I mean, a lot of energy has been put into providing that visibility around VPN services because quite honestly it was never seen as a particularly critical component of the overall enterprise. It was that, as I said earlier, it was that kind of, oh, that's just something to help the guys on the road. And all of a sudden it became the most important piece. And as I said, it's also not just been about, okay, let's give sufficient visibility for you to kind of keep the wheels on the truck, it's also helping the customers about thinking forward, about planning. We talked about planning a migration, split VPN, but also thinking about their future needs. I think a lot of customers are looking to over-provision and the ones that have already transitioned to virtualized infrastructure are actually in a stronger position because they've got a lot more flexibility and ability, for example, to split up more VPN resources, or more virtual desktop resources, for example. >> And of course you mentioned that you guys deal with many types of industries, but specifically a lot of regulated industries, financial services, healthcare, government, et cetera. And so I would imagine that, that those guys really had to tap your services over the past 100 days. >> Exactly, and as we mentioned earlier, those are the organizations that are much more likely to be using full VPN and have a lot more constraints on their ability. So even if they do move to split VPN, then there's going to be limits on how much of the traffic that they can truly allow direct over the internet. >> I wonder if we could end just sort of riffing on the whole notion of digital transformation and automation. I mean, prior to COVID, we talk a lot about automation, talk about digital transformation, but the reality is a lot of it was lip service. A lot of customers or companies would really kind of prioritize other initiatives, but overnight, if you weren't digital, you couldn't transact business and automation has really become imperative. People don't seem to be afraid of it anymore, they seem to be sort of glomming onto it. And really as a productivity driver, how do you see the nation in this post-isolation economy and what are the impacts to some of your customers? >> Well, as we all understand, digital transformation is all about trying to be agile, to be able to move as fast as possible, to be able to deploy new services quickly, to respond to disruption in the marketplace and new opportunities. The only way you can really achieve that as you mentioned, is through large scale automation. But I like to make two observations about automation. Automation is very good at taking a small building block and then replicating it and deploying it, many hundreds or thousands of times over. But if you've got a bug or a defect in that building block, when you go and replicate it, you go and replicate whatever that failure moment was or that bug. So if you don't have visibility, very quickly, you can find that a very small little area that was overlooked by the quality guys has got the huge implications. The other thing about wholesale automation, and as we build these increasingly complex systems where we have machines talking to machines, largely unobserved, I'm always reminded of the stock market crash of 1987, so called Black Monday on October the 19th. And this was one of the biggest crashes ever, something like a trillion dollars was wiped off the US markets alone. And although, a lot of people said a correction was due, when we look back, we see that the thing that was different about that crash is that it was the first time we really had automated trading algorithms in play. Now, I don't believe anybody who wrote one of those algorithms was deliberately trying to crash the markets, they were trying to make money. But what no one had thought about is how all of these different algorithms by different people would interact with each other when they were pushed sort of out of their comfort zone, if you like. And I think we have a very strong analogy with digital transformation. As I say, we continue to build increasingly complex systems with machines talking to machines. So for me to operate these kinds of environments without maximum visibility, it's almost terrifying. It's like driving a racing car without a safety harness. So, visibility is absolutely key as we move towards further automation. >> That's interesting, I mean, I wasn't around in the 1920s, but my understanding was that when stock market crash hit then, depression then it took hours and hours and hours to determine, what the market actually closed at. You actually saw that in the 60s as well. And then I remember, well, 1987, there were no, for you younger people in United States, there were no real time quotes then, unless you had like a Bloomberg Terminal, which we had one, actually, I was at IDC at the time. And it took like many, many minutes to actually get a quote back. I mean, the volume was so high and the infrastructure just really wasn't there. But now to your point, you see things happening today in the stock market, Paul and they chalk it up to a computer glitch, which essentially means they have no idea what happened. And to your point about the complexity and machines to machines, if you think about AI, a lot of AI is again, back to this black box. So are you suggesting that you guys can actually provide visibility? It's solves some of that black box problem? >> Well, absolutely, what we can do is we can provide a visibility into the interactions between all of these different systems. It's amazing how often in these large complex environments, there may be dependencies that people didn't even know existed. That can be that complex. So by looking at all of the traffic flowing between all of these different systems, we can help people understand what the dependencies are. Is a particular sub-component starting to fail? Is it becoming slow? Is it generating errors? And if things do go wrong, it's about troubleshooting as fast as possible. We need to get these systems back up and running. So the ability to rapidly isolate problems and to get away from the situation where different organizations in IT are pointing the finger at each other, 'cause nobody really knows where to start. And that's kind of human nature. It's like, well, it could be my responsibility, but it could be the other guy, so I'm pointing the finger at the other guy. What we do is we provide that information that first of all, isolates the location of the problem. So we can put the correct team working on it and the other guys can get back to their day jobs. And by providing evidence of a problem, you can actually allow someone to get to the bottom of a problem much faster. >> You got to have tooling, with all this public internet, the public cloud, now with IOT, it's just going to get more and more complicated. We'll probably look back on the 2010s and say that was nothing compared to what we're entering here. But Paul, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE it was a great conversation. Really appreciate your insights. >> Thank you, I enjoyed it's my pleasure. >> All right and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> 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. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with co-host, John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have Abhiman Matlapudi. He is the Product Master at Deloitte. Welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> And we have Kubalahm Rajeev Krishnan, Specialist Leader at Deloitte. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Rebecca, John. It's always good to be back on theCUBE. >> Love the new logos here, what's the pins? What's the new take on those? >> It looks like a honeycomb! >> Yeah, so interesting that you ask, so this is our joined Deloitte- Informatica label pin. You can see the Deloitte green colors, >> Nice! They're beautiful. >> And the Informatica colors. This shows the collaboration, the great collaboration that we've had over, you know, the past few years and plans, for the future as well. Well that's what we're here to talk about. So why don't you start the conversation by telling us a little bit about the history of the collaboration, and what you're planning ahead for the future. Yeah. So, you know, if we go like you know, ten years back the collaboration between Deloitte and Informatica has not always been that, that strong and specifically because Deloitte is a huge place to navigate, and you know, in order to have those meaningful collaborations. But over the past few years, we've... built solid relationships with Informatica and vise versa. I think we seek great value. The clear leaders in the Data Management Space. It's easy for us to kind of advise clients in terms of different facets of data management. You know, because no other company actually pulls together you know, the whole ecosystem this well. >> Well you're being polite. In reality, you know where it's weak and where it's real. I mean, the reality is there's a lot of fun out there, a lot of noise, and so, I got to ask you, cause this is the real question, because there's no one environment that's the same. Customers want to get to the truth faster, like, where's the deal? What's the real deal with data? What's gettable? What's attainable? What's aspirational? Because you could say "Hey, well I make data, data-driven organization, Sass apps everywhere." >> Yeah. Yeah absolutely. I mean every, every company wants to be more agile. Business agility is what's driving companies to kind of move all of their business apps to the Cloud. The uh, problem with that is that, is that people don't realize that you also need to have your data management governance house in order, right, so according to a recent Gartner study, they say by next year, 75% of companies who have moved their business apps to the Cloud, is going to, you know, unless they have their data management and data assets under control, they have some kind of information governance, that has, you know, context, or purview over all of these business apps, 50% of their data assets are going to erode in value. So, absolutely the need of the hour. So we've seen that great demand from our clients as well, and that's what we've been advising them as well. >> What's a modern MDM approach? Because this is really the heart of the conversation, we're here at Informatica World. What's- What does it look like? What is it? >> So I mean, there are different facets or functionalities within MDM that actually make up what is the holistic modern MDM, right. In the past, we've seen companies doing MDM to get to that 360-degree view. Somewhere along the line, the ball gets dropped. That 360 view doesn't get combined with your data warehouse and all of the transaction information, right, and, you know, your business uses don't get the value that they were looking for while they invested in that MDM platform. So in today's world, MDM needs to provide front office users with the agility that they need. It's not about someone at the back office doing some data stewardship. It's all about empowering the front office users as well. There's an aspect of AIML from a data stewardship perspective. I mean everyone wants cost take out, right, I mean there's fewer resources and more data coming in. So how how do you manage all of the data? Absolutely you need to have AIML. So Informatica's CLAIRE product helps with suggestions and recommendations for algorithms, matching those algorithms. Deloitte has our own MDM elevate solution that embeds AIML for data stewardship. So it learns from human data inputs, and you know, cuts through the mass of data records that have to be managed. >> You know Rajeev, it was interesting, last year we were talking, the big conversation was moving data around is really hard. Now there's solutions for that. Move the data integrity on premise, on Cloud. Give us an update on what's going on there, because there seems to be a lot of movement, positive movement, around that. In terms of, you know, quality, end to end. We heard Google up here earlier saying "Look, we can go into end to end all you want". This has been a big thing. How are you guys handling this? >> Yeah absolutely, so in today's key note you heard Anil Chakravarthy and Thomas Green up on the stage and Anil announced MDM on GCP, so that's an offering that Deloitte is hosting and managing. So it's going to be an absolutely white-glove service that gives you everything from advice to implement to operate, all hosted on GCP. So it's a three-way ecosystem offering between Deloitte, Informatica, and GCP. >> Well just something about GCP, just as a side note before you get there, is that they are really clever. They're using Sequel as a way to abstract all the under the hood kind of configuration stuff. Smart move, because there's a ton of Sequel people out there! >> Exactly. >> I mean, it's not structured query language for structured data. It's lingua franca for data. They've been changing the game on that. >> Exactly, it should be part of their Cloud journey. So organizations, when they start thinking about Cloud, first of all, what they need to do is they have to understand where all the data assets are and they read the data feeds coming in, where are the data lakes, and once they understand where their datas are, it's not always wise, or necessary to move all their data to the Cloud. So, Deloitte's approach or recommendation is to have a hybrid approach. So that they can keep some of their legacy datas, data assets, in the on premise and some in the Cloud applications. So, Informatica, MDM, and GCP, powered by Deloitte, so it acts as an MDM nimble hub. In respect of where your data assets are, it can give you the quick access to the data and it can enrich the data, it can do the master data, and also it can protect your data. And it's all done by Informatica. >> Describe what a nimble hub is real quick. What does a nimble hub mean? What does that mean? >> So it means that, in respect of wherever your data is coming in and going out, so it gives you a very light feeling that the client wouldn't know. All we- Informatica, MDM, on GCP powered by Deloitte, what we are saying is we are asking clients to just give the data. And everything, as Rajeev said, it's a white-glove approach. It's that from engagement, to the operation, they will just feel a seamless support from Deloitte. >> Yeah, and just to address the nimbleness factor right, so we see clients that suddenly need to get into new market, or they want to say, introduce a new product, so they need the nimbleness from a business perspective. Which means that, well suddenly you've got to like scale up and down your data workloads as well, right? And that's not just transactional data, but master data as well. And that's where the Cloud approach, you know, gives them a positive advantage. >> I want to get back to something Abhiman said about how it's not always wise or necessary to move to the Cloud. And this is a debate about where do you keep stuff. Should it be on on prem, and you said that Deloitte recommends a hybrid approach and I'm sure that's a data-driven recommendation. I'm wondering what evidence you have and what- why that recommendation? >> So, especially when it depends on the applications you're putting on for MDM, and the sources and data is what you are trying to get, for the Informatica MDM to work. So, it's not- some of your social systems are already tied up with so many other applications within your on premise, and they don't want to give every other data. And some might have concerns of sending this data to the Cloud. So that's when you want to keep those old world legacy systems, who doesn't want to get upgrades, to your on premise, and who are all Cloud-savy and they can all starting new. So they can think of what, and which, need a lot of compute power, and storage. And so those are the systems we want to recommend to the Cloud. So that's why we say, think where you want to move your data bases. >> And some of it is also driven by regulation, right, like GDPR, and where, you know, which providers offer in what countries. And there's also companies that want to say "Oh well my product strategy and my pricing around products, I don't want to give that away to someone." Especially in the high tech field, right. Your provider is going to be a confidere. >> Rajeev, one of the things I'm seeing here in this show, is clearly that the importance of the Cloud should not be understated. You see, and you guys, you mentioned you get the servers at Google. This is changing not just the customers opportunity, but your ability to service them. You got a white-glove service, I'm sure there's a ton more head room. Where do you guys see the Cloud going next? Obviously it's not going away, and the on premise isn't going away. But certainly, the importance of the Cloud should not be understated. That's what I'm hearing clearly. You see Amazon, Azure, Google, all big names with Informatica. But with respect to you guys, as you guys go out and do your services. This is good for business. For you guys, helping customers. >> Yeah absolutely, I think there's value for us, there's value for our clients. You know, it's not just the apps that are kind of going to the Cloud, right? I mean you see all data platforms that are going to the Cloud. For example, Cloudera. They just launched CDP. Being GA by July- August. You know, Snowflake's on the Cloud doing great, getting good traction in the market. So eventually what were seeing is, whether it's business applications or data platforms, they're all moving to the Cloud. Now the key things to look out for in the future is, how do we help our clients navigate a multi Cloud environment, for example, because sooner or later, they wouldn't want to have all of their eggs invested in one basket, right? So, how do we help navigate that? How do we make that seamless to the business user? Those are the challenges that we're thinking about. >> What's interesting about Databricks and Snowflake, you mentioned them, is that it really is a tell sign that start-ups can break through and crack the enterprise with Cloud and the ecosystem. And you're starting to see companies that have a Sass-like mindset with technology. Coming into an enterprise marketed with these ecosystems, it's a tough crowd believe me, you know the enterprise. It's not easy to break into the enterprise, so for Databricks and Snowflake, that's a huge tell sign. What's your reaction to that because it's great for Informatica because it's validation for them, but also the start-ups are now growing very fast. I mean, I wouldn't call Snowflake 3 billion dollar start-up their unicorn but, times three. But it's a tell sign. It's just something new we haven't seen. We've seen Cloudera break in. They kind of ramped their way in there with a lot of raise and they had a big field sales force. But Data Bear and Snowflake, they don't have a huge set in the sales force. >> Yeah, I think it's all about clients and understanding, what is the true value that someone provides. Is it someone that we can rely on to keep our data safe? Do they have the capacity to scale? If you can crack those things, then you'll be in the market. >> Who are you attracting to the MDM on Google Cloud? What's the early data look like? You don't have to name names, but whats some of the huge cases that get the white glove service from Deloitte on the Google Cloud? Tell us about that. Give us more data on that. >> So we've just announced that, here at Informatica World, we've got about three to four mid to large enterprises. One large enterprise and about three mid-size companies that are interested in it. So we've been in talks with them in terms of- and that how we want to do it. We don't want to open the flood gates. We'd like to make sure it's all stable, you know, clients are happy and there's word of mouth around. >> I'm sure the end to end management piece of it, that's probably attractive. The end to end... >> Exactly. I mean, Deloitte's clearly the leader in the data analytics space, according to Gartner Reports. Informatica is the leader in their space. GCP has great growth plans, so the three of them coming together is going to be a winner. >> One of the most pressing challenges facing the technology industry is the skills gap and the difficulty in finding talent. Surveys show that I.T. managers can't find qualified candidates for open Cloud roles. What are Deloitte's thought on this and also, what are you doing as a company to address it? >> I mean, this is absolutely a good problem to have, for us. Right, which means that there is a demand. But unless we beat that demand, it's a problem. So we've been taking some creative ways, in terms of addressing that. An example would be our analytics foundry offering, where we provide a pod of people that go from data engineers you know, with Python and Sparks skills, to, you know, Java associates, to front end developers. So a whole stack of developers, a full stack, we provide that full pod so that they can go and address a particular business analytics problem or some kind of visualization issues, in terms of what they want to get from the data. So, we teach Leverate that pod, across multiple clients, I think that's been helping us. >> If you could get an automated, full time employee, that would be great. >> Yeah, and this digital FD concept is something that we'd be looking at, as well. >> I would like to add on that, as well. So, earlier- with the data disruption, Informatica's so busy and Informatica's so busy that Deloitte is so busy. Now, earlier we used plain Informatica folks and then, later on because of the Cloud disruption, so we are training them on the Cloud concepts. Now what the organizations have to think, or the universities to think is that having the curriculum, the Cloud concepts in their universities and their curriculum so that they get all their Cloud skills and after, once they have their Cloud skills, we can train them on the Informatica skills. And Informatica has full training on that. >> I think it's a great opportunity for you guys. We were talking with Sally Jenkins to the team earlier, and the CEO. I was saying that it reminds me of early days of VMware, with virtualization you saw the shift. Certainly the economics. You replaced servers, do a virtual change to the economics. With the data, although not directly, it's a similar concept where there's new operational opportunities, whether it's using leverage in Google Cloud for say, high-end, modern data warehousing to whatever. The community is going to respond. That's going to be a great ecosystem money making opportunity. The ability to add new services, give you guys more capabilities with customers to really move the needle on creating value. >> Yeah, and it's interesting you mention VMware because I actually helped, as VMware stood up there, VMCA, AW's and NSA's offerings on the Cloud. We actually helped them get ready for that GA and their data strategy, in terms of support, both for data and analytics friendliness. So we see a lot of such tech companies who are moving to a flexible consumption service. I mean, the challenges are different and we've got a whole practice around that flex consumption. >> I'm sure Informatica would love the VMware valuation. Maybe not worry for Dell technology. >> We all would love that. >> Rajeem, Abhiman, thank you so much for joining us on theCube today. >> Thank you very much. Good talking to you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from Informatica World tomorrow.

[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're joined by Sally Jenkins. She is the executive vice president and CMO here at Informatica. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Sally. >> Oh you're welcome, thank you for having me. Its nice to see you all again. >> So congrats on a great show, we're going to get to the stats of the show, but the framework of Informatica World is built around these four customer journeys. Next Gen analytics, Cloud Hybrid, 360 engagement, Data Governance and Privacy. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about how this framework reflects what you're hearing from customers and their priorities >> Yes absolutely, Rebecca and yes, you got the right and in the right order, thank you. So, we started this journey with our customers and trying to understand how do they want to be spoken to. What business problems are they solving? And how do they categorize them, if you will. And so, we've been validating these are the right journeys with our customers over the past few years. So everything that you see here at Informatica World is centered around those journeys. The breakouts, our keynotes, all the signage here in our solutions expo. So, its all in validation of how our customers think, and those business problems they're solving. >> So the show, 2600 attendees from 44 countries, 1200 sessions. What's new, what's new and exciting. >> Oh, gosh, there's so many things that are new this year. And one other stat you forgot, 92 customers presenting in our Breakouts. So our customers love to hear from other customers. As to what journeys they're on, what problems their solving. Those are record numbers for us. Record number of partners sponsoring. We've got AWS, we've got Google, we've got Microsoft, we've got the up and comers, that we're calling in the Cloud and AI Innovation zone. So people like DataBricks and Snowflake. We wanted to highlight these up and comer partners, what we call our ecosystem partners. Along with the big guys. You know, we're the Switzerland of data. We play with everybody. We play nicely with everybody. A lot of new things there. A few other things that are new, direct feedback from our customers last year. They said we want you to tell us which breakouts we should go to. Or what work shops should we attend. So we rolled out two things this year. One's called the Intelligent Scheduler. That's where we ask customers what journey are they on. What do they want to learn about. And then we make a smart recommendation to them about what their agenda should look like while they're here. >> You're using the data. >> Yes, AI, we're involving AI, and making the recommendations out to our customers. In addition, our customers said we want to connect with other customers that are like us, on their journeys, so we can learn from them. So we launched we called the Intelligent Connect and again this is part of our app. Which, our app's not new, but what we've done with our app this year is new. We've added gamification, in fact as part of the AI and Cloud Innovation zone, we are asking our customers and all of our attendees to vote on who they think is the one with the best innovation. They're using our app to use voting. They can win things, so there's lots of gaming. There's social that's involved in that, so the app's new. We're taking adavantage of day four. We usually end around lunchtime on day four, this year we're going all in, all day workshops, so that our practitioners can actually roll up their sleeves and get started working with our software. And our ecosystem partners are also leading a lot of those workshops. So a lot that's new this year. And as I mentioned, the Cloud and AI Innovation zone, that's new it's like a booth within a booth here on the solutions expo floor. So this is the year of new, for sure. >> You know one of the things that's been impressive, I was talking with Anil and also Bruce Chizen, who is a board member, The bets you guys have made is impressive. You look back, and this our tenth year in theCUBE, so we go to a lot of events, 100s events in a year, over 100 events over 10 years. We've seen this story with you guys, this is now our fourth year doing theCUBE here. And the story has not changed, its been early moves, big bets. Cloud, early. Going private to see this next big wave. AI, early before everyone else. This is really kind of showing, and I think the ecosystem part is on stage with Databricks, with Snowflake. Really kind of point to a new cast of characters in the ecosystem. >> That's right. >> You're seeing not just the classic enterprise, 'cause you guys have great big, large enterprises that you do business with. That want to be SAS like, they want the agility, they want all those great things but now you have Cloud. The markets seems to have changed. This is an ecosystem opportunity. >> That's right. >> Can you share what's new? Because you see Amazon, Google and Azure, at the cloud, you got On-Premise, you now Edge and IoT, everything's happening with data. Hard, complex, what's new, what's the ecosystem benefit? Can you just share some color commentary around how you guys view that as a company. >> Yeah, thanks, John, and that's a good question. I'm glad you're pointing out that our whole go to market motion is evolving. It's not changing it's evolving because we want to work with our customers in whatever environment they want to work in. So if they're working in a cloud environment, we want to make sure we're there with our cloud ecosystem partners. And it doesn't matter who, cause like I said, we work with everybody, we work nicely with everybody. So we are tying in our cloud ecosystem partners as it makes sense based on what our customer needs are. As well as our GSI partners. So we've got Accentra's here. They brought 35 people to Informatica World this year. We play nicely with Accentra, Deloitte, Cognizant, Capgemini so we really are wanting to make sure that we're doing what makes sense with our customer and working with those partners that our customers want to work with. >> Well I think one of the observations we've made on theCUBE and we said in our opening editorial segment this morning, and we're asking the question about the skill gaps, which we'll get into with you in second, but these big partners from the Global System Integraters to even indirect channel partners, whether they're software developers and or channel partners. They all are now enabled and are mandated to create value. >> Yes, that's right. >> And if they can't get to the value, those projects aren't going to get funded and they're not going to get renewed And so we've seen with the Hadoop cycle of just standing up infrastructure for infrastructure sake isn't going to fly. You got to get to the value. And data, the business that you're in, is the heart of it. >> Well, data's at the heart of it. That's why we're sitting at a really nice sweet spot, because data will always be relevant. And the theme of the conference here is data needs AI and AI needs data. So we're always going to be around. But like I said, I feel like we're sitting right in the middle of it. And we're helping our customers solve really complex problems. And again, like I said if we need to pull in a GSI partner for implementation, we'll do that we've got close to 400,000 people around the world, trained on how to use Informatica solutions. So we're poised and we are ready to go. >> We were talking before we came on camera. We were sitting there catching up, Sally. And I always make these weird metaphors and references, but I think you guys are in an enabling business. It reminds me of VMware, when virtualization came in. Because what that did was, it changed the game on what servers were from a physical footprint, but also changed the economics and change the development landscape. This seems to be the same kind of pattern we're seeing in data where you guys are providing an operational model with technical capabilities. Ecosystem lift, different economics. So kind of similar, and VMware had a good run. >> We'll take that analogy, John, thank you. >> What's your reaction? Do you see it that way? >> Yeah I do, and it all comes back to the journeys that we talk about right. Because our customers, they're never on just one journey. Most of them are on multiple journeys, that they are deploying at the same time. And so as they uncover insights around one journey, it could lead them to the next. So it really comes back to that and data is at the center of all that. >> I want to ask about the skills gap. And this is a problem that the technology industry is facing on a lot of different levels I want to hear about Informatica's thoughts on this. And what you're doing to tackle this problem. And also what kinds of initiatives you're starting around this. >> Well, I'm glad you asked because it's actually top of mind for us. So Informatica is taking a stance in managing the future, so that we can get rid of the skills gap in the future. And last year we launched a program we call the Next 25. That's where we are investing in middle school aged students for the next seven years. Its starts in 6th grade and takes them all the way through high school. They are part of a STEM program, in fact we partnered with Akash middle school here in Las Vegas. Cause we wanted to give back to the local communities since we spend so much time here. And so these kids who are part of the STEM program take part in what we call the Next 25. Where we help them understand beyond academics what they need to learn about in order to be ready for college. Whether that's social skills, or teamwork, or just how do we help them build the self confidence, so it goes beyond the academics. But one of the things that we're talking about tomorrow, is what's next as part of STEM. Cause we all know they're very good at STEM. And so we've engaged with one of the professors at UNLV to talk about what does she see as a gap when she sees middle school students and high school students coming to college and so that's where she recognizes that coding is so important. So we've got a big announcement that we're making tomorrow for the Next 25 kids around coding. >> Its interesting, cause we could talk about this all day, cause my daughter just graduated from Cal, so its fresh in my mind, but I was pointed out at the graduation ceremony on Saturday that the first ever class at University of California Berkley, graduated a data science, they graduated their inaugural class. That goes to show you how early it is. The other thing we're hearing also on these interviews as well as others, that the aperture or the surface area for opportunities isn't just technical. >> Right >> You could be pre med and study machine learning and computer science. There's so much more to it. What do you see just anecdotally or from a personal standpoint and professional, key skills that you think people should hone in on? What dials should they turn? More math, more coding, more cognitive, more social emotional, What do you see as skills they can tailor up for their-- >> Well so let's just start with the data scientist. We know LinkedIn has identified that there are 150,000 job openings just for data scientist in the US alone. So what's more interesting than that, is four times that are available for data engineers. And for the first time ever, data engineers' starting salaries are paying more than starting salaries on Wall Street. So, there's a huge opportunity, just in the data engineering area and the data scientist area. Now you can take that any which way you want. I'm in marketing and we use data all day long to make decisions. You don't have to be, you don't have to go down the engineering path. But you definitely have to have a good understanding of data and how data drives your next decisions, no matter what field you're in. >> And its also those others skills that you were talking about, particularly with those middle school kids, it is the collaboration and the team work and all of those too. >> It does, again, it goes beyond academics. These kids are brilliant. Most of them are 7th or 8th grade. But nothing holds them back, and that's exactly what we're trying to inspire within. So we have them solving big global problems. And you'll hear as they talk about how they're approaching this. They work in teams of five. And they realize to solve huge problems they need to start small and local. So some of these big global problems they're working on, like eradicating poverty, they're starting at the local shelters here in Las Vegas to see how they can start small and make a difference. And this is all on their own, I have folks on my team who are junior genius counselors with them, but that is really to foster some of the conversations. All the new ideas are coming directly from the kids. >> My final question is obviously for the folks who couldn't make it here, watching, know you guys, what's the theme of the show because the news right out of the gate is obviously the big cloud players. That's the key. And the new breed of partners, Snowflake, Databricks as an example. Hallway conversations that I'm hearing, can kind of be geeky and customer focused around "where do I store my data?" so you're seeing a range of conversations. What is the theme this year? What's different this year, or what more the same? Where are you doubling down? What's going on here for the show? What's the main content? >> Well so this is our 20th Informatica World if you can believe that. We've been around for 26 years, but this is our 20th Informatica World. And several years ago we started with the disruptive power of data. Then last year we talked about how we help our customers disrupt intelligently. And this year the theme is around ClAIrity Unleashed. You can tell the theme has been that we've been talking about for the past three years is all underpinned with AI. So it is all about how AI needs data and data needs AI. And how we help bring clarity to our customer's problems through data. >> And a play on words, ClAIr, your AI to clarity. >> Exactly, AI is at the center of our Intelligent data platform. So it is a play on AI but that is where ClAIrity Unleashed comes from. >> Terrific, thank you so much for coming on theCube, Sally. Its great having you. >> Great, thanks Rebecca. Thanks, John. >> Thank you. >> Nice to see you all. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from Informatica World, stay tuned. (upbeat pop outro)

>> 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 2019. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Sanjeev Vhora. He is the group technology officer and global data business lead at Accenture. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks. Thanks for having me here. >> We're hearing so much about AI lead data intelligence, and the other buzz word of course, that we hear so much of, is digital transformation. I'd love to hear your thoughts about data first approach to digital transformation. First of all, what does that mean? >> I think what we are seeing is that, if you... I think we do see that we are getting into a post digital era. Which means that in the last seven years, most bigger companies and businesses have invested in building a better customer engagement. What they did was they created properties, like portals, mobile applications, you name it, to just get better sense and touch their customers better than they were touching earlier. That was a whole investment that went in the last six, seven years. What they feel is that what's next. You do that, but does it really translate into revenue growth? Is it really translating into the experience in a sustained basis? Not one time, but on sustained basis. Every time when you touch a customer, they feel the same passion towards you. They feel that they are still engaged with you, and they want to come again to you for whatever your offering, your services or your goods. They felt that that's not actually happening. The reason why it's not happening is because the underlying data is not complete or comprehensive enough, or not accurate enough, for giving that experience. That realization is seeping up right now. They are asking for ensuring instead of looking at a use-case base approach of solving one problem for one business or one geography, is there a way to do it enterprise-wide? That a (mumbles). Point which is coming out is that they looked at that technology process that's old tradition model of looking at new businesses. Technology people processes and those three. But now they're looking to fourth element, which is foundation-call data. That's what we are calling data-first approach. You have to look at data as well, while looking at reforming your business services, and offers to the client. >> I want to touch on something you said earlier, and that is to make the customer feel passionate about interacting with you. I mean that's such a loaded, and almost romantic word to describe a customer interacting with a company. Why is it that companies are trying invoke passion, and insight passion, inspire passion? >> I think it's a way to differentiate yourself from the competition, so I think that's what in my view the businesses are doing right. Let me give an example to you to make it real, it may address your first question as well to some extent. We are working with a cruise company, one of the largest cruise companies North America based. They obviously are trying to make sure the experience of the customer is much better than had earlier. Which can resinate to a much higher revenue for them obviously, and inquisition of more customers. The friends of friends, friends of customers if you may. They had done a great job creating that digital property, and the transformation of the program. But they also realize that they are now, they realize that they don't really have a sense of who's the customer? Now that's a good question, after all this investment you still don't know who's the customer. That's where they came and talked about can I get a single view of my customer? The reason why they don't have a single view of customer is because they actually don't own all their individual customers. They only own their own individual customers, but they also work with their partners. As you can see Experian and others actually own that same customer. So they are not able to have a sense of that customer, their habits, and their behavior in one single place. They can really provide their accommodations, saying... well guest, if you're going to Italy we can probably help you this summer. >> So yes, exactly that's what I want to know; Is what, if you do have a sense of who your customer is, and that is everything from their basic demographic information, to what they do on Sunday afternoon with their families. What kinds of things then can the cruise company do to make that customer more passionate toward the cruise. >> They can do a lot, but I can tell you another example of another cruise company. Was looking at customer files and they did a fantastic job, and I'm assuming that you may have also experienced yourself. This customer they had covered the single view of customer obviously, but what they did was use a lot of IoT or sensors in their ships. They actually transformed the entire ship. Like the entire ship has been transformed to understand the customer movement, and give that flawless and seamless (mumbles) to customers. Which can help them have a pretty great on their vessels if you may. That's what they, from the day that you order the tickets for this service... From that time onward they actually send you a (mumbles). That tracks you as a person moving into the ship, and they can offer much more seamless services, and also reduces a friction of the operations staff. The staff is not in a hurry and hassle. They're actually able to understand who's actually the customer, what they want, and they are able to provide that service. So that's how they're using that feature of knowing the customer, to better serve them; being a better engagement with them. Plus also eases the operational friction in their own staff. >> So the customer wins because they feel the company gets them, and knows them, and understands them; and then the company wins because they're able to make more money off that customer, because they already have predicted what that customer wants and needs at every moment. >> And they can do more with less. They can do more with less staff, less resources. >> So one of that we are also talking a lot about here on theCUBE it's the tenth anniversary of theCUBE. So we've had a lot of these conversations, is how data is becoming a C-suite discussion, and there's this growing need to appoint a chief data officer to drive data strategy. What do you see as the evolving role of the CDO, at your company; and then also at the companies that you work with? >> We see this is a very significant step in the future. There are a lot of predictions from (mumbles) An analyst saying that there will be more and more roles, like three-fourth of the companies would have a CDO (mumbles). But I think our point is likely, you know, to augment that point I think what we believe is that, we do believe in respective of who actually owns (mumbles) That a chief data officer or a CI, or a CO. They definitely need a person at the C-suite, not below C-suite. To have that discussion at the table, and show that their data strategy is attached to their business strategy, and that's not true in many cases right now. So the data is (mumbles) which is two levels down in (mumbles), and that's why it's not getting that attention as a corporate asset as a (mumbles) asset from where you can actually extract value that you're looking at right. That's what we see; so we see a very broadened role, we see who so is in that role, we think there are a few qualities that person needs to have. The first one the person has to have a seat at the table. The second, is that person should be able to understand business quite well. (mumbles) He or she should have an insider business innovation, and if the person is tech savy it's good to have, but it's not must to have. We do believe that person should be able to prepare a strategy, and the governance of data across his or her peers. So they know that what value they are able to get from that data, and how they can share it across their functions. That's where the value comes in. Plus, beyond that the last point would be making sure whatever they do, they do responsibly. Do they actually make things work; whether it's using A.I., whether it's using any machine learning or anything else they have. They make sure that it's responsible data, and make it secure for themselves, for their enterprise, and for their customer. >> Well that is certainly a theme that we're hearing a lot about at Infomatica world. Tell me about the relationship between Accenture and Informatica. >> It's quite good, it's been good for years. We have been working together for years. The last two years, or two in a half years I think it has really taken a different shape within the new companies, and that's largely because we have really gone into a strategic discussion with the companies, and seeing what is the future. I think one thing that they are doing very well with their leadership. Anil himself is CEO; and Amit, and Tracy, and everybody else. And with our leadership is that we do believe that we are on the surface of un-tapping the value, one. Second thing is I don't think that used cases will draw the benefit which large organizations are looking at. It has to be something done at enterprise level. So think about like I think there another talk in the morning about enterprise data catalog. Amit was talking about, You need that. You need that to not do one used case for one particular business, for one particular country, or one particular customer segment. We need to do that for entire businesses across the enterprise. That can only happen if you have a sense of data, and you know how to do it effectively at scale. That's what I think that people are looking. Companies are going to be looking at the solution base, and I think it's the right timing for having the discussion. >> And there are going to be learnings that you can derive from financial services, and apply to retail, and healthcare, and all sorts of (mumble). Is that what you're finding here at Informatica World? Are you having those in conversations to learn the best practices? >> Oh yeah, I think we have our customers here; Accenture, as we have our customers here. we're presenting in different session. We had (mumbles) present today morning at eleven a.m. about how master data management can actually help you drive a better strategy on transforming your operations system like ESPE. That was never talked earlier, two years back nobody talked about saying how can MDM help you have a better transformation of your ESPE systems. Well that's where we are going. We are saying that, okay you have a trandiction systems, but you also need a system of right governance. Because all of your data, customer data or other data maybe sitting in ESPE or maybe sitting in sales force. How would you connect the dots? You need something to connect that dot so you have a single source of truth, and make sure that you know your customer, or vendor, or location, or everything else in the right fashion. >> Know your customer. So another thing I want to ask you about is the skills gap. I know that workforce of the future is something that you've worked passionately on. Passion keeps coming up in our conversation. (laughs amusingly) At Accenture. Tell us your story first in terms how you came to terms with this skill gap, and what you did at Accenture to remedy it. >> So this is four years back, and we were looking at our tech strategy, and our strategy to (mumbles) our business going forward, or where do we invest? And we are a people centric company so we are 470,000 people, that's a lot of people. In my role, one of the thing in my role is to make sure that I look at all the investment we do on our people. As CDO of our technology business, I need to make sure that we are investing in the right places. So this came to me saying that okay, will we be relevant as 470,000 people ten years from now? That's the question right? Because of A.I., because machine in our name, because people plus machine. What happens to our work force? So that's what I was trying to solve. Instead he's saying, what do we do next, and that was the whole point about workforce of the future. We will work more closely with the machines, and how will that happen. So what skills we will need as humans to work with machines, and everything else. What's going to happen in terms of automation going forward. And plus new talent which is required for the future. So we worked hard on this we built a strategy on what we need, then we did a very simple thing, we actually went to a high speed excursion, and agile sprints. We get it the few of principles actually. I can say a couple of them to use to resinate. One is the principle saying there's only (mumbles) available in the market. So don't spend creating stuff, but spend learning stuff. The second thing the chains of (mumbles) are a vision of our people vision, employee vision. It used to be saying, That you need to preform and grow. Something like that, if you preform high in our company, you'll grow faster. We changed the saying to learn and grow. So we said learning is more fundamental because performance will become automatic when you learn more. What we did was we changed. We worked really hard on the cultural aspect. And one of the things (mumbles) used to always say in the past ten years back, you used to learn a day in a month. Well that may not be enough today. Just because (mumbles) and the change of technology is much faster. It's 10x speed. So you can learn at 10x level, that doesn't mean you need to be learning at deep level for ten things, that's going to be hard for humans to do that. But you can use some help. That's what we do a 2 pronged approach. One is what we call a (mumble) training. Which means we make you more aware of everything that's happening in the world, and we give you a chance to support people-- >> I mean how do you do that, I mean that's a tall order. >> So what I did was we went to the market, and we looked at a lot of platforms. Okay you need technology to do everything. You get it right. You will be sitting here talking (mumbles). Using right technologies, right? Maybe show that our what we're talking is for (mumbles) people to watch us right. But the same thing there when we were looking at all the platforms. I looked at all things and I felt everything was great. (mumbles) It was not something which is exponential So I had to build a platform off it all, so I spent 6 months writing a whole platform. It was a really smart team, and all the logic I used was build a platform which treats or ploy a human in the center of your (mumbles) design. So we made a very personalized platform, where it helps a person to get there, and attracts you to come back. So it's very user friendly, or a very exponential platform. We call it Accenture Future Talent Platform. We deployed it across our entire businesses, we have 70+ number of people who are already being certified to their platform. They feel goof that they've gone to the next stage of their career. And now we are actually using the same platform for our clients. So we are giving them platforms so clients can use that effectively. >> From what I am hearing from you, it's about having technology skills, know how, and expertise. But also having this mindset of learning, and a hungry for learning, and wanting to know more. How do you make sure that, that culture is cultivated in the right way? >> We did some of the campaigns, so a very simple principle that we use is that like you do a marketing campaign to attract a customer. Whether he is selling a (mumbles), or selling a cruise experience, or vacation, or whatever. Use a similar principles for our own employers, and use it as learning campaigns. So marketing campaigns are learning campaigns. So one of the campaigns that we ran was, How important was it for you to be learning fit? So just like we always measure ourselves on health everyday, instead you measure yourself in learning. So our app was actually given to everybody, so you can see whether you are learning enough or not. We're in the culture of seeing how I'm doing against my own goals, but how am I doing against Rebecca's goal. >> Gameafying it, making it a little more fun. Making it a little competition. >> We also did (mumbles) as well, Because we felt that people look at their own models and say, well this person is very sexist, why would I want to be that person. That's a normal human. That's what people see so we made sure that our leaders do what they are saying. And they can buckle it down, they should start learning faster itself, from top management perspective. So people see them learning, they would say, I want to be like him. So that means I need to have the same behavior as this person. >> No, those are critical people in companies. Well, Sanjeev thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a pleasure having you. >> Same here, it was nice talking to you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. You are watching theCUBE Informatica World 2019. (funky techno music)

(funky music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Informatica World 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Rebecca Knight who's on the floor getting some data, getting some reports. She's my co-host here this week. Next guest is Bruce Chizen, board member of Informatica, OG, original gangster of the tech scene. Been there, done that. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you, John. >> Big alumni. I love having you on because you're kind of, you're a historian through experience, still active in the industry, obviously, Informatica. Four years private. >> Historian, that's scary. >> You've been around the block. You've seen more waves than I have, and that's a lot. But, you know, you've done a lot of things and you've seen the waves. You've run companies, you've been on boards. You've been on Informatica board. Four years private, a lot of great things can go on. Michael Dell proved that. He took Dell Computer, which is now Dell Technologies, he took it private, and I asked him. He wanted to retool and didn't want to do the shot clock of being a public company. Filing, and sour beans and all those regulations, 'cause he knew what was coming, the wave was coming. Informatica did the same thing, so I'm expecting an IPO, or MNA big deal happening. But four years, with great product people, you're on the board. Data, our original conversation four years ago on theCUBE, hasn't changed. >> No. It's the same wave, and now everyone's jumping on the wave. >> The good thing for Informatica is, as a private company, we got to do things that we could not have done as a public company. The level of investment we made in R&D, the transition from perpetual, or on-premise, to subscription. The investment in the sales organization. Couldn't have done that as a public company 'cause the shareholders tend to be too short term focused. >> And also I will add, just to get your reaction to, is that, my observation, looking at these situations when you have smart people, the board, like yourself, and the product team. Which I've been complimentary of Informatica's, as you know. Some other critical analysis, but that's different. But, great product engineering people. When you don't have the pressure of time, you could watch things gestate and when you're early, you have an advantage. Talk about that, because that's a strategic thing, most people aren't talking about, but you an early lead on data. You've had product engineering leadership, and you had time. >> It's not as easy as you make it sound. Keep in mind, Informatica is owned by financial sponsors. Private equity. >> Yeah, there's some pressure. >> CPP. And it's up to people like myself on the board, the other independent board member, the management team, to continue to remind the investors that if we make early investments and they pay off the company will be worth more and they'll ultimately make more money and their partners will make more money. >> I made it sound like you're on the beach drinking wine. >> A great example is what Informatica did with the data catalog. That was an early investment. No one really knew whether it would pan out. Sounded good, but it required a significant investment, that came out of the pockets of our investors and we were able to convince them to do that. Another great example is CLAIRE. You know, AI is hot. Well had we not invested in CLAIRE, three, three and a half years ago, CLAIRE would not be in existence today. Couldn't have done that as a public company. >> And it gives you a little bit of a lead, again, there's just no shot clock on public. But yeah, the private executives, they're not going to let you sit around and hit the beach and clip coupons. You got to work hard. But I got to ask >> The other thing you've seen the company has gone from a great point product company, great products, to really developing a platform, and architecting a platform. Which requires a significant amount of engineering. >> I was going to ask you about that, I'm glad you jumped the gun on that. Platform is the key. Speaking of platforms, I was just at Adobe, a company you're very familiar with, they're rolling out a new platform. Platforms are now back in vogue but it's not the old way. The old way was build a platform, have a competitive advantage, lock in your nested solution in imitability. Now it's platform open, different twist. How is that different? 'Cause you've seen the platform where you got to own it, barest entry, proprietary technology, to platform that's open extensible. >> Yeah, customers have gotten smart. No customer wants to be held hostage to one individual platform. SAP being a great example. Microsoft Windows being another example. They want to make sure that if they choose one platform, they could easily migrate to another. It's one of the reasons why Informatica is in such a sweet spot, because we allow our customers to choose which Cloud infrastructure providers they want to put their workloads on. And they can use multiple Cloud infrastructure. >> I got to ask about the competition now. Not competition but co-opetition, just marketplace in general. Everybody's jumping on the same wave that you guys have been on. You go to YouTube.com/Siliconangle look up Informatica videos I've done here with the team and you four years ago. Look up some of the things we were talking about, not a lot of many people talk about data driven, hardcore analytics, next-gen. These are the kind of topics that in AI machine learning, now everyone's talking about them. What's different about Informatica as the noise level increases around some of these things? Certainly, it's pretty obvious AI is going to be hot. Multi-generational Cloud, multi-generational things can happen. Operations, AI automation. >> Yeah. >> But what's different about Informatica? What should people know about Informatica that might be unique that you can lend some insight into? >> So when I think about the competition, or the co-opetition, I put those competitors in two buckets. There's a whole slew of smaller players that have some really good point products. Fortunately for Informatica, they don't have the scale to compete. And when I say scale to compete, not just on the go to market side, but they can't afford to invest two hundred million dollars a year in research and development building a complete platform. So, even though they're kind of ankle biters and occasionally I feel like the company has to slap them around, and they're annoyances, I don't think they're a big threat. The Cloud infrastructure players, the platform guys, Google, AWS, Azure, will continue to provide data tools that are developed for their stack. They will do some things that will be good enough. The good news is Informatica does great as it relates to enterprise Cloud management. So, if an enterprise really cares about their data, and they really care about having choice in the future, and they don't want to be held hostage to any one platform, Informatica is the only game in town. >> You're one of the best at doing theCUBE. This is our tenth year, and I remember telling some NetApp people because they invested in Cloud early, too, they don't get the credit. This is another example of Informatica invested early on in Cloud. I talked to Emmett and Anil years ago, they were well down that Cloud path. So Johnny-come-lately's going to jump on the Cloud 'cause there's an advantage so props to Informatica. >> And plus it's not Cloud only. Most of the large enterprises are hybrid, they will be hybrid for many years to come. In fact, if you look at workloads today, they majority of the workloads are still on-premise. >> Scales come up a lot. You know my commentary and theCUBE, everyone who watches me knows I like to rap about I was the first to call Amazon the trillion dollar opportunity because of the scale. Scale is the new competitive advantage, I've said that. I've said open is the new lock in. Value is the new lock in is what I said. So now you've got scales. The question is how does a startup compete if scale is table stakes? Is it race for funding? Snowflakes got to three billion dollar evaluation. Are they worth three billion? We're going to analyze that in theCUBE later. But they raise almost a billion dollars in cash. Do you scale up with cash and grow? >> Great technology. It starts out with really great technology. An organization like Snowflake, great technology. Look at Databricks, great technology. So, I look at the great new startups, what makes them great is that they have an innovative technological solution that's hard to replicate. Then they get the funding, and they're able to scale. That's what it takes to be a startup. >> And that's almost the OG, original gangster, Vectra Capital model. >> That's correct. >> Agile, iterate your way to success. No craft, no scale. Just speed. Is the world going back to the old formula? >> It's going back to innovation. To technical innovation. Especially given that you have so many scale players. You can no longer just come in there as a startup. Money alone is not going to enable you to be successful. >> All right I want you to pay it forward for all the young people graduating. I just was at my daughter's Cal, Berkeley graduation yesterday. Although she wasn't in this class. Cal just graduated their inaugural first-generation class of data science. Databricks was involved in that, they donated a lot of software. They're very Cal oriented. People who graduate high school, elementary school, this is a new field. Not enough jobs. Berkeley, a leading institution, first class ever in data science. What skill gaps are out there that need to be filled that people could learn now to get ahead and get an advantage in the workforce? >> My view, John, it starts in middle school with math. If we could help our kids who are in middle school to get through algebra, studies have shown they will move on to undergrad and then many of them will move to graduate work. We've got to start early. Yeah, there's some simple fixes. Help people become coders, help people do other things. But the reality is >> If you can't get the algebra done you're not going to code. >> We have to solve the longer term problems. So when I think about jobs of the future, we've got to create people who are creative, but at the same time understand the basics. >> Math, stats, great stuff. Final question. Are you going to run a company again soon? >> So I get that question quite often. First of all, I love doing what I do today, which is kind of a lot of little stuff. I do miss running a company. But, as I've told a whole bunch of people, I have no desire to ever report to a board again. So unless I own 51% of that company, I will not be running a company. >> Well now you know the deal terms, anyone who's watching for an investment from Bruce partnering with them. Great stuff. What's missing? What's around the corner? What are people missing in the news these days in the trends? What's coming that's exciting that nobody's talking about? >> I think what's happening, and this happens each wave, there's been so much excitement about the movement from On-Premises to Cloud, about AI and machine learning, I don't think people really appreciate how early it is. That we're this much in to it and we've got a long ways to go. And the old workflows that are on-premise, the amount of advancement in artificial intelligence and machine learning has so far to go, that people need to be patient and continue to invest aggressively in what's going to transpire ten years from now, not six months from now. And then you add things like 5G, faster speed WiFi, that also is going to have this huge impact. >> Great insight, Bruce. Thanks for sharing that insight. Get the kids learning math in middle school, gateway to coding, gateway to graduate work. Next ten waves, lot of waves coming. Bruce, thanks for sharing the insight. Good to see you again. >> Thanks, John. It's a pleasure. >> CUBE coverage here in Informatica World 2019. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll be back with more after this short break. (funky music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome everyone, you are watching theCUBE. We are kicking off a two-day event here at Informatica World 2019 in Las Vegas. I'm your host, and I'm co-hosting along with John Furrier. It's great to have you. Great to be here. >> Great to see you again. >> So, Informatica is really sitting in the sweet spot of a fast-growing area of technology, cloud and big data. I want to ask you a big question. Where is the market? What do you see happening in this sweet spot area? >> Well we're here in Informatica World. I think it's our fourth Cube coverage. We've been following these guys since they've gone private two years ago in depth. Interesting changeover. They went private just like Michael Dell did with Dell Technologies. And then they went public in great performance. We said at that time, if they can go private with the product skills that they have in their senior leadership, they could do well. And they've been on the same trend line, which has been really positive data. Now data is the hottest thing on the planet. This is the theme of the industry. Data is everything. Machine learning needs data. Data feeds machine learning. Machine learning feeds AI. This is a core innovator. Now the challenge is on the enterprise side is that data is structured. It's in all these different databases. So in an enterprise, data's kind of has all these legacy structures and legacy systems. And the cloud for instance. Cloud is where SaaS wins. And SaaS winners like Zoom Communications, Air BNB, you name all those successful cloud data companies. Data's at the heart of their value proposition. And data is unencumbered. There's no restrictions. They use data, data as analysis. They look at customer behavior, AB testing. So data is the heart of innovation. This is Informatica's plan here. CLAIRE is their AI product. Their theme is kind of clever. CLAIRE starts here. And this is really the focus for Informatica. Their opportunity is to be that independent vendor supplier, the Switzerland as it has been called, the neutral third party to bring data together On Premise and Cloud. That's what they're saying. That's their opportunity. The challenges are high. The data business is being regulated. We talk about it last time. You know, privacy, GDPR one-year anniversary, Microsoft's calling for more privacy. As more regulation comes in, that puts more restrictions on data. That requires more software. That creates overhead. Overhead is not good for SaaS business models. And that is where the conflict is. This is the opportunity, and if they can overcome that as a supplier, then they can do well. And data growth is just massive. Cloud, IoT Edge, you name it. Data is the center of the value proposition. >> Well, and we're going to have a lot of great guests on the program this week, in particular we're going to have Sally Jenkins talking about these four customer journeys that the customers are going on. And in fact data governance and privacy is one of the big tenants. So, they are making, they are saying this is our wheelhouse. We can do this. We can help you do this. >> Well, the thing is we're going to ask every guest the question of the week is What's the skill gaps? Because digital transformation although very relevant is only as good as the people and the culture that's behind it. And that's a theme that we hear all throughout our different CUBE events. If people have the culture for it, they could do it. DevOps is another word that has been kicked around. But ultimately if you don't have the people and just machines, it's really going to be a tough balance to strike. You need the machines, you need the data, you need the people. And this is where the challenge is in the industry. I think the skill gaps is a huge problem for digital transformation. It's to me the big blocker in seeing innovation accelerate. So customers are now having that journey. They're starting, they really think about how to architect their enterprise with an On Premise, with a Legacy and Cloud Native with full SaaS. And the companies that can get to a SaaS business model, managing the On-Premise's legacy will have a winning shot at taking new market share or top one down incumbents in leadership positions. >> I'm really excited about this idea. Asking people about the skill gap and where the next generation of jobs are going to be in big data. I saw a statistic, a survey from Google, 94% of IT managers can't find qualified candidates for open Cloud roles. That is-that's astonishing. I also saw an interesting quote from Tim Cook, who recently said that half of Apple's new hires are not going to have a college degree this year. He said when our own founder didn't have one. It kind of really shows you what you can do. >> It's really early. >> You might not need this degree. >> First of all, it's really, first of all I agree that degrees don't really matter. In some cases, old degrees might not apply to the new jobs. I'll give you an example. My daughter just graduated from Cal Berkeley this week. And they had the inaugural class of data, data science, data analytics. For the first time, first graduating class. That's a tell-sign that we're at the early, early stages. But data science can come from anyone. You could be, you know, anthropologist, you could be any any skill. You can solve a problem, you're good at math. You can see the big picture. You're seeing data science really becoming a career. And again, there's just not enough job openings. And data science isn't just for the data jockeys out there who just want to do data. There's cyber security, huge data-driven. Everything is data-driven. The big growth area in the enterprise is the IoT, the Edge. As devices come online for manufacturing to oil rigs to wind farms. The edge computing is a huge thing. And that's a data problem. Everything is a data problem. So this is where the industry is focused I think Informatica was really on it early. And now everyone's jumping in. You got Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the big cloud players, and you got all the existing incumbent enterprise suppliers all putting data at the center-value proposition. You know you got a lot of competition now for Informatica, and they have to make some good moves here. And what I'm going to be looking for here, Rebecca, is how they transform as a company. Because I think that they have to be an integration company. They want to be that Switzerland. They got to integrate to all the clouds. They got to integrate to all the different platforms and environments on the enterprise and create that one operating model. And this is something they say they want to do, and we're going to ask them. >> And you not only called them Switzerland, they've called themselves Switzerland. And so I think that they are. They do want that. They want that for themselves. They want they are having these partnerships with all of the major cloud providers. So, you said this is what you're going to be asking. This is what you're going to be looking for. What is it that you think will set them apart? >> I think ultimately I think Informatica's got a great management team when it comes to product and engineering. One of the things I've been impressed with is they get the product around data. The only thing I think that could be a headwind for them as a challenge is this regulatory environment. I brought that up earlier. I think this could be a challenge and an opportunity, and it could be the difference maker because there's no question that their value proposition or how they're dealing with data management, their deals we're going to hear about with the cloud and all of the new innovation they have with CLAIRE and AI. Certainly that's good. But if you don't have data-feeding machine learning, and the data's hard to get at, and it's regulated, you got clouds with geographies and countries have new regulations. This is a complicated problem. If they could create software to make that easier and create an abstraction layer and use the power of the cloud, I think they could have a winning formula. So to me, that's a killer opportunity. And then making data work for SaaS-oriented business models, On-Premise and in the cloud. >> I think you're absolutely right and we heard Anil Chakravarthy say this today. Data needs the machine learning an AI, AI machine learning need data. And any application of AI and machine learning is only as good as the data that's been collected. So, the other big challenge is what I think is going to be really exciting about for this show is seeing all of these use cases. In industry after industry we are seeing applications of AI and machine learning transforming business models and approaches and leadership and big ideas around these important game-changers in our industry. >> Yeah, one of the things that's interesting I had an interview with in the city of Howie Xu, who's formally VMWare engineer, entrepreneur, sold his company to Zscaler. He's an AI guy, and we talked about the SaaS business model. And one of the things that's key is if you don't have the data feeding the SaaS, it's not going to work, so to me if they could get that data back in to the system quicker with all that regulation, that's going to be a game changer. And I think they got to start thinking how they can show the customer proof points. That's going to be interesting when the customers start adapting in that scale. >> And as we've also said many times on theCUBE the governance is kind of a mess itself. I mean Washington doesn't quite know what to do with this and how to regulate it. How do you think that these technology companies should be working with Washington on this? >> Well that's a loaded question. First of all, I think the government is not the bellwether for technology innovation. In fact, I think innovation is stifled by too much regulation. There's got to have a balance there. One of the things that's positive is in the cyber-security area you see private, public partnerships go on where there's some joint sharing. I think cloud is going to be a catalyst. We're going to have the VP of marketing from Amazon web services on, I'm going to ask him that direct question. This is where the action is. So I think this notion of collaboration the enterprise and cloud players is going to be key because if you look at like just how search engines used to work back in the old days, if it was not encumbered by all this legacy infrastructure in the enterprise, it works great. The more you add complexity to things, the more you need software. The more you need software, you need horsepower to compute. You need more storage. So all these things are creating a different environment than it was just three years ago. So, you know can they adjust, can the industry shape itself out? I think the industry needs to lead here, not the government. >> What about the idea of Informatica working together with customers and making sure that they are in fact deriving value? Because I mean I think that's the other thing is that all of these companies know they need to have an AI strategy, they need to be using more machine learning. It's very complicated as you said. But then there's this question of am I really going to see a return of investment on this? >> Well, I think Informatica can do a good job working with cloud architecture and looking at because you got again IoT edge is coming around the corner. But if they can nail the architecture On-Premises and Cloud, that is a great start. The second thing that Informatica can help customers at, and this is a customer challenge, is where do you store the data? Because moving data around is very expensive. So this scenario is where you want it all on the cloud. This scenario is where you want it all On Premise. And this scenario is where you want it on both locations. And then with the edge, you want to move data I mean compute to where the data is. So, data becomes a very critical piece of the overall architecture and whoever can build this operating system's mindset will have a winning formula, and again being neutral is a critical strategy. And the more Informatica can help enterprise be more like consumer companies, the better. If you look at Slack for instance, it's an IPO candidate coming out very popular. It's just a chat kind of message board app. What made Slack successful is that they built connectors and APIs into all different tools. If Informatica could do that, that would be a winning formula because they want to be data brokering, they want to be data connecting, and they want to feed the applications and machine learning data. If they can't get data to the machine learning and AI, the AI will not be sufficient. And that will be a problem. >> Well, this is all the things we are going to be talking about over these next two days. John, I look forward to it. I'm Rebecca Knight, you are watching theCUBE. (lighthearted techno music)

(funky guitar music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, This is theCUBE conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California CUBE studios, I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. Were with CUBE alumni, special guest Amit Walia, President of Products & Marketing at Informatica. Amit, it's great to see you. It's been a while. It's been a couple of months, how's things? >> Good to be back as always. >> Welcome back. Okay, Informatica worlds is coming up, we have a whole segment on that but we have been covering you guys for a long long time, data is at the center of the value proposition again and again, it's more amplified now, the fog is lifting. >> Sure. >> And the world is now seeing what we were talking about four years ago. (giggles) >> Yeah. >> With data, what's new? What's the big trends that going on that you guys are doubling down on? What's new, what's changed? Give us the update. >> Sure. I think we have been talking the last couple of years, I think your right, data has becoming more and more important. I think, three things we see a lot. One is obviously, you saw this whole world of digital transformation. I think that has de faintly has picked up so much steam now. I mean, every company is going digital and obviously that creates a whole new paradigm shift for companies to carry out almost recreate themselves, rebuild them, so data becomes the new definition. And that's what we call those things you saw at Infomatica even before data3.org, but data is the center of everything, right? And you see the volume of data growth, you know, the utilization of data to make decisions, whether it's, you know, decisions on the shop floor, decisions basically related to cyber security or whatever it is. And the key to what you see different now is the whole AI assisted data management. I mean the scale of complexity, the scale of growth, you know, multi-cloud, multi-platform, all the stuff that is in front of us, it's really difficult to run the old way of doing things, so that's why we see one thing that we see a whole lot is AI is becoming a lot more mainstream, still early days but it's assisting the whole ability for companies, what I call, exploit data to really become a lot more transformative. >> You have been on this for a while, again we can go back to theCUBE archives, we can almost pull out clips from two years ago, be relevant today, you know, the data control, understanding >> Yeah. >> Understanding where the data governance is-- >> Sure. >> That's always a foundational thing but you guys nailed the chat bots, you have been doing AI was previous announcements, this is putting a lot of pressure on you, the president of the products, you got to get this out there. >> What's new? What's happening inside Informatica? pedaling as fast as you can? What is some of the updates? >> No. >> Gives us the-- >> The best example always is like a duck, right? Your really swimming and feel things are calm at the top and then you are really paddling. No, I think it's great for us. I think, I look at AI's, AI is like, there is so much FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] around it and machine learning AI. We look at it as two different ways. One is how we leverage machine learning within our products to help our customers. Making it easy for them, like I said, so many different data types, think of IOT data, unstructured data, streaming data, how do you bring all that stuff together and marry it with your existing transactional data to make sense. So, we're leveraging a lot of machine learning to make the internal products a lot more easier to consume, a lot more smarter, a lot more richer. The second thing is that, we're what we call it our AI, CLAIRE, which we unveiled, if you remember, a couple of years ago at the Informatica World. How that then helps our customers make smarter decisions, you know, in data science and all of these data workbenches, you know, the old statistical models is only as good as they can ever be. So, we leveraging helping our customers see the value proposition of our AI, CLAIRE, then to what I make things that, you know, find patterns, you know, statistical models cannot. So, to me I look at both of those really, leveraging ML to shape our products, which is where we do a lot of innovation and then creating our AI, CLAIRE, to help customers to make smarter decisions, easier decisions, complex decisions, which I called the humans or statistical models, really cannot. >> Well this is the balance with machines and humans. >> Right. >> working together, you guys have nailed this before and I'm, I think this was two years ago. I started to hear the words, land, adopt, expand, form you guys, right? Which is, you got to get adoption. >> Right. >> And so, as you're iterating on this product focus, you got to getting working, making secure your products-- >> Big, big maniacal focus on that one. >> So, tell me what you have learned there because that's a hard thing. >> Right. >> You guy are doing well at it. You got to get adoption, which means you got to listen customers, you got to do the course correction. >> Yeah. >> what's the learnings coming out of that piece of that. >> That's actually such a good point. We've made such, we've always been a customer centric company but as you said, like, as whole world shifted towards a new subscription cloud model, we've really focused on helping our customers adopt our products and you know, in this new world, customers are struggling with new architectures and everything, so we doubled down on what we called customer success. Making sure we can help our customers adopt the products and by the way it's to our benefit. Our customers get value really quickly and of course we believe in what we call a customer for life. Our ability to then grow with our customers and help them deliver value becomes a lot better. So, we really focused, so, we have globally across the board customers, success managers, we really invest in our customers, the moment a customer buys a product from us, we directly engage with them to help them understand for this use case, how you implement the product. >> It's not just self service, that's one thing that I appreciate 'cause I know how hard it is to build products these days, especially with the velocity of change but it's also when you have a large scale data. >> Yeah. >> You need automation, you got to have machine learning, you got to have these disciplines. >> Sure. >> And this is both on your end and but also on the customer. >> Yes. >> Any on the updates on the CLAIRE and some customer learnings you're seeing that are turning into use cases or best practices, what are some of them? >> So many of them. So take a simple example, right? I mean, we think of, we take these things for granted, right? I mean, take note, we don't talk about IOB these days right? All these cell cells, we were streaming data, right? Or even robots on the shop floor. So much of that data has no schema, no structure, no definition, it's coming, right? Netflix data and for customers there is a lot of volume in it, a lot of it could be junk, right? So, how do you first take that volume of data? Create some structure to it for you to do analytics. You can only do analytics if you put some structure to it, right? So, first thing is I've leverage CLAIRE, we help our customers to create, what I call, schema and you can create some structure to it. Then what we do allow is basically CLAIRE through CLAIRE, it can naturally bring what we have the data quality on top of it, like how much of it is irrelevant, how much of it is noise, how much of it really makes sense, so, then, as you said it, signal from the noise We are helping our customers get signal from the noise of data. That's where it AI comes very handy because it's very manual, cumbersome, time consuming and sometimes very difficult to do. So, that's a area we have leveraged creating structure and data quality on top and finding rules that didn't naturally probably didn't exist, that you and me wouldn't be able to see. Machines are able to do it and to your point, our belief is, this is my 100% belief, we believe AI assisting the humans. We have given the value of CLAIRE to our users, so it complements you and that's where we are trying to help our users get more productive and deliver more value to you faster. >> Productivity is multifold, it's like, also, efficiency, people wasting time on project that can be automated, so you can focus that valuable resource somewhere else. >> Yeah. >> Okay, let's shift gears onto Informatica World coming up. Let's spend some time on that. What's the focus this year, the show, it's coming up, right around the corner, what's going to be the focus? What's going to be the agenda? What's on the plate? >> Give you a quick sense on how it's shape up, it's probably going to be our Informatica World. So, it's 20th year, again back in Waze, you know, we love Waze of course. We have obviously, a couple of days lined up over there, I know you guys will be there too. A great set of speakers. Obviously, we will have me on stage, speakers like, we'll have some, the CEO of Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian is going to be there, we'll have on the main stage with Anil, we'll have the CEO of Databricks, Ali, with me, we'll also have CMO of AWS, Ariel, there, then we have a couple of customers lined up, Simon from Credit Suisse, Daniel is the CDO of Nissan, we also have the Head of AI, Simon Guggenheimer from Microsoft as well as the Chief Product Officer of Tableau, Francois Ajenstat, so, we have a great line up of speakers, customers and some of our very very strategic partners with us. If you remember last year, We also had Scott Guthrie there main stage. 80 plus sessions, pretty much 90% lead by customers. We have 70 to 80 customers presenting. >> Technical sessions or going to be a Ctrack? >> Technical, business, we have all kinds of tracks, we have hands on labs, we have learnings, customers really want to learn our products, talk with the experts, some want to the product managers, some want to talk to the engineers, literally so many hands on labs, so, it's going to be a full blown couple of days for us. >> What's the pitch for someone watching that never been Informatica World? Why should they come for the show? >> I'll always tell them three things. Number one is that, it's a user conference for our customers to learn all things about data management and of course in that context they learn a lot about. So, they learn a lot about the industry. So, day one we kick it off by market perspectives. We are giving a sense on how the market is going, how everybody is stepping back from the day to and understanding, where are these digital transformation, AI, where is all the world of data going. We've got some great annalists coming, talkings, some customers talking, we are talking about futures over there. Then it is all about hands on learning, right?, learning about the product. Hearing from some of these experts, right?, from the industry experts as well as our customers, teaching what to do and what not to do and networking, it's always go to network, right, it's a great place for people to learn from each other. So, it's a great forum for all those three things but the theme this year is all about AI. I talked about CLAIRE, I'll in fact our tagline this year is, Clarity Unleashed. We really want, basically, AI has been developing over the last couple of years, it's becoming a lot more mainstream, for us in our offerings and this year we're really taking it mainstream, so, it's kind of like, unleashing it for everybody can genuinely use it, truly use it, for the day to day data management activities. >> Clarity is a great theme, I mean, it plays on CLAIRE but this is what we're starting to see some visiblility into some clear >> Yeah. >> Economic benefits, business benefits. >> Yep. >> Technical benefits, >> Yep. >> Kind of all starting to come in. How would you categorize those three areas because you know, generally that's the consensus these days that what was once a couple years ago was, like, foggy when you see, now you're starting to see that lift, you're seeing economic, business and technical benefits. >> To me it's all about economic and business. So, technology plays a role in driving value for the business, right, I'm a full believer in that, right, and if you think about some of the trends today, right, a billion users are coming into play that will be assisted by AI. Data is doubling every year, you know the volume of data, >> Yep. >> The amount of, and I always say business users today, I mean, I run a business, I want, I always say, tomorrow data, yesterday to make a decision today. It's just in time and that's where AI comes into play. So our goal is to help organizations transform themselves, truly be more productive, reduce operation cost, by the way governance and compliance, that's becoming such a mainstream topic. It's not just basically making analytical decisions. How do you make sure your data is safe and secure, you don't want to get basically get hit by all of these cyber attacks, they're all are coming after data. So, governance, compliance of data that's becoming very, so, those-- >> Again you guys are right on the data thing. >> Yeah. >> I want to get your reaction, you mentioned some stats. >> Sure. >> I've got some stats here. Data explosion, 15.3 zettabytes per year >> Yeah, in global traffic. >> Yeah. >> 500 million business data users and growing 20 billion in connected devices, one billion workers will be assisted by machine learning, so, thanks for plugging those stats but I want to get your reaction to some of these other points here. 80% of enterprises are looking at multicloud, their really evaluating where the data sits in that equation >> Sure. And the other thing is the responsibility and role of the Chief Data Officer >> Yes. >> These are new dynamics, I think you guys will be addressing that into the event. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Because organizational dynamics, skill gaps are issues but also you have multicloud. So your thoughts on those to. >> That's a big thing, look at, in the old world, John, Hidrantes is always still in large enterprises, right, and it's going to stay here. In fact I think it's not just cloud, think of it this way, on-premise is still here, it's not going a way. It's reducing in scope but then you have this multicloud world, SAS apps, PAS apps, infrastructure, if I'm a customer, I want to do all of it but the biggest problem is that my data is everywhere, how do I make sense of it and then how do I govern it, like my customer data is sitting somewhere in this SAS app, in that platform, on this on-prem application transaction app I'm running, how do I connect the three and how do I make sense it doesn't get, I can have a governance control around it. That's when data management becomes more important but more complex but that's why AI comes in to making it easier. What are the things we've seen a lot, as you touched upon, is the rise of CDO. In fact we have Daniel from Nissan, she is the CDO of Nissan North America, on main stage, talking about her role and how they have leveraged data to transform themselves. That is something we're seeing a lot more because you know, the role of the CDO is making sure that is not only a sense of governance and compliance, a sense of how do we even understand the value of data across an enterprise. Again, I see, one of the things we going to talk about is system thinking around data. We call it System Thinking 3.0, data is becoming a platform. See, there was OSA-D hardware layer whether it is server, or compute, we believe that data is becoming a platform in itself. Whether you think about it in terms of scale, in terms of governance, in terms of AI, in terms of privacy, you have to think of data as a platform. That's the other big thing. >> I think that is a very powerful statement and I like to get your thoughts, we had many conversations on camera, off camera, around product, Silicon Valley, Venture Capital, how can startups create value. On of the old antigens use to be, build a platform, that's your competitive strategy, you were a platform company and that was a strategic competitive advantage. >> Yes. >> That was unique to the company, they created enablement, Facebook is a great example. >> Yeah. >> They monetized all the data from the users, look where they are. >> Sure. >> If you think about platforms today. >> Sure. >> It seems to be table steaks, not as a competitive advantage but more of a foundational. >> Sure. >> Element of all businesses. >> Yeah. >> Not just startups and enterprises. This seems to be a common thread, do you agree with that, that platforms becoming table steaks, 'cause of if we have to think like systems people >> Mm-hmm. >> Whether it's an enterprise. >> Sure. >> Or a supplier, then holistically the platform becomes table steaks on premer or cloud. Your reaction to that. Do you agree? >> No, I think I agree. I'll say it slightly differently, yes. I think platform is a critical component for any enterprise when they think of their end to end technology strategy because you can't do piece meals otherwise you become a system integrator of your own, right? But it's no easy to be a platform player itself, right, because as a platform player, the responsibility of what you have to offer your customer becomes a lot bigger. So, we obviously has this intelligent data platform but the other thing is that the rule of the platform is different too. It has to be very modular and API driven. Nobody wants to buy a monolithic platform. I don't want to, as a enterprise, I don't buy all now, I'm going to implement five years of platform. You want it, it's going to be like a Lego block, okay you, it builds by itself. Not monolithic, very API driven, maybe microservices based and that's our belief that in the new world, yes, platform is very critical for to accelerate your transformational journeys or data driven transformational journeys but the platform better be API driven, microservices based, very nimble that is not a percussor to value creation but creates value as you go along. >> It's all, kind of up to, depends on the customer it could have a thin foundational data platform, from you guys for instance, then what you're saying, compose. >> Of different components. >> On whatever you need. >> For example you have data integration platform, you can do data quality on top, you can do master data management on top, you can provide governance, you can provide privacy, you can do cataloging, it all builds. >> Yeah. >> It's not like, oh my gosh, I have go do all these things over the course of five years, then I get value. You got to create value all along. >> Yeah. >> Today's customers want value like, in two months, three months, you don't want to wait for a year or two. >> This is the excatly the, I think, the operating system, systems mindset. >> Yes. >> You were referring too, this is kind of how enterprises are behaving now. There is the way you see on-premise, >> Yep. >> Thinking around data, cloud, multicloud emerging, it's a systems view distributed computing, with the right Lego blocks. >> That's what our belief is. That's what we heard from customers. See our, I spend most of my time talking to customers and are we trying to understand what customers want today and you know, some of this latent demands that they have, sometimes can't articulate, my job, I always end up on the road most of the time, just hearing customers, that's what they want. They want exactly to your point, a platform that builds, not monolithic, but they do want a platform. They do want to make it easy for them not to do everything piece meal. Every project is a data project. Whether it's a customer experience project, whether it's a governance project, whether it's nothing else but a analytical project, it's a data project. You don't repeat it every time. That's what they want. >> I know you got a hard stop but I want to get your thoughts on this because I have heard the word, workload, mentioned so many more times in the past year, if there was a tag cloud of all theCUBE conversations where the word workload was mentioned, it would be the biggest font. (laughs) >> Yes. >> Workload has been around for a while but now you are seeing more workloads coming on. >> Yeah. >> That's more important for data. >> Yes. >> Workloads being tied into data. >> Absolutely. >> And then sharing data across multiple workloads, that's a big focus, do you see that same thing? >> We absolutely see that and the unique thing we see also is that newer workloads are being created and the old workloads are not going away, which is where the hybrid becomes very important. See, we serve large enterprises and their goal is to have a hybrid. So, you know, I'm running a old transaction workload order here, I want to have a experimental workload, I want to start a new workload, I want all of them to talk to each other, I don't want them to become silos and that's when they look to us to say connect the dots for me, you can be in the cloud, as an example, our cloud platform, you know last time, we talked about a 5 trillion transactions a month, today is double that, eight to ten trillion transactions a month. Growing like crazy but our traditional workload is also still there so we connect the dots for our customers. >> Amit, thank you for coming on sharing your insights, obviously you guys are doing well. You've got 300,000 developers, billions in revenue, thanks for coming on, appreciate the insight and looking forward to your Informatica World. >> Thank you very much. >> Amit Walia here inside theCUBE, with theCUBE conversation, in Palo Alto, thanks for watching.