(gentle music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase. Season two, episode three. This is about MarTech, emerging cloud scale customer experience. This is our ongoing series that you know and love hopefully that feature a great number of AWS ecosystem partners. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Got a great guest here from Branch. Michelle Lerner joins me, the senior director of business development. She's going to be talking about Branch but also about one of your favorite brands, Peet's, yep, the coffee place, and how they supercharged loyalty and app adoption with Branch. Michelle, it's great to have you on the program. >> Yeah. Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. >> Tell us a little bit about Branch, what you guys do for the modern mobile marketer. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you can think about Branch as a mobile linking platform. So what that means is we offer a seamless deep linking experience and insightful campaign measurement across every single marketing channel and platform on mobile. We exist so that we can break down walled gardens to help our customers engage with their customers in the most optimal way across any device and from every marketing channel. Our products are specifically designed to help create an amazing user experience, but also provide full picture holistic downstream measurement across any paid, owned, and earned channels so that brands can actually see what's working. So what that really means is that we make it really easy to scale our links across every single marketing channel, which then route the users to the right place at any device through even past install so that they can get to the context that they expect for a seamless experience. We then provide that cross channel analytics back to the brand so that they could see what's working and they can make better business decisions. So kind of summing it up, our industry leading mobile linking actually powers those deep links, also supports that measurement so that brands can build a sophisticated experience that actually delight their users but also improve their metrics and conversion rates. >> Those two things that you said are key. We expected to be delighted with whatever experience we're having and we also want to make sure, and obviously, the brands want to make sure that they're doing that but also that from an attribution perspective, from a campaign conversion perspective, that they can really understand the right tactics and the right strategic elements that are driving those conversions. That's been a challenge for marketers for a long time. Speaking of challenges, we've all been living through significant challenges. There's no way to say it nicely. The last two years, every industry completely affected by the pandemic talk. We're going to talk about Peet's Coffee. And I want to understand some of the challenges that you saw in the quick service restaurant or QSR industry at large. Talk to me about those industry challenges and then we'll dig into the Peet's story. >> Yeah, absolutely. So obviously the pandemic changed so much in our lives whether it's going to work or commuting or taking our kids to school or even getting our morning coffee. So when you think about Peet's, specifically within the QSR industry, they knew that they needed to innovate in order to make sure that they could provide their customers with their daily cups of coffee in a really safe and effective way. So they thought really quickly on their feet, they engaged us at Branch to help launch their order ahead messaging across their online and offline channels. They really wanted to maintain their commitment to an excellent customer experience but in a way that obviously would be safe and effective. >> That was one of the things that I missed the very most in the very beginning of the pandemic was going to my local Peet's. I missed that experience. Talk me about, you mentioned the online and offline, I'm very familiar with the online as an app user, mobile app user, but what were some of the challenges that they were looking to Branch to resolve on the offline experiences? People were queuing outside or for those folks that were they trying to get folks to convert to using the mobile app that maybe weren't users already? What was that online and offline experience? What were some of the challenges they were looking to resolve? >> Yeah, absolutely. The modern marketer is really both, like you said, online and offline, there is a heavy focus within the app and Peet's kind of wanted to bridge those two by pushing users into the app to provide a better experience there. So what they ended up doing was they used our deep linking capabilities to seamlessly route their customers to their loyalty program and their rewards catalog and other menu offerings within the app so that they could actually get things done in real time, but also in real time was the ability to then measure across those different campaigns so that they had visibility, Peet's, into kind of the way that they could optimize that campaign performance but also still give that great experience to their users. And they actually saw higher loyalty adoption, order values, and attributed purchases when they were able to kind of see in real time where these users were converting. But another thing that we're actually seeing across the board and Peet's did a great job of this was leveraging Branch power QR codes where we are seeing like the rebirth of the QR code. They're back, they're here to stay. They actually used that across multiple channels. So they used it with their in-store signage. You might have even seen it on their to go cups, coffee cards that were handed out by baristas. They were all encouraging customers to go order ahead using the Peet's coffee app. But that was kind of just the beginning for them. The creation of unique links for those QR codes actually spread for them to create Branch links across everything from emails to ads on Instagram. So before long, most of Peet's retail marketing were actually Branch links just because of the ease of creation and reliability, but more so again, going back to that customer experience, it really provided that good experience for the customers to make sure that they were getting within the mobile app so that they can take action and order their coffee. Another way that Branch kind of bridges the different platforms is actually between mobile web and app. Peet used Branch Journeys and that's a product of ours. It's a way that they can convert their mobile web users into app users. So they used deferred deep links with the ultimate goal of then converting those users into high value app users. So the Peet's team actually tested different creative and interstitials across the mobile site which would then place those users into the key pages, like either the homepage or the store locator, or the menu pages within the app. So that also helped them kind of build up not just their mobile app order online but also their delivery business so they could hire new trials of seasonal beverages. They could pair them with a free delivery offering. So they knew that they were able to leverage that at scale across multiple initiatives. >> I love those kinds of stories where it's kind of like a land and expand where there was obviously a global massive problem. They saw that recognized our customers are still going to be is demanding. Maybe if not more than they were before with I want my coffee, I want it now, you mentioned real time. I think one of the things we learned during the pandemic is access to realtime data isn't a nice to have anymore. We expect it as consumers even in our business lives, but the ability to be able to measure, course correct, but then see, wow, this is driving average order value up, we're getting more folks using our mobile app, maybe using delivery. Let's expand the usage of Branch across what we're doing in marketing can really help transform our marketing organization and a business at the brand level. >> Absolutely. And it also helps predict that brand loyalty. Because like you said, we, as consumers expect that that brands are going to kind of follow us where we are in our life cycle as consumers and if you don't do that, then you're going to be left in the dust unfortunately. >> I think one of the memories that will always stick with me, Michelle, during the last couple years is that first cup of Peet's that I didn't have to make at home myself. Just finally getting the courage to go back in, use the app, go in there, but oh man, that was probably the best taste of coffee I probably will ever have. You mentioned some of the products, you mentioned Journeys, and that allows them to do AB testing, looking at different CTAs, being able to kind of course correct and adjust campaigns in real time. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Journeys, what it does is it's basically a banner or a full page interstitial that is populated on the mobile web. So if you go to let's say Peets.com, you could get served as a user, either different creative or depending on where you are, location wise, you could be in the store, maybe there's a promotion. So it's triggered by all these different targeting capabilities. And so what that does is it takes me as a user. I can click that and go into the app where, like we said before, we have higher order value, higher lifetime value of a customer. And all my credit card information is saved. It just makes it so much more seamless for me to convert as a user within the app. And obviously Peet's likes that as well because then their conversion rates are actually higher. There's also kind of fun ways to play around with it. So if I am already a loyal customer and I have the app, you probably would target different creative for me than you would for someone who doesn't have the app. So you could say, hey, download our app, get $5 off of your next mobile order. Things like that you could play around with and you can see really does help increase that loyalty. But actually they were able to take, they kind of are experimenting with the geotargeted journeys in different key markets with different Peet's. And actually it was helping ultimately get their reinstalls growing. So for customers who maybe had the app before but needed to reinstall it because now there's such a bigger focus, they saw it both on the acquisition and the re-engagement side as well. >> So Branch has been pretty transformative, not in my estimation to Peet's marketing, but to Peet's as a business I'm hearing absolutely customer loyalty, revenue obviously impacted, brand loyalty, brand reputation. These are things that really kind of boil up to the top of the organization. So we're not just talking about benefits to the marketing and the sales folks. This is the overall massive business outcomes that you guys are enabling organizations like Peet's to generate. >> Yeah, definitely. And that's kind of what we tell our customers when they come to Branch. We want them to think about what their overall business objectives are versus if you think just campaign by campaign, okay, that's fine. But ultimately what are we trying to achieve? How could we help the bottom line? And then how can we also kind of help integrate with other mobile marketing technology or the modern tech stack that they're using? How do we integrate into that and actually provide not just a seamless experience for their end user, but with their marketing orgs, their product orgs, whoever's kind of touching the business as well? >> Have you noticed along those lines in the last couple of years as things like customer delight, seamless experience, the ability to translate, if I start on my iPad and I go to my laptop and then I finish a transaction on my phone, have you noticed your customer conversations increasing up to the C-suite level? Is this much more of a broad organizational objective around we've got to make sure that we have a really strong digital user experience? >> Yeah, absolutely. Like we were talking about before, it really does help affect the bottom line when you're providing a great experience with Branch being a mobile linking platform, our links just work. We outperform everybody else in the space and it might sound like really simple, okay, a link is working getting me from point A to point B, but doing it the right way and being consistent actually will increase performance over time of all these campaigns. So it's just an addition to providing that experience, you're seeing those key business results every single time. >> Talk about attribution for a minute because I've been in marketing for a long time in the tech industry. And that's always one of the challenges is we want to know what lever did the customer pull that converted them from opportunity to a lead to whatnot? Talk about the ability for Branch from an attribution perspective to really tell those marketers and the organization exactly, tactically, down to the tactical level, this is what's working. This is what's not working. Even if it's a color combination for example. That science is critical. >> Yeah, absolutely. Because we are able to cover the entire marketing life cycle of that they're trying to reach their customers. We cover off on email. We have mobile web to app. We have organic, we have search. No matter what you can look at that purview under a Branch lens. So we are just providing not just the accurate attribution down to the post-install, what happens after that, but also a more holistic view of everything that's happening on mobile. So then you can stitch all that together and really look at which ones are actually performing so you could see exactly which campaigns attributed directly to what amount of spend or which campaigns helped us understand the true lifetime long term value of customers, let's say in this case who ordered delivery or pickup. So to the kind of customer persona, it really helped. And also they actually were able to see Peet's because of our attribution, they saw actually a four and a half time increase in attributed purchases at the peak of the pandemic. And even since then, they're still seeing a three times increase in monthly attributed purchases. So because they actually have the view across everything that they're doing, we're able to provide that insight. >> That insight is so critical these days, like we mentioned earlier talking about real time data. Well we expect the experiences to be real time. And I expect that when I go back on the app they're going to know what I ordered last time. Maybe I want that again. Maybe I want to be able to change that, but I want them to know enough about me in a non creepy way. Give me that seamless experience that I'm expecting because of course that drives me to come back over and over again and spend way too much money there which I'm guilty of, guilty as charged. >> Coffee is totally fine. >> Right? Thank you. Thank you so much for validating that. I appreciate that. But talk to me about, as we are kind of wrapping things up here, the brick and mortars, it was such a challenge globally, especially the mom and pops to be able to convert quickly and figure out how do we reach a digital audience? How do we get our customers to be loyal? What's some of the advice that you have for the brick and mortars or those quick service restaurants like Peet's who've been navigating this the last couple years now here we are in this interesting semi post pandemic I would like to believe world? >> Yeah, we're getting there slowly but surely, but yeah, it's really important for them to adapt as we kind of move into this semi post pandemic world, we're kind of in the middle of like a hybrid online, offline, are we in stores, are we ordering online? These brand and customer relationships are super complex. I think the mobile app is just one part of that. Customers really shouldn't have any problems getting from the content or item they're looking for, no matter if they're in the store, if they're in the app, if they're on the desktop, if they're checking their email, if they're perusing TikTok, the best customer relationships really are omnichannel in nature. So what I would say, the need for providing the stellar customer experience isn't going to go away. It's actually really key. Whether it's driving users from their mobile properties to the app, providing a great in-store experience, like the QR codes, customers are expecting a lot more than they did before the pandemic. So they're not really seeing these brand touch points as little silos. They're seeing one brand. So it really should feel like one brand you should speak to the customers as if it's one brand across every single device, channel, and platform, and really unify that experience for them. >> Absolutely. That's going to be I think for so many different brands, whether it's a brick and mortar QSR, that's going to be one of the defining competitive advantages. If they can give their end users a single brand experience across channels, and you mentioned TikTok, those channels are only going to grow. As are I think or expectations. I don't think anybody's going to go back to wanting less than they did two years ago, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Well this has been great, Michelle, thank you so much for joining me, talking about Branch, what you guys are doing, mobile linking platform, mobile measurement platform, the deep links, what you were able to do with Peet's Coffee, a beloved brand since the 60s and so many others. We appreciate your insights, your time and the story that you shared. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. I hope you have a great rest of your day. >> You as well. For Michelle Lerner, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Showcase. Keep it right here. More great content coming up from theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. (gentle music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> People hate to be sold, but they love to buy. We become what we think about, think, and grow rich. If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive. The world is replete with time-tested advice and motivational ideas for aspiring salespeople, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Earl Nightingale, and many others have all published classics with guidance that when followed closely, almost always leads to success. More modern personalities have emerged in the internet era, like Tony Robbins, and Gary Vaynerchuk, and Angela Duckworth. But for the most part, they've continued to rely on book publishing, seminars, and high value consulting to peddle their insights and inspire action. Welcome to this video exclusive on theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm pleased to welcome back Professor Mark Roberge, who is one of the Managing Directors at Stage 2 Capital, and Paul Fifield, who's the CEO and Co-Founder of Sales Impact Academy. Gentlemen, welcome. Great to see you. >> You too Dave and thanks. >> All right, let's get right into it. Paul, you guys are announcing today a $4 million financing round. It comprises $3 million in a seed round led by Stage 2 and a million dollar in debt financing. So, first of all, congratulations. Paul, why did you start Sales Impact Academy? >> Cool, well, I think my background is sort of two times CRO, so I've built two reasonably successful companies. Built a hundred plus person teams. And so I've got kind of this firsthand experience of having to learn literally everything on the job whilst delivering these very kind of rapid, like achieving these very rapid growth targets. And so when I came out of those two journeys, I literally just started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London where I now live. I spend a bunch of time over in New York, and literally started this because I wanted to sort of kind of give back, but just really wanted to start helping people who were just really, really struggling in high pressure environments. And that's both leadership from sense of revenue leadership people, right down to sort of frontline SDRs. And I think as I started just doing this voluntary teaching, I kind of realized that actually the sort of global education system has done is a massive, massive disservice, right? I actually call it the greatest educational travesty of the last 50 years, where higher education has entirely overlooked sales as a profession. And the knock-on consequences of that have been absolutely disastrous for our profession. Partly that the profession is seen as a bit sort of embarrassing to be a part of. You kind of like go get a sales job if you can't get a degree. But more than that, the core fundamental within revenue teams and within sales people is now completely lacking 'cause there's no structured formal kind of like learning out there. So that's really the problem we're trying to solve on the kind of like the skill side. >> Great. Okay. And mark, always good to have you on, and I got to ask you. So even though, I know this is the wheelhouse for you and your partners, and of course, you've got a deep bench of LPs, but lay out the investment thesis here. What's the core problem that you saw and how are you looking at the market? >> Yeah, sure, Dave. So this one was a special one for me. We've spoken in the past. I mean, just personally I've always had a similar passion to Paul that it's amazing how important sales execution is to all companies, nevermind just the startup ecosystem. And I've always personally been motivated by anything that can help the startup ecosystem increase their success. Part of why I teach at Harvard and try to change some of the stuff that Paul's talking about, which is like, it's amazing how little education is done around sales. But in this particular one, not only personally was I excited about, but from a fun perspective, we've got to look at the economic outcomes. And we've been thinking a lot about the sales tech stack. It's evolved a ton in the last couple of decades. We've gone from the late '90s where every sales VP was just, they had a thing called the CRM that none of their reps even used, right? And we've come so far in 20 years, we've got all these amazing tools that help us cold call, that help us send emails efficiently and automatically and track everything, but nothing's really happened on the education side. And that's really the enormous gap that we've seen is, these organizations being much more proactive around adopting technology that can prove sales execution, but nothing on the education side. And the other piece that we saw is, it's almost like all these companies are reinventing the wheel of looking in the upcoming year, having a dozen sales people to hire, and trying to put together a sales enablement program within their organization to teach salespeople sales 101. Like how to find a champion, how to develop a budget, how to develop sense of urgency. And what Paul and team can do in the first phase of essay, is can sort of centralize that, so that all of these organizations can benefit from the best content and the best instructors for their team. >> So Paul, exactly, thank you, mark. Exactly what do you guys do? What do you sell? I'm curious, is this sort of, I'm thinking in my head, is this E-learning, is it really part of the sales stack? Maybe you could help us understand that better. >> Well, I think this problem of having to upscale teams has been around like forever. And kind of going back to the kind of education problem, it's what's wild is that we would never accept this of our lawyers, our accountants, or HR professionals. Imagine like someone in your finance team arriving on day one and they're searching YouTube to try and work out how to like put a balance sheet together. So it's a chronic, chronic problem. And so the way that we're addressing this, and I think the problem is well understood, but there's always been a terrible market, sort of product market fit for how the problem gets solved. So as mark was saying, typically it's in-house revenue leaders who themselves have got massive gaps in their knowledge, hack together some internal learning that is just pretty poor, 'cause it's not really their skillset. The other alternative is bringing in really expensive consultants, but they're consultants with a very single worldview and the complexity of a modern revenue organization is very, very high these days. And so one consultant is not going to really kind of like cover every topic you need. And then there's the kind of like fairly old fashioned sales training companies that just come in, one big hit, super expensive and then sort of leave again. So the sort of product market fit to solve, has always been a bit pretty bad. So what we've done is we've created a subscription model. We've essentially productized skills development. The way that we've done that is we teach live instruction. So one of the big challenges Andreessen Horowitz put a post out around this so quite recently, one of the big problems of online learning is that this kind of huge repository of online learning, which puts all the onus on the learner to have the discipline to go through these courses and consume them in an on-demand way is actually they're pretty ineffective. We see sort of completion rates of like 7 to 8%. So we've always gone from a live instruction model. So the sort of ingredients are the absolute very best people in the world in their very specific skill teaching live classes just two hours per week. So we're not overwhelming the learners who are already in work, and they have targets, and they've got a lot of pressure. And we have courses that last maybe four to like 12 hours over two to sort of six to seven weeks. So highly practical live instruction. We have 70, 80, sometimes even 90% completion rates of the sort of live class experience, and then teams then rapidly put that best practice into practice and see amazing results in things like top of funnel, or conversion, or retention. >> So live is compulsory and I presume on-demand? If you want to refresh you have an on demand option? >> Yeah, everything's recorded, so you can kind of catch up on a class if you've missed it, But that live instruction is powerful because it's kind of in your calendar, right? So you show up. But the really powerful thing, actually, is that entire teams within companies can actually learn at exactly the same pace. So we teach it eight o'clock Pacific, 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM in the UK, and 5:00 PM Europe. So your entire European and North American teams can literally learn in the same class with a world-class expert, like a Mark, or like a Kevin Dorsey, or like Greg Holmes from Zoom. And you're learning from these incredible people. Class finishes, teams can come back together, talk about this incredible best practice they've just learned, and then immediately put it into practice. And that's where we're seeing these incredible, kind of almost instant impact on performance at real scale. >> So, Mark, in thinking about your investment, you must've been thinking about, okay, how do we scale this thing? You've got an instructor component, you've got this live piece. How are you thinking about that at scale? >> Yeah, there's a lot of different business model options there. And I actually think multiple of them are achievable in the longer term. That's something we've been working with Paul quite a bit, is like, they're all quite compelling. So just trying to think about which two to start with. But I think you've seen a lot of this in education models today. Is a mixture of on-demand with prerecorded. And so I think that will be the starting point. And I think from a scalability standpoint, we were also, we don't always try to do this with our investments, but clearly our LP base or limited partner base was going to be a key ingredient to at least the first cycle of this business. You know, our VC firm's backed by over 250 CRO CMOs heads of customer success, all of which are prospective instructors, prospective content developers, and prospective customers. So that was a little nicety around the scale and investment thesis for this one. >> And what's in it for them? I mean, they get paid. Obviously, you have a stake in the game, but what's in it for the instructors. They get paid on a sort of a per course basis? How does that model work? >> Yeah, we have a development fee for each kind of hour of teaching that gets created So we've mapped out a pretty significant curriculum. And we have about 250 hours of life teaching now already written. We actually think it's going to be about 3000 hours of learning before you get even close to a complete curriculum for every aspect of a revenue organization from revenue operations, to customer success, to marketing, to sales, to leadership, and management. But we have a development fee per class, and we have a teaching fee as well. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think you guys, it's really an underserved market, and then when you think about it, most organizations, they just don't invest in training. And so, I mean, I would think you'd want to take it, I don't know what the right number is, 5, 10% of your sales budget and actually put it on this and the return would be enormous. How do you guys think about the market size? Like I said before, is it E-learning, is it part of the CRM stack? How do you size this market? >> Well, I think for us it's service to people. A highly skilled sales rep with an email address, a phone and a spreadsheet would do really well, okay? You don't need this world-class tech stack to do well in sales. You need the skills to be able to do the job. But the reverse, that's not true, right? An unskilled person with a world-class tech stack won't do well. And so fundamentally, the skill level of your team is the number one most important thing to get right to be successful in revenue. But as I said before, the product market for it to solve that problem, has been pretty terrible. So we see ourselves 100%. And so if you're looking at like a com, you look at Gong, who we've just signed as a customer, which is fantastic. Gong has a technology that helps salespeople do better through call recording. You have Outreach, who is also a customer. They have technologies that help SDRs be more efficient in outreach. And now you have Sales Impact Academy, and we help with skills development of your team, of the entirety of your revenue function. So we absolutely see ourselves as a key part of that stack. In terms of the TAM, 60 million people in sales are on, according to LinkedIn. You're probably talking 150 million people in go to market to include all of the different roles. 50% of the world's companies are B2B. The TAM is huge. But what blows my mind, and this kind of goes back to this why the global education system has overlooked this because essentially if half the world's companies are B2B, that's probably a proxy for the half of the world's GDP, Half of the world's economic growth is relying on the revenue function of half the world's companies, and they don't really know what they're doing, (laughs) which is absolutely staggering. And if we can solve that in a meaningfully meaningful way at massive scale, then the impact should be absolutely enormous. >> So, Mark, no lack of TAM. I know that you guys at Stage 2, you're also very much focused on the metrics. You have a fundamental philosophy that your product market fit and retention should come before hyper growth. So what were the metrics that enticed you to make this investment? >> Yeah, it's a good question, Dave, 'cause that's where we always look first, which I think is a little different than most early stage investors. There's a big, I guess, meme, triple, triple, double, double that's popular in Silicon Valley these days, which refers to triple your revenue in year one, triple your revenue in year two, double in year three, and four, and five. And that type of a hyper growth is critical, but it's often jumped too quickly in our opinion. That there's a premature victory called on product market fit, which kills a larger percentage of businesses than is necessary. And so with all our investments, we look very heavily first at user engagement, any early indicators of user retention. And the numbers were just off the charts for SIA in terms of the customers, in terms of the NPS scores that they were getting on their sessions, in terms of the completion rate on their courses, in terms of the customers that started with a couple of seats and expanded to more seats once they got a taste of the program. So that's where we look first as a strong foundation to build a scalable business, and it was off the charts positive for SIA. >> So how about the competition? If I Google sales training software, I'll get like dozens of companies. Lessonly, and MindTickle, or Brainshark will come up, that's not really a fit. So how do you think about the competition? How are you different? >> Yeah, well, one thing we try and avoid is any reference to sales training, 'cause that really sort of speaks to this very old kind of fashioned way of doing this. And I actually think that from a pure pedagogy perspective, so from a pure learning design perspective, the old fashioned way of doing sales training was pull a whole team off site, usually in a really terrible hotel with no windows for a day or two. And that's it, that's your learning experience. And that's not how human beings learn, right? So just even if the content was fantastic, the learning experience was so terrible, it was just very kind of ineffective. So we sort of avoid kind of like sales training, The likes of MindTickle, we're actually talking to them at the moment about a partnership there. They're a platform play, and we're certainly building a platform, but we're very much about the live instruction and creating the biggest curriculum and the broadest curriculum on the internet, in the world, basically, for revenue teams. So the competition is kind of interesting 'cause there is not really a direct subscription-based live like learning offering out there. There's some similar ish companies. I honestly think at the moment it's kind of status quo. We're genuinely creating a new category of in-work learning for revenue teams. And so we're in this kind of semi and sort of evangelical sort of phase. So really, status quo is one of the biggest sort of competitors. But if you think about some of those old, old fashioned sort of Miller Heimans, and then perhaps even like Sandlers, there's an analogy perhaps here, which is kind of interesting, which is a little bit like Siebel and Salesforce in the sort of late '90s, where in Siebel you have this kind of old way of doing things. It was a little bit ineffective. It was really expensive. Not accessible to a huge space of the market. And Salesforce came along and said, "Hey, we're going to create this cool thing. It's going to be through the browser, it's going to be accessible to everyone, and it's going to be really, really effective." And so there's some really kind of interesting parallels almost between like Siebel and Salesforce and what we're doing to completely kind of upend the sort of the old fashioned way of delivering sort of sales training, if you like. >> And your target customer profile is, you're selling to teams, right? B2B teams, right? It's not for individuals. Is that correct, Paul? >> Currently. Yeah, yeah. So currently we've got a big foothold in series A to series B. So broadly speaking out, our target market currently is really fast growth technology companies. That's the sector that we're really focusing on. We've got a very good strong foothold in series A series B companies. We've now won some much larger later stage companies. We've actually even won a couple of corporates, I can't say names yet, but names that are very, very, very familiar and we're incredibly excited by them, which could end up being thousand plus seat deals 'cause we do this on a per seat basis. But yeah, very much at the moment it's fast growth tech companies, and we're sort of moving up the chain towards enterprise. >> And how do you deal with the sort of maturity curve, if you will, of your students? You've got some that are brand new, just fresh out of school. You've got others that are more seasoned. What do you do, pop them into different points of the curriculum? How do you handle it? >> Yeah we have, I'll say we have about 30 courses right now. We have about another 15 in development where post this fundraise, we want to be able to get to around about 20 courses that we're developing every quarter and getting out to market. So we're literally, we've sort of identified about 20 to 25 key roles across everything within revenue. That's, let's say revenue ops, customer success, account management, sales, engineering, all these different kinds of roles. And we are literally plotting the sort of skills development for these individuals over multiple, multiple years. And I think what we've never ceases to amaze me is actually the breadth of learning in revenue is absolutely enormous. And what kind of just makes you laugh is, this is all of this knowledge that we're now creating it's what companies just hope that their teams somehow acquire through osmosis, through blogs, through events. And it's just kind of crazy that there is... It's absolutely insane that we don't already exist, basically. >> And if I understand it correctly, just from looking at your website, you've got the entry level package. I think it's up to 15 seats, and then you scale up from there, correct? Is it sort of as a seat-based license model? >> Yeah, it's a seat-based model, as Mark mentioned. In some cases we sell, let's say 20 or $30,000 deal out the gate and that's most of the team. That will be maybe a series A, series B deal, but then we've got these land and expand models that are working tremendously well. We have seven, eight customers in Q1 that have doubled their spend Q2. That's the impact that they're seeing. And our net revenue retention number for Q2 is looking like it's going to be 177% to think exceeds companies like Snowflakes. Well, our underlying retention metrics, because people are seeing this incredible impact on teams and performance, is really, really strong. >> That's a nice metric compare with Snowflake (Paul laughs) It's all right. (Dave and Paul laugh) >> So, Mark, this is a larger investment for Stage 2 You guys have been growing and sort of upping your game. And maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, we're in the middle of Fund II right now. So, Fund I was in 2018. We were doing smaller checks. It was our first time out of the gate. The mission has really taken of, our LP base has really taken off. And so this deal looks a lot like more like our second fund. We'll actually make an announcement in a few weeks now that we've closed that out. But it's a much larger fund and our first investments should be in that 2 to $3 million range. >> Hey, Paul, what are you going to do with the money? What are the use of funds? >> Put it on black, (chuckles) we're going to like- (Dave laughs) >> Saratoga is open. (laughs) (Mark laughs) >> We're going to, look, the curriculum development for us is absolutely everything, but we're also going to be investing in building our own technology platform as well. And there are some other really important aspects to the kind of overall offering. We're looking at building an assessment tool so we can actually kind of like start to assess skills across teams. We certify every course has an exam, so we want to get more robust around the certification as well, because we're hoping that our certification becomes the global standard in understanding for the first time in the industry what individual competencies and skills people have, which will be huge. So we have a broad range of things that we want to start initiating now. But I just wanted to quickly say Stage 2 has been nothing short of incredible in every kind of which way. Of course, this investment, the fit is kind of insane, but the LPs have been extraordinary in helping. We've got a huge number of them are now customers very quickly. Mark and the team are helping enormously on our own kind of like go to market and metrics. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've raised over 100 million myself in venture capital. I've never known a venture capital firm with such value add like ever, or even heard of other people getting the kind of value add that we're getting. So I just wanted to a quick shout out for Stage 2. >> Quite a testimony of you guys. Definitely Stage 2 punches above its weight. Guys, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on. Good luck and we'll be watching. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, thank you everybody for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time.

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

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here in Las Vegas at the Venetian, this is Informatica World 2018, CUBE's exclusive coverage. It's our fourth year covering Informatica World, and boy, what a transition; it's been fun to watch. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, with Peter Burris, Head of Research for Wikibon, SiliconANGLE, and theCUBE. Our next guest is Sally Jenkins, Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer at Informatica. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Thank you, John, it's nice to see you too. >> Very comfortable here, you guys having a great event, congratulations. It's crowded, but it doesn't feel crowded. A lot of sessions are going on. What's going on with the event? Give us some stats, you've got a lot of partners here. >> Yeah, so we are very happy to be back in Las Vegas, and we are taking this up a whole notch a bit, if you can notice. We've got close to 4,000 folks who saw the Opening General Session this morning. For the first time ever, we're live streaming, and sent out a note that we were live streaming to over 250,000 customers, so I'm real happy about that. Because, as you know, with the rebrand last year, it was all about getting our message out and upleveling our message, so we're really happy that our message is getting out there, with everything that came from General Session this morning, and then, tomorrow with Closing General Session. >> Just gets bigger every year, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Great to see that everything comes in. Of course, the products are just right in line. The timing couldn't have been better. Multi-cloud, everything's kind of clicking. GDPR over the top, little push there for all the international customers. But the big story that we see is the journeys that are happening. You guys have been on a journey as your own company, digital disruption, digital transformation. But there's multiple journeys. Can you just take us through the vision of how you guys see the journeys, and how does Informatica fit into the customers, 'cause your customers are also changing? >> Sally: Yes, that's right. >> Do you change your business model? Anil laid it out, customers have this journey. What's the four journies? >> Yes, that's a great question, John. So we have, of course, been customer-centric ourselves. We've adapted our journeys to accommodate the journeys that we know our customers are on. And this whole conference is centered around those four journeys, so hybrid cloud, next-gen analytics, 360 engagement, and data governance and compliance. So that's what we've heard our customers deal with day in and day out, in their data-centric initiatives, and so we wanted to encapsulate that into the entire conference. So that's what it's all about, and that's an extension of our messaging that we laid out last year. So you'll see that again and again and again in a consistent fashion. >> "Disrupt Intelligently", I saw the messaging. First of all, great artwork, great branding, a lot of the images; what does that mean? 'Cause you've got all kinds of great imagery, people on the move, mobile, data's involved, obviously, the center of it. >> Well, that and data is the critical foundation for what we call "Intelligent Disruptive". So disruption with a purpose is intelligent. And we believe, with our technology, that our customers can then unleash the power of their data to create what we call their next intelligent disruption. So we were very thoughtful about the choice of words there, 'cause disruption can be considered a negative, but we see it as very much a positive, and a way for customers to leapfrog the competition, and set the tone for their markets. >> This is an interesting concept. We were talking with a lot of the customers you've had on; we've had Toyota on, and they said, quote, these testimonials just kind of pop out, "We knew we had the data; we had all these problems "we hadn't connected, but we actually had the data "when they actually connected us, and said, "we could have foreseen this." >> Sally: That's right. >> So they were disrupted in a negative way, the fact that they were trying to connect, now they're set up. And then he used an example, once they got set up, that they didn't predict that all this inbound data from the cars were coming in. So again, that's a disruption, but now they've handled it. Is that kind of where you guys were kind of connecting the dots on the intelligent piece? >> Yeah, that's right, we're helping our customers understand what to do with the data, right? So they know the data exists, but we need to help them turn it into actionable insights that leads to their next disruption, and again and again and again with their different projects. And so those are the conversations that we've been having with our customers. Just helping them, we say, unleash the power of their data. The data's there, we need to make it useful and valuable to them. >> And competitive advantage, obviously, seeing data, ease of use as a competitive strategy. Now the Microsoft announcement was interesting, because you can see that you can take an on-prem dataset, go through the Azure portal in their console, which is very cloud-native, you know, press a few buttons, connect to Informatica's intelligent cloud service, and move data. >> Sally: That's right. >> I mean, it's not like there's someone behind the curtain; it's actually a working product. >> No, it's real, it's real and it's available for preview, and if you saw the keynote this morning, you heard from Scott Guthrie. He said this whole partnership between Informatica and Microsoft, and I quote, "A match made in heaven". So there's something real there. Microsoft and their customers see the value in partnering with us, so we were really pleased to announce that today. >> I'm going to check the Internet, but I think this might be the first iPaaS integration into Azure at this level. 'Cause it's pretty deep with these guys. So that's going to certainly set up hybrid cloud instantly. >> That's right, that's right. And scale, right, we're enterprise-scale to begin with, obviously, so is Microsoft. So it's a good partnership. >> Okay, from the branding piece, I got to ask you, you guys did the rebranding, what's your one-year review, if you have to give yourself a report card, check, check, check, straight As, perfect score? If you could go back and do- >> Well, I'd like to say that we were in the honor roll. And we measure ourselves based on what our customers tell us, so we were very deliberate in choosing a few areas of which we wanted to see progress, and that is, the first one is, were people aware that we're a cloud company? And I'm delighted to say that, yes, we've absolutely moved the needle on that, so they associate Informatica with cloud, as you know, we're the number one in enterprise cloud data management. That's what we kicked off last year. And so you'll see a continued investment around the globe in the brand. We believe that good brand health is what leaders do, in terms of setting the pace for their industry. And that's exactly what we're doing. So, one year into it, we feel really good. We did what we set out, and we delivered on what we said we were going to do. And if you all remember last year's part of the rebrand, as soon as we went external, then we needed to shift our focus back internally, and think about what does this mean to our employees, and how do we leverage the culture that we already had inside Informatica and build upon that? And that's exactly what we've been working on. So we rolled out a new set of values in January. To no surprise, they're called We-DATA. And DATA stands for Do Good, Act as One Team, Think Customer First, and Aspire for the Future. And so that's what we're doing right now, is rolling that out around the world to our employees. And that was based on employee feedback, as well. >> That's bottoms up, that's good organic listening. I got to talk about branding, 'cause this is something that we're seeing a lot of. We're seeing a lot of shifts going on. When you have these shifts you mentioned earlier, about getting a competitive advantage, a leg up on the competition, you guys had that same opportunity. Because the brand, pecking order of companies is going to change with these new waves coming. With data, certainly, so it's a huge opportunity. Do you guys talk about that when you're in the brand meetings, and you're talking about with the execs, the power of the brand, and building the brand? >> Sally: Absolutely. >> And what are some of the things you're focused on to help continue to build that brand? >> Well, I think where you're going with this is what's the financial impact or value that the brand has? And everybody, from our industry analysts, to the financial analysts, to our customers, partners, they put a value on the brand. So if you don't define who you are in the market, then you let everybody else define you, and then there's no value in that. So that's really what we set out to do last year, is we wanted to define who we were, and be proud of it, and take ownership of it. >> Put a stake in the ground. >> Yeah, and then continue to invest in that. So when I say we'll continue to invest in the brand, that is about our messaging, and making sure that we are very clear as to who we are, as I said, 'cause we're setting the pace for this industry. >> And the brand promise real quick, just to summarize, if you had to kind of sum up the bumper sticker for Informatica, Disrupt Intelligently, kind of add to that, what would be the brand promise to your customers? >> Yeah, so it's the Disruptive Power of Data. And then what falls out of that is Unleashing the Power of Data, right? So that's our brand promise to our customers, is that's what we were talking about earlier, that's exactly what we do for them with our technology, and how can we help them stay ahead of their competition? >> That's great, look at the trends too. Look at what GDPR's doing, and some of the block chain stuff that's kind of emerging, it's power to the people. People want to have control of the data. >> Sally: That's right, putting the control back in their hands. >> Great stuff, so thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it, great to see you, congratulations. >> Thanks, John. >> And great to have our fourth year, our fifth year with Anil, we saw him at Amazon re:Invent in 2014, so great to continue to watch you guys grow. It's been fun to watch. >> Great, good, well stay tuned, there's more to come for sure. >> Right, can't wait to hear. It's theCUBE live here at Informatica World, two days of coverage here. We're getting down to the second day. We've got more action coming; stay here with us. I'm John Furrier, Peter Buriss, we'll be back after this short break.

>> 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 in Las Vegas at the Venetian Hotel Ballroom the main floor here it's The Cube out in the open, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris this week, for the next two days. Our next guest is Richard Ganley, he's the senior vice president digital transformation solutions and global partners for Informatica. Richard, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure. >> We have three Palo Alto people on The Cube in Vegas. We probably all flew out here last night, but Informatica is doing great, you're dealing a lot with the digital transformation, dealing with the big large projects and partners, global partners. The ecosystem here is getting robust, and were going to expected to hear some announcements. We don't yet have the news in hand, but we hear some big ecosystem kind of announcements coming. Not sure you can talk about it, but talk about the ecosystem and the partner relationship that you guys are having with your customers. >> True absolutely, well I would look at it like this, you know we've got many of our partners here and part of the reason for that is the issue many of our users are trying to solve now, we call it digital transformation, but I think it's analogous to what happened about 20 years ago, when the internet was first really coming into our lives, people were getting online in large numbers. And many companies were scrambling for a strategy. You know they were worried about ordinary internet organizations who had already started to get online, but they were particularly worried about companies that looked a bit like them, who might get there first. And if we go to where we are today, many companies now, they're trying to unleash the power of data, they're trying turn all of that data that they got into some strategic advantage. And sure, customers of ours are worried about the likes of Amazon and Tesla to Informatica customers who are obviously very data driven, but they're also worried about organizations who are very much like them and what would happen if they unlock the power of their data first. So we see some of our customers trying to get ahead, trying to steal the march on companies that look very much like them, but also many organizations just struggling to find that place to start, and I think this is such a big problem, part of the reasons so many of our partners are here is cause it will take us all working together for the benefit of our customers, to solve these very very complex problems. >> I wonder if it's actually worse than it was 20 years ago, though right? Because 20 years ago, your general arrangement of assets, which pretty much every industry is defined by having relatively common arrangement of assets. You introduce data into that, it reduces assets specificity, you make things programmable, which means not only are you worried about companies that look like you, potentially you're worried about companies that look nothing like you, because data can quickly make them look like you. How does that play out into, as your partners are thinking about their business, how they engage customers? I've got a follow on question to that as well. >> Yeah, that's a good question Peter. I think the dynamic there, what is forcing people to do is to come up with a plan. You know, I don't think anybody can sit and wait to figure out what their plans going to be for data. They need to do something today. So we see many of our customers, very much in a hurry now, and I think boards of directors have woken up to the reality that they need to do something. So it has become a board room issue, but we see many boards now employing new titles, just like we saw 20 years ago when the internet came along. New titles being created like Chief Digital Officer, Chief Data Officer, Chief Analytics Officer, many of these new titles, new budgets becoming available. The hardest part for many is finding that starting point. And I think that's where many of our partners come in is many of our customers they'll turn to us, but they'll also turn to our partners for strategic advice, so it's important for us to all work together cause we've all got different skills that are part of the overall solution. >> But one of the challenges that I think everybody in the technology industry has, is that historically partnership arrangements have been tied to what industry are you in? What size company are you working with? And as digital takes root, it's going to change that very understanding of what kind of business is that customers in, what size are they going to be, what size can they be, is that starting to effect how you manage partners as well? How you manage relationships with your partners? >> I think it is. We're having to look at things very differently. I think many of our partners, they are changing as well. They're changing their businesses to deal with the changes in the world, as our customers become data driven, the business world is becoming disrupted you know our partners are going through that too. I think all businesses are fundamentally changing the way that they do business and it's the same for our partners, so I think the whole world, even society, is going through the same thing at the same time, we're all having to think differently about what we do, and it's data, data is changing the lives of everybody on the planet and every single business at the same time, including our partners. >> I got to ask you a question. The reality that we're hearing from customers is that there is a major shift going on with data. And you outlined them. But now combine that shift with, a couple of rooms in the house burning on fire, like GDPR. So you have this shift going on right? So more than every they need partners. So what we're hearing is, "Okay, we're used to dealing with a lot of regulations and data" to "Oh my God, we've been fast and loose just trying to scale up and scale out with the cloud and what not, and now I need help." They need help right now, they don't need a ten year project or a six month project, they need stuff instantly. How are you guys bringing those parties to the table? What does a customer do, what does a prospect do, do they say, "Hey, Informatica, you guys are like the Switzerland of data, you got the catalog and stuff, MDM, I like the story, I want to move on this, what do I do?" What do you guys, what do you say to that? Obviously it's a good prospect. >> That is a great question, and for most of our customers that's the hardest thing, is where to get started. What we see is, and this theme runs through our conference, there were four journeys that we see our customers going on, it's 360, getting a single view of their customers or products, governing their data, number two, and number three, moving to the cloud or hybrid, and fourthly, next generation analytics, putting data in the hands of business people who can use it to serve customers and run their business better. We see all of our customers, they typically will start in one of these areas and it really depends on what's most pressing and burning in their business. So if GDPR is an issue for them, that's typically where they'll start. They'll start with governance, but also at the same time, there's many people looking at GDPR, they're seeing if they can govern all of their data, build a solid foundation, they'll be in a great position for the future. So that is actually a really really good starting point. And GDPR has been a goodness. I think it's driven a lot of the right behaviors and it's waking a lot of people up to the realities that they need to govern their data. >> We've been getting involved in a lot of the partnership conversations with The Cube obviously we have a lot of interviews with suppliers and their partners, you're in charge of global partners. What does that mean, and what are you doing to get them to be more effective? Either working together with each other or with Informatica and with the customer. How are you growing the partner network? What's the value purpose? Take a minute to explain the value preposition for the partners. >> Yeah, so I think for partners, there's never been a better time to partner with Informatica. These are great times, as I was saying at the beginning, the world is becoming data driven, and this is perfect. I think where our partners really come in is around those four journeys that I mentioned. They've all got different expertise on different parts of their journey and we align with partners who've got different skills that we can use. So for example, if a customer is looking to solve for GDPR and they want to become data driven, they want to govern their data, we'll work with partners who've those special skills, whether it's on the implementation side, whether it's business consulting, whether it's strategy, all kinds of different partners will support us. And really for our customers that gives them a much richer solution. >> Who are you trying to attract? Cause as you guys are growing obviously we would predict that given the value proposition of Informatica you're probably going to have some growth there. What's your value proposition to pitch to people that might not yet be a partner? What are you offering them? What's the incentive? What would you say to the people watching that might be a potential partner? That say, "Hey I want to join the Informatica partner network." >> Yeah, for many of our newer partners we signed up a huge number of new partners last year, and I think one of the value propositions is that as the world becomes data driven, we need our partners, this is perfect timing, there's never been a better time to come and work with us. I think we've got great solutions, many great products that our partners can compliment our solutions around, so I think the timing is perfect, and we also welcome new partners as well. So I think this is a great time for our partners to build their business with Informatica. It's a great time to be a partner, it's a great time to be a customer, and it's a great time to be-- >> So you bring business, growth together, grow together kind of philosophy. Is that the, does that sound right? >> Yeah, I think it's all about growing together, the markets growing really really fast, our customers need help immediately right now, and between us and our partners we're in the perfect position to help them. >> Richard great stuff. Thanks for coming on, great to meet you. Here in Las Vegas is Palo Alto native, resident of course with two other Palo Alto residents here at the Informatica World 2018. Day one of two days of coverage with The Cube, exclusively here in Las Vegas live. Stay with us for more day one coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2018, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris, this is day three of our coverage. Mohammad Farooq is here, he's the general manager of Brokerage Services GTS at IBM. Mohammad, great to see you again, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, appreciate for having me here. >> You're very welcome. So, big show. All the clients come together in one big tent. >> Yes. >> What do you think? >> It's very exciting. I think we're doing some interesting things with our technology. We have learned a lot from our clients the last two years. We are working very closely with our partners because we believe not one company can do everything in this massive transformation that's underway. So, working with our partners, with our clients on new technologies to specifically accelerate enterprized option of the cloud model and that's exciting for us. >> Partnering, it seems to have new, energized momentum at IBM. I sense a change, is it palpable? I mean, how can you comment on that? >> I think partnering is critical for everybody's success because the industry itself is transforming, and one company cannot achieve all the requirements that clients are asking for, and we have our core competencies. Service Now, our VMWare, our Amazon, our Azure They have their core competencies. But IBM, as a company, is a company that enterprisers trust to move them to cloud and operate them in the cloud. So what we are doing is, to keep that goal in mind, we are saying okay, we are going to take a client from point A, which is non-cloud, to point B, which is cloud native, and in that journey, we will take everybody our partners helped to get there. So that's why, based on client request, we are leveraging our partners, and it has a special meaning for us because it makes our clients successful. >> OK, so, describe exactly what brokerage services does. Is it your job to get people to the cloud? But talk more about that; add some color please. >> I think the brokerage has evolved since I last talked to you a year ago. At this conference, right? A lot of people think brokerage is arbitrage. >> Peter: Is what? >> Arbitrage of services from one provider to the other, that's the limited definition of brokerage. So what we're really calling it is Hybrid Cloud Management System, not brokerage. Brokerage is one part of it. So the Hybrid Cloud Management System is the go-forward strategy of IBM in 2019, 2018 and beyond. Which includes three, four components. One is: how do you bring the entire cloud ecosystem into a federated management maodel? Which includes: business management of IT and cloud, our hybrid. Consumption: a standard consumption model through one point of access to all clouds, internal or external. Third: delivery, how do we deliver services, either automated or workflow? Bi-model, as Gartner calls it, in one model. And four: operations management across public, private, hybrid, internal or external. >> Let me make sure I got this, so, business services in the sense of running IT more like a business, >> Mohammad: Right! >> A consumption model in terms of presenting this in a way that's simple and easy for a business-person to use, a delivery model, in the sense that it's very simple and straightforward and fast to deliver, and then an operations model which makes sure that everything above it works well. >> Yes, and the consumers, in this case, are developers, IT operations people, and DevApp teams, and from a delivery perspective, it is automated or people-work-flow, so you support both, so bringing this federated model together is a very complex undertaking, and IBM services is the strategic partner clients are asking to take them on this journey. Hey, bring this together for us. It's very complex at all layers. It's not a simple thing, and in that bringing it together, partners have a big role to play. Azure, Amazon, Google, Service Now, VMWare, Cisco, they all have critical pieces of it that make this model work, and clients have made choices. Clients already have VMWare. Clients already have Service Now Clients already have Amazon, Azure. But there is no system that brings it together and manages it on an ongoing basis, and the important thing is, the clouds keep changing very fast, and keeping up with the clouds, leveraging the power of the clouds to the right teams within the enterprise to deliver new digital apps, to delivery revenue, is what IBM is enabling our clients to do. >> So wikibot has actually done a fair amount of research around what we call the cloud operating model, we call the Digital Business Platform. AWS has an example of that, as you mention. They all have their approaches to handle those four things that you mentioned. >> Mohammad: Yes! >> But when you get to a customer, who also has to marry across these clouds, sustain some on-premises assets, perhaps some near-premises assets within the cost-service provider, it's what you're trying to do is ensure that they have their operating model that is the appropriate mix of all these different capabilities for their business, we got that right? >> Exactly, you got it. So what we said was every cloud provider, internal or external, or even hosting cloud providers, IBM is a hosting cloud provider. >> Right! >> With the adjustment of business. They had their own model across those four things: Business, consumption, delivery, operations. Now, we cannot operate four silos. Every enterprise is using Amazon, every enterprise has Google, every enterprise has VMWare, every enterprise has IBM. We cannot have four models. >> Dave: Right! >> So what we have done is we have created one standard consistent target operating model. We have integrated all these offerings within that so clients don't have to do it. We offer services to create extensions to it based on variations clients might have, and then operate it as a service for them, so that their path to cloud gets accelerated, and they start leveraging the power of what's good today inside the data centers, and what's available outside in public clouds, in a very secure way. So that is the business IBM is in moving forward, which we are calling it, we are transforming our offerings portfolio, we are calling it: Hybrid Cloud Services Business >> OK so you've got this hybrid operating model, IT operating model that you're envisioning, you're letting the cloud partners do what they do best, >> Mohammad: Right. >> Including your IBM cloud partners, >> Mohammad: Including our operating partners, >> And then you guys are bringing it all together in a framework, in an operating model, That actually can drive business value. >> Exactly, that's what we're doing. We are giving them ease of access from one place, choice of delivery platform, choice of delivery models from one place. Single visibility into how they're running, performing, help, and diagnostics from one place, and then, one billing and payment model, not four. So when I pay monthly bills, I pay based on usage, qualification of that usage across everybody, and then reconciling with my ERP systems, and making the payments. So the CFO has a standard way to manage payments. So that's what IBM is bringing to the table. >> How far could you take this? Could you take this into my SAS portfolio as well, Or is that sort of next step? >> What right now we are doing InfoSecure as a service and platform as a service. Our goal is in '18 and '19 to move to software as a service, because software as a service is much easier because we don't own the infrastructure or the service, we just consume it as electricity, utility. So that we discover the usage of SAS and meter it for usage against our billing model that we have to as B2B contract between a SAS provider and an enterprise and then make sure we've done the license management right. So there's companies like Flexera and others who do that For SAS management there's companies like Skyhigh Networks that recently got acquired, we're bringing those companies in to give us that component. >> But doing that level of brokering amongst the different services, while very useful, valuable, especially if you can provide greater visibility in the cost, because this becomes an increasing feature of COGs in a digital business, right? You still got to do a lot about the people stuff. A lot of folks are focused on ITIL, ITSM, automation at that level. Describe how you'll work with an IT organization and a business to evolve its underlying principals for how the operating model is going to work. >> I think that's probably a more difficult challenge than the technology itself, and if you look at our business, it was a people, it is a people business with GTS. We're more than 90,000 to 100,000 employees babysitting infrastructure for major fortune 500 corporations, and InfoSecure is more into software-defined, that means that we are moving from configuration skills to programming skills, where your programming API is in Amazon to provision infrastructure and deploy, so the skillsets have to definitely move. They have to move to infrastructure teams now have to become programming teams, which they have not been used to. They used to go to VMWare, vSphere, vCenter and configure VMs and deploy VMs. Now they have the right programs to drive and provision infrastructure, so that's one part of it. Second, the process was you do development and then your throw it over to operations, and they'll go configure and deploy production. Now, when you're programming infrastructure. Second, you're doing it in collaboration with developers, because developers are defining their own infrastructure in the cloud. So the process is different. The skills are different, and the process you are to operate in is not the same, it's different. Third, the technologies are different that you work with. So there is change at all levels and what GTS has done is we have put a massive goal in place to re-scale our workforce to take our people and re-scale them in the new process, the new technology and the new roles and that's a very big challenge I think the industry is facing: we don't have enough people who know this. A lot of these people are in Netflix, Facebook, Google, in Silicon Valley, and now, it takes time, it has happened before. The training and the transfer of knowledge, all of that is going on right now. So right now we have a crunch, And the second thing that is becoming more difficult is there's a lot of data coming out of these systems. The volume of data is unbelievable. Like if you look at Splunk and other tools and platforms, they collect a lot of log data. So all these cloud platforms spit out a lot of machine data. Humans cannot comprehend that. It's incomprehensible. So we need machine learning skills and data science skills to understand how these systems are performing. >> Peter: And tools. >> And tools. So we need the AI skills, the data science skills, in addition to the infrastructure design architecture and programming skills. So we really have a challenge on our hands as an industry to kind of effectively build the next-gen management systems. >> Right and we've got, so we've got all these clouds, the ascendancy of clouds has brought cloud creep, >> Mohammad: Right. >> All these bespoke tools along with them, all these different operating models. You're clearly solving a problem there. What's the go-to-market model with all these partners that you've mentioned? You've got cloud, you got PRAM, eventually SAS, >> Yeah, so our cloud go-to-market is three ways We see clients adopting cloud in three ways. One is digital initiatives: They want to go build new IOD apps or mobile apps and they want to put it in production that drive revenue, okay? So we are creating offerings around the DevApps model. We'll say like look, the biggest challenge that our folks have is how to put a app that you build in production. I built a new feature, how can I get it to my client as soon as possible, in a secure way, that can scale and perform, that is the biggest problem with app developers. I can develop anywhere, it's all open-source. I'm not living in, and I can spin up a VM or a container in Amazon and develop a service in two days. But to put it in production, it takes a long time. How can we make offerings that accelerate that? Through our DevApp CICD automation process I was talking about, that's our revenue play. So our go-to-market is driven by how we can generate revenue for our clients through agile offerings for DevApps, that's one go-to-market. Second go-to-market is CIOs are saying like look, I'm spending a lot of money managing my current infrasatructure and my current app portfolio, and I can take money out of the system through cost reductions, so what is my migration and modernization path for my existing portfolio? >> Well, slightly differently, I used to get I used to get my eight to nine percent that I gave back to the business every year simply by following hardware price performance. >> Mohammad: That's exactly right. >> That's not available in the same way. I have to do it through process and automation. >> All automation right? So then we have to look at everything. What part of the portfolio can move to Amazon or cannot? What other refactoring I have to do to microservices and containers to build portability to move to the cloud? So we have created a migration, a global migration practice at IBM in a factory in India and in the US where we have created offerings to work with the CIO right from planning, cost planning, portfolio planning, application design planning and design review, to lift-and-shift, to deploy in cloud and operate it. So we have a series of offerings that track the life-cycle of migration. So that's our second go-to-market path. Our third go-to-market path is: Hey, my business per units are shadow IT; they're already in the cloud, now my CEO is telling me: Hey mister CIO, you make sure they all work and they're secure, and there's no loss in data. And this infrastructure is now in cloud and on-prem. So how do I provide, manage service, to manage your infrastructure and workloads in the cloud? IBM has offerings that will directly provide you multi-cloud management as managed service. So we are taking three client journeys and we are building go-to-market offerings around those three, and we have built, we have re-designed IBM portfolio to operate on those lines. >> Do the digital initiatives, chief digital officer, obviously, target their CIO for the portfolio rationalization optimization and line of business through the shadow IT? >> Right! >> And you bring those together with a constant consistent operating model? >> Exactly, so all three journeys lead to one operating model. >> Dave: Yeah! >> But going back to what Dave said, and we have time for just a little bit more, is, is, no offense, there's no way you can do it all by yourself. >> Mohammad: You cannot. >> So what are some of the core, what are some of the most important partnerships that users need to be looking to? >> I think we have defined what's goal to us. Not always go back to, if you are clearly going to market, what is the core competency of IBM? Okay, with (mumbles) we're going to service this company for a long time, right? We made sure we are, we bring the complexity and control and we manage the complexity; that's our core business. We had mainframe business, we had software business, and a very profitable software business. So we've done all three, hardware, software, and services. As we go forward, cloud services, cloud managed services, our IBM services, is a core competency for us, which is planning, design, managed services, and services integration, to bring these tool sets together from different partners, and operationalizing it, and babysitting it and offering it as a service. So services business is our core offering. Now in the software space, which is the management software, which is service now, (mumbles) Cisco, there there is many layers to it, as I talked about the four things: consumption, operations management, business management, >> And service delivery >> And service delivery. And in service delivery we have three choices: we have VMWare, we have Microsoft and we have IBM. We have stitched it together in a federated framework. The stitching together is our core competence. Okay, Operations management. We have created a federated data lake because data will drive everything going forward. So we own the data lake as our core competency and Watson driving intelligence. But some of the monitoring tools like AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk, that collect the data, those are our partners. We're integrating that into our Watson framework. So we're looking at core versus non-core in all four layers, and wherever there's a overlap, we're creating unique vertical go-to-market strategies. Here, for this segment, we overlap with you, we agree to compete, to your clients you can lead with that, for our clients we'll lead with ours, so we agree to disagree, but we are going to stick to the target operating model, so that our clients are successful. So there's no confusion we are creating in their minds. So its a very complex dance at this point. >> But you laid it out and it's coherent. >> Right. >> It's got to start there. >> The most important thing is we need to tell our clients what is our core, and what is the core we're going to stand behind? And that core delivers them bottom-line value to move from point A to point B and be successful in the cloud. >> Well Mohammad, I think you've defined those swim lanes, you obviously trust and you've got the trust of your partners, trust of your customers. Like you say, you agree to compete where it makes sense, and you bring core competency and value to differentiate from your competition, so, >> Right. >> Dave: Congratulations on laying that out. We really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Think 2018, we'll be right back. >> Mohammad: Thank you very much. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco it's the CUBE. Covering Informatica World 2017. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017 exclusive coverage from the CUBE. Third year covering the transformation of Informatica as a company. I'm John Furrier, Silicon Angle. My co-host this week is Peter Burris, General Manager of Wikibon.com and Head of Research for Silicon Angle Media. Our next guest is eight time CUBE alumni, Amit Walia Executive Vice President of Products at Informatica. Amit, great to see you. >> Good to be here. >> Thanks for spending the time to come on. Saw you had a nice dinner last night with all your top customers. Very happy customers. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Yes, thank you. We keep them happy. Eleventh year in a row we got number one in customer loyalty. We work hard for that. >> There's a lot of exciting things happening. I just want to jump into some of the products though because that's your wheelhouse. You guys have been an amazing product company. I've always been kind of bullish on you guys, very complimentary. The one thing that, when we've talked on FaceBook and also on the CUBE is that not everyone knows about Informatica. They know about the old Informatica. We had Jerry Held on yesterday talking about the transformation, how hybrid cloud's here to stay. You guys have made great strides on the product front, the platform front, decentralizing data with control. Now you got the new brand. What's going on, give us the update. You got to be pretty pumped now, you got a megaphone out there with the new CMO. >> Yeah, lots happening at that end. I'll go back and paint a picture about how we see where the industry is and then how we are basically transforming that. My fundamental belief is that we're going through this massive transformation. Pick any word, but underlying at the technology level, the systems of records, all the databases and all the apps are massively fragmenting. Cloud, on-premise, hundreds and hundreds of choices. Systems of engagement for customers are fragmenting, right. When I talk to customers, they're struggling to figure out what is the system of intelligence. What's the organizing principle? Take a great example, my customer data and what I know about you John, is available inside the system, within multiple databases, multiple apps, outside the systems, what you do on LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter, how do I get a handle of you to be able to effectively engage with you? That is a fundamental change that is happening in the industry is what is my organizing principle to have the system of intelligence? We've honed in at the metadata layer for that. We believe leave the data wherever it is because it's going to be in different places. Use your best of breed apps. Organize the metadata because the scale and scope of that, while small, power of that is very high. Yesterday in my keynote, I announced the launch of Claire, our AIML offering. The idea is that we are going to be the Google of the enterprise to bring the entire metadata together. When we apply machine learning to it, it's the same algorithms that LinkedIn applies, or FaceBook applies for photo tagging or relationships, or Amazon applies for recommendations. We're going to apply it for data and make that then be what I call organizing principle, the system of intelligence for an enterprise. That's the nutshell of what we're trying to do. >> Also this Jada 3.0 thing, I want to press you on this because this is really cool. You guys have increased the surface area of addressibility of data and we talked about that last year, making it horizontally scalable yet with all the goodness of the controls as we talked about in the past. Now you're bringing in access methods via machine learning and AI techniques to make it accessible. Think Alexa, right. People at home, "Hey give me a song." How are you guys using the algorithms because now algorithms have become a super important part of what to look at. FaceBook, you mentioned FaceBook and Google, they've been criticized for their algorithms suppressing quality data. News cycle, things pop up once they see some traction. How do you guys tweak and enable algorithms to surface the best data possible? >> The best way to describe is that our philosophy is different. Claire, our AI engine, our goal is to make sure we can surface all of the data to the customer, but in an organized fashion. We're not looking to say, filter something. The best example is that predictive maintenance. If I am BMW and I'm running a robotic driven shop floor, how do I know when something's about to go down? I have a lot of old, historical data on my shop floor, but real time streaming data's coming from the sensor of the robot. I want to marry the two together and then let the system tell me, boy I feel like in the next 30 minutes, something is about to happen. We are doing those kind of things, solving those problems so we're not looking to filter or suppress anything. Our goal is to make sure we can bring more and more and more data together and with the help of machine learning, Claire, make it easy for customers to make decisions. Intelligent decisions, smart decisions, easier versus hundreds of people having to guess or predict which ends up not being very smart. >> On the road map side, I want you to take a minute to explain it. It's a good laying out the value proposition there, but I want to tie the cloud together with this because Jerry Held said yesterday, hybrid cloud's going to be a very long journey because legacy doesn't go away. You guys have a great business on-prem that's been historical for you guys. As you guys have modernized, what is the connection on a product basis that's available today and that's being worked on on a road map basis that says, you can do all this stuff with the data, but it's going to be cloud enabled. How do you get that cloud, hybrid cloud connection so the customer doesn't feel pain in moving to the cloud? >> First of all, I can boldly say that we were probably the only software company in the industry that disrupted our own industry to go to the cloud. By the way, data integration which is our core model, 11 years ago we invested in the cloud. We didn't know where it will go and we announced that Informatica 11 years ago and today 11 years later, we are the number one market share leader in cloud integration, number one in Gartner Magic Quadrant, and our cloud platform today is transacting a trillion transactions a month. In some ways, we were disrupting ourselves as you speak. >> Yeah, I mean the Gartner thing, I always say this cause those are old metrics, but the new metric is customer traction. You guys were in the announcement with Google Spanner as they globally GA their spanner distributed database which is a horizontally scalable database. You have a relationship with Amazon, you're in Microsoft. What is the customer uptake and what are some use cases? Give us some specifics. >> Three specific use cases. The customer started a journey in cloud more connecting cloud applications. On SalesForce, connected with World Gate, connected to SAP, so on and so forth. Simple application integration, all API management. Where data gravity is moving to cloud, where fundamental workloads are going and we see more and more traction is taking analytics to the cloud. I'm moving my workload to Redshift or I'm moving to an Azure data warehouse. That's where, by the way between January and May, we have moved half a trillion data objects to cloud data warehouses. Half a trillion. Clearly in that context we work with AWS. Three years ago, we started with them. Azure -- >> Just to put an exclamation point on that, in January it was a billion so between January and now, it's up to a trillion. Huge. That's a hockey stick. >> Kale is a hockey stick over there because so much more is being created outside the enterprise and customers don't want to bring it on-premise. They say look I just want to put it in Redshift or Azure database and I want to process there and over time, what they want, more to your point is connect me to my on-premise data warehouse too. Let's say I've done some analytics here, connect the relevant analytics and move it to, let's say my on-premise data warehouse and over a period of time as I get comfortable with this hybrid, I may take this workload and 100% flip over to the cloud too. They want this bi-directional journey. That's what's really enabling customers. >> It's always kind of hard to cobble together things that customers language that they're used to speaking in, to new concepts. It seems to me that data integration is your business of business. >> That's the foundation. We discovered data integration is the foundational layer and everything else we do is what I call more value added data management capabilities. Like MDM. Data integration allows you to connect, bring data together, MDM is a value added data management solution to say now I can get a 360 degree view of my customer like Nordstrom is using us for. Or a 360 degree view of my products, or a 360 degree view of my suppliers to make more business decisions. >> John: So integration is table stakes from your standpoint? Foundational. >> It's foundational. >> John: Foundational. Okay, better word. >> In that context, we operate like the Switzerland in the world of data. Whether it's Amazon, Google, Azure, tomorrow Oracle, SAP, we connect to the whole world. >> Amit, you have a vision of where this is all going to go. It's one thing to say, we've got our product set and we're moving it to a new technology base, which is good. That'll improve productivity. This whole concept of data management is bigger than just moving existing tooling, existing practices to a new set of platforms, no matter how much more productivity you might get out of those new platforms. It means something more. It means the way your business operates differently, business thinks differently, it means different ways of institutionalizing work. Give us the vision that you're laying out to your product team about how, yes we're re-platforming, we're introducing these new development technologies and all these other things, but here's where we're going. Here's the role we want to have in business. What is the role that Informatica wants to have in business? >> Our vision is to be what I call the system of intelligence for our customers because the organizing layer for that is data. When we say data management, data management's a very broad word you could argue. Our goal is that we want to organize the enterprises data. The vision that Google has for the internet, organize the customer's data whether it's inside their four walls or outside, in the context of the business processes. I'll translate that for you in two ways. We used to optimize for the IT technical user. A couple of years ago we made a big pivot to put an AND to it. We are also optimizing it for the business user because data now is such a powerful asset that business users want direct access to it. One of the things you would see from us in the last three or four years is we have been putting out a lot of out of the box data solutions. Intelligent Data Lake is a great example of that. We are giving IT full control of it, but we have a bi-modal experience where a business user can self service analytics. I just want to walk in as a marketing analyst and understand what was my lead to revenue conversion. I don't care about all the underlying infrastructure. I don't (mumble), but I just want to do my job. IT also wants to make sure as business users are accessing it, there's governance, security, compliance issues. We're marrying the two together. That's a very high bar for ourselves. >> Let me see if I can follow up on that because I want to make sure that at least I understand it. When you say you want to be the Google for enterprises data, there's actually a couple subtle things in there. First off, number one is that Google is looking at mainly public data and you want to look at public and an enterprises private data. As you said, that requires a whole level of functionality >> Amit: Totally right. >> That Google doesn't worry about like privacy, like ownership, like management and control. Secondly, increasingly the enterprise concept, especially when it comes to data is being able to get access to any data, anywhere. It's not organize the internet. It's not organize the enterprises data, it's organize all data for that enterprise. >> For the enterprise. >> Is that right? >> Exactly. We don't own the data. The enterprise owns the data. Big difference for us. >> The enterprise is also going to go out to all those sources that Google's looking at - >> Two big differences, the data within the enterprise and outside the enterprise for the enterprise, and we don't own the data, we want to bring it together for the enterprise to consume and operate and execute a lot more easy and efficiently. >> We're not talking about just small corners of data. >> No, not at all. >> We're talking about the enterprise, all data that's possible -- >> We are going outside the world, we're looking at unstructured data because, for example when you are, let's say on Twitter. Today we're going to be Tweeting, that's unstructured data, but it's about you and me. Today if Nordstrom wants to figure out something, what John likes, what John thinks, they want that, they want to. We are bringing that together within the MDM to say, oh you know what John bought for you, here's what John is saying on FaceBook or here's what John's saying on Twitter. Marry the two together and you understand John a whole lot better. That's what we want to do. >> And make it addressable and make it available to not only databases and systems, but developers. >> Amit: Oh absolutely! >> When I asked the question about data management, kind of the vision of data management, in many respects, it's the enterprises access to data that's relevant to it, number one. The ability from a metadata standpoint to know where it is and have the properties of ownership and privacy and rights and privileges and identities, and number two, the ability to move it around according to, as you noted, the integration laws that the -- >> That's exactly right. Because we've been operating for the enterprise for the last 25 years, we understand what they need. What regulations, what security concerns, what governance and compliance issues. If I had to summarize that context, look, we want to organize the enterprises data whether it's inside the four walls or outside for them, at their level of scale and security and governance and then with the help of Claire, democratize that for any user to truly use it. >> Democratization's a big angle and I want to ask you that because as much as you see the future, and I think you do, we've been talking to you many times here in they keynotes, customers aren't in the future. You've got to kind of come to earth and get to reality so I've got to ask you the question for customers, because they're trying to just deal, I'm trying to move to the cloud, I've got some VM Ware, I've got Amazon over here, I've got Azure, I haven't really baked out my full how I'm going to integrate cloud in my business model, what are some of the use cases that you guys are engaging customers with? You have good vision, products are solid. When you go out to the field, talk to customers, what are the use cases? What are you engaging them on? >> The journey to cloud is a big use case. In the journey to cloud, as I said there are two specific journeys customers are on. One is I'm deploying these thousands and thousands or hundreds and hundreds of enterprise SaaS apps. Help me weave them together in the context of data integration or MDM. Second is, the whole data gravity going to cloud. We talked about data warehousing analytics. Second is all of that. Move my data warehousing, but give me the flexibility in the hybrid. As I said, right, I want to bring outside data within Redshift, but connect it to my. Those are our two biggest use cases we see. Third we see that rides on both of them is self-service analytics. If I'm able to do both of these, then I'm much more easily able to do self-service analytics. Those three are the ones -- >> John: Are primary use cases right now? >> Those are the three prime use cases. Second one, on the other hand we see governance and compliance come up very big. Clearly customers are realizing that all of this re-architecture that's happening, you still need the same governance and compliance. If I am a large bank, if I'm a large insurance company, the laws didn't change for me. Cloud may have come, Hadoop may have come, the laws still stay the same so governance and compliance is a huge one for us. Look at GDPR. There is a deadline in May 2018 and customers are unprepared for that. That's the number two, I see governance a lot I see. >> In Europe it's even worse. You could get a top line, is that the top line, four percent of you -- >> Amit: Customers don't realize if you're a US company, even if you transact with one, single European entity, you are now -- >> The liability's there so let's just go to the root cause of what causes that liability potential, that's security. Quickly, security obviously's on the mind of you guys. You have an interesting security product. You guys are digging in the product, what's the product vision on security? >> That's the last one I was going to say. Four years ago, we saw that coming that security is an unsolved problem at the data layer and that's where the world is going to organize itself. We invested, and we have to invest ahead of the curve. We launched the product Secure@Source. Today, it's basically the industry's number one product. 11 awards at Odyssey. Raymond James is a customer, deployed within their four walls. Seven thousand databases go through Secure@Source to give them a full view of my sensitive data, who's accessing it, all of those risks that are now coming to the data layer. As data gets democratized, the security issues become bigger and broader. >> Final question for you. I want you to take a minute to end the segment because I want to give you the chance to say that because you know I'm a big fan of product work. Watching you guys go private and seeing the transition with the new management team, the product guys came in. I've said this on the CUBE many times, you've got the brand marketing going on now, new CMO, things going to be pumping out there. What is special about Informatica right now from a product standpoint? What makes you guys unique? You guys have done some good things, products coming down the pike. What are the guiding principles for you as the leader of the product team to continue to stay on that wave and innovate and make these products valuable to customers? >> I think the biggest change I would say is that we are innovating at the space of a start up. But we have the skill and breadth in the world of data management that is unparalleled to anyone. In this space, whether it's the traditional architecture, big data architecture, real-time streaming architecture or a cloud architecture or it's MDM and security and governance, nobody can do it at scale as us. By the way, we firmly believe in the best of breed concept. All of those capabilities are best of breed within their own market. Our belief is that look, we can solve a customers transition a lot more seamlessly and a lot more risk-free, and a lot more in the future proof way. Of course, we are modeling ourselves to move at the pace of a startup. I call ourselves the hottest pre-IPO -- >> John: I was just going to ask the revenue question. >> A billion dollar in revenue company, not billion dollar market cap company. >> John: You're doing over a billion in revenue? >> Doing over a billion in revenue. >> I'm going to add one more thing to that Amit. I'm not even going to test it. We are especially impressed that you have made very, very bold promises the past few years and you've executed on them. You're one of the few companies in this space in the whole data management, this emerging data management next generation world that has executed on the promises that it's made. Your promises make sense and all the things that you said are excellent. The promises make sense, but your execution makes is safe for customers. >> Well we had some critical analysis yesterday so we're not going to just all fawn all over you guys, there's some things to work on. The big bets are paying out. You guys made some great bets. The cloud bet was key. Congratulations. Amit, great to see you. Coming on the CUBE, thanks for spending the time. You got a keynote coming up this afternoon. Real quick, what's going to be the topic? >> Well I'm going to talk about how Claire will be able to solve a lot of future-looking problems. Today's keynote is all about the futures and what the vision of the future is. I'm going to showcase a few examples of what machine learning and AI can do to increase productivity and help ease the pain of our users and customers. >> Get that data integrated, democratize it and create freedom for data to fly around and get those apps addressing it. This is the CUBE, bringing you all the data here inside the CUBE, but soon we'll have an AI bot doing all the interviews in the future sometime. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. We'll do them today. Informatica day two exclusive coverage from the CUBE. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Stay with us.

(electronic dance music) >> Host: Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Covering Oracle OpenWorld 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld 2016. This is theCUBE. SiliconANGLE Media's flaghship program. We got out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier the co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media with Peter Burris, my co-host, who's the head of research for SiliconANGLE Media as well as the general manager of Wikibon Research. Our next guest is Dave Donatelli, Executive Vice President of Cloud and Converged Systems and Infrastructure at Oracle. Cube alumni always coming on. Great to see you. Thanks for spending really valuable time to come and share your insights with us. >> Great to see you guys again. It's always a pleasure. >> So you did the keynote today, obviously the forces in the industry around Cloud, Oracle's got the whole story now. They got the IaaS V2, they're calling it. And now you have up and down the stack PasS and Saas, and under the covers, under the hood is the power hardware. >> Dave: Of the infrastructure, yeah. >> Very disruptive and we chatted and we wrote a story at SiliconANGLE, also on Forbes, about the destruction of the existing incumbents. So with that in mind, how did the keynote go from your perspective? What was your key themes and how does that relate to some of the disruption in the landscape of the industry? >> Okay, well, as a self-writer, I'd say the keynote went very well, but what I really talked about was Oracle offers people three deployment models. And I gave 'em kind of five journey to take to the Cloud. The three models are public Cloud, broad-based public Cloud. Second thing is traditional enterprise, which business we've been in for so long. And then a new category is what we call Cloud a customer. Taking our public Cloud and making that available to customers. And then the second thing I did in the keynote is talk about five journeys people could take to our public Cloud and it's everything from optimizing what they currently have in their legacy environment, to running hybrid Cloud, to running this Cloud a customer, to running private Cloud, and the fifth one is just, end what you're doing in the current way and move all public Cloud. So in the five journeys, just to drill down on that. It's five different paths the customer could take. >> Dave: Correct, all from a customer's perspective. >> From their current position to a Cloud endgame, if you will. >> Dave: Yes. >> And which one you think is the most dominant right now in terms of your view because obviously we'll go though those, but of the ones, beyond on-prem, which ones has the most relevance today in terms of customers that you hear from. Why I'd say two things, what I see and what I've seen the last year is the acceleration of movement to the public Cloud in literally since the start of the year has been massive. And what's really changed about a lot of it's coming top down. So you see CEOs, board of directors, CFOs saying we're going to go to the Cloud, even some companies are giving their IT departments specific requirements. You'll have 40% of our applications in the Cloud by 2000. So big acceleration there and in saying that what most customers are doing is something in the middle. They have their legacy that they've always been running. we look at it app by app by app. What's the most likely to transform to the Cloud? Which ones are probably just going to go away? Which one should we just redesigned and build net new in the Cloud. And so that means to me that hybrid is really, you know, the one that we see most often. People are running on-premise, they're running in the Cloud. They'll have a mix for some time until the on-premise continues to go away. >> What's the concept we heard from Chuck Hollis yesterday around this notion of Cloud quotas. He's seeing customers being kind of mandated to get to the Cloud, almost like a quota. Hey, where are you with your with your Cloud migration? So there's pressure certainly coming in but you introduced Cloud insurance. Is that not actually insurance, but as a concept, just explain what you meant by that. >> Sure. So what we mean by that is this, is that, as I, as we just talked about most enterprises, if you look at most of data out there says only 5% of applications have moved to the Cloud, so far. So that means a lot are still running in their data centers. But now you're going to go to your boss and you're going to say, "Hey you know I need to buy some new infrastructure.". And if you're a regular company, that's going to take three to five years to depreciate. So you go to your boss and say, "Hey, give me $10 million, I got this great idea. I'm going to put this new infrastructure in.". Well, what if two years from now your boss comes in and says, "Guess what? We now we need to move to the public Cloud.". With traditional infrastructure or with infrastructure designed by companies who don't have a public Cloud, you now have a boat anchor, right? I run big businesses myself and the last thing you want is equipment on your books depreciating that has no technical value. What we mean by Cloud insurance, is that everything we sell customers on-premise also has a public Cloud equivalency. Think of Exadata. You can use Exadata on-premise. We have an Exadata Cloud service you can subscribe to in the Cloud. So if you buy an Exadata on-premise today and they say we want to start moving to Cloud. You can say, "Great, I'll do things like test EV in the Cloud with my equivalent Exadata service.". They're fully compatible. It's got the same management. It's one push button to move data from on-premise to the public Cloud. No one else can do that. >> Peter: So you're really selling them a Cloud option. Whatever you buy you are also buying a Cloud option. >> What I say is I'm giving them assurance and insurance. The assurance is you're buying something today that you know will have a useful life going forward in the go forward architecture. >> Peter: And if you want to exercise hat option today, you can do so, if you want exercising three years you can do so. >> Exactly. >> No financial penalty to you. >> Exactly. And what most competitors are saying is hey, by the way you always did it and guess what? You don't have that option. >> Peter: It's your asset. So one of the things, I love the idea of the five paths, but paths are going to be influenced by workloads. So as you think about the characteristics of workloads, not big companies, small company, regional, those are always going to be important. Sophistication, maturity of the shop. But, as you think about workloads, going back to John's question, what types of workloads do you see coming in first? So for example, we're seeing a lot of on-premise, big data happening, but not as fast as it might because of complexity. We're starting to see more of that move into options that are more simply packaged, easier to use like in the Cloud. What kind of workloads do you think are going to pull customers forward first? >> Dave: Sure. Well, first remember we play in Saas, PasS, and infrastructure. And what we've seen if you look at our financials, is huge growth in SaaS and that's where people are saying, I am taking, you know, with GE here, as an example, Ge is taking their ERP, big global company, they're putting that in the public Cloud. HSBC was here, same story, big financial institution. They're putting that in the Cloud first. And the reason why they're doing it, is they think it gives you more flexibility, makes them more efficient, saves them money. Then, which really changed, and what we've evolved to, is with our new infrastructure Cloud now we can do anything. This is to your question. Anything that runs on an x86 server or spark based server, whether it's an Oracle application or not, you can either migrate it and run it in our Cloud. You can, you know, reimagine it using using our PaaS to redesign it, move it to the Cloud, it's everything. And we're seeing increasing rates of people walking through by app by app in their environment and doing just what we've said. What stays, what moves, what do we transform in the process? >> You seen a lot of the the movie at EMC, certainly your history, your career at EMC and then HP. Lot of industry had changed while you're, you know, in those shops, now here at Oracle. So I got to ask you now with the Oracle advantage and you guys are pushing from the silicon to the app, however, I forget how they word it, but it's silicon to the app, the end-to-end kind of thing. What's different from a design standpoint, from a technical, as the product development teams build it, what's the unique thing that's changed? And how's that render itself to impacting the customer? >> Dave: Okay, that's a great question. So let me give you the customer benefit first and I'll tell you why it occurs. what I said today from stage is that to run our, I'll use an examples of our software. To run our software there's no better place on earth than our infrastructure, and compared to their most likely alternative which is their self build, them buying an x86 server, them buying their own networking, them buying storage. We give people better performance, better end-user experience, easier to manage and most importantly it costs them less money. >> John: So knocking down Oracle on Oracle, boom. That's a baseline. >> Less cost versus you going to buy a server online at Dell and trying to put it together yourself. >> I buy that. >> Dave: The way we do it, is the fact that we have insights which we have designed, all the way into our software as well as into our products. So depending which product you're talking about, for instance in Spark, we embedded a silicon itself. Accelerators for things like encryption, for deencryption, for the ability to compress, to decompress. All kinds of things that matter and speed. At the same time we make a lot of changes to our software itself to make that run better with our Hardware. It's RIP. It takes a lot of engineering to do that, but simply put if you don't have the software stack, you know if you're someone who just builds hardware, you can't see the software, you can't make those changes. >> John: Well, you have the advantage. Obviously, you have have software that Oracle writes, you have systems that are engineered for Oracle software. Clear advantage, so you're saying unequivocally-- >> Dave: From a technical-- >> You blow everyone away. >> Dave: From a pure technical perspective, it is an unfair fight. We will win every time. >> John: Okay, so i buy that, so that, you win those rounds. Curveball is multi-vendor. Now we're into a multi-vendor because a lot of people have that technical debt now on the books, if you will, I don't know if that's the right term, technical debt, but they have legacy. It might be Dell EMC, it might be HP and other stuff. How do how do those shops deal with this Oracle infrastructure Cloud and non Oracle software. >> Okay, so two ways. So if you look at an on-premise, we make products that run both Oracle software, engineered systems to run both Oracle software, non Oracle software in the same machine. So you get all the accrued benefits we talked about but you can also host your applications that might not necessarily be Oracle, with us. In the Cloud itself, i think you heard, you know I thought Larry gave an excellent presentation yesterday and very clearly walking through what we do that's different than alternatives. And as we said, >> John: He was very aggressive on Amazon. >> Dave: But I thought he was very, I thought he was very fair in how you did it, right. He walked through it just the facts. This is what they do, this is what we do, this is why it's technically different. He didn't just come out and say hey, we're better than amazon he gave specific reasons why. >> John: He did that and he did that, he did both. >> But if you look at it, so even just running a generic app, that's non-Oracle, on our infrastructure as a service, what we said very clearly is, we have an infrastructure by the way it is architected, that has less noise, meaning so you get less performance disruption, so it runs faster. It's built with the newer hardware and at the same time in doing so because of our architecture we can offer that to people at a lower price than they'd otherwise get. And again I think those are very straightforward, very well articulated points to show the value and you know that opens up the whole world to us. As you know the x86 market is almost a $40 billion market on-premise. What we're saying now at Oracle is, we can do a better job for you in the public Cloud running any of those workloads. >> That's right now. I think the other thing that came out, we've talked about it here, is that the stream of innovation that's going to unload itself on the industry over the next few years, someone still has to do the integration of all of these different piece parts. They're going to be improved upon and that integration cost is real, and so you can look at that from a CIOs perspective, they can look at and say do I want to put my time into the integration, do I want to put my time into the application that's going to have a differential effect on my business. So you guys seem to be coming pretty strongly on we've got the baseline we need to do the, we've got the stuff that we need to bring the innovation in an integrated way into our packaging. >> Dave: That's correct and I think very well said. I believe we are the easiest company to work with, in bringing people from, in essence, their old architecture to the new. And that is because we've already done that integration work. We offer those architectures on both sides of the equation, current on-premise into the public Cloud and give you one management software structure to manage both. Anybody else is only going to work with you on one extreme or another. It's either, hey only do Cloud or only do on-prem. How you work with the other one, you as a customer stuck with that burden to figure out. Dave, I know you got to go to another meeting, but I want to get the final question to you to elaborate on. What you're most proud of now in your tenure at Oracle. Some things that have worked for you in the organization product-wise, successes you've had. You want to highlight a few? And what's your priorities going forward? You're now running the Cloud group as well as Converged Infrastructure kind of coming together. What are you most proud of? what is, could be people not things, like ZDLRA, I know is doing really, Juan Loaiza was saying it's a smashing success and we're not hearing anything about that. We heard about it yesterday, but so what are you most proud of and then what's your priorities going forward? >> What I'm most proud of about being at Oracle is we're an organization investing for our customers' future. So we're spending $5.2 billion this year on R and D and it's all about bringing out these products that fit the future for our customers and protecting their investments along the way. I'm very proud to be part of a company, because as you know in these big transitions, companies don't make it. Think of Deck, right? They're a leader, didn't make it through to the new transition. And we're one of these companies that's leading the new transition even though we also participated in the prior architecture. I think from a product perspective, I would say ZDLRA is a great one you brought up. It stands for Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance. It is designed by our database engineers to fully backup and recover, as it says, with zero data loss, our database. And we've had a number of customers here, we had customers of the keynote today, very major enterprises at the keynote today was General Electric, who talked about how it enables them now to sleep. They don't get woken up at three in the morning. It gives some certainty in terms of how they recover. And most importantly, it saves them money. >> And you're in the hardware business, but you're not in the box business. You're actually have the software, it's again software enabled. Congratulations, I know you're attracting a lot of good talent as well. They did a great job and it's been fun to watch your success at Oracle and we're proud to cover you guys. We have some points we would disagree with you. If we had more time we can go into little detail, but thanks for spending the time and sharing on theCUBE. >> All right, a pleasure. Always great to see you guys. Live in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, we'll be back with more after this short break.