(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with a very special guest, Amit Walia CEO of Informatica. Newly appointed CEO, about a month ago, a little bit over a month ago. Head of product before that. Been with Informatica since 2013. Informatica went private in 2015, and has since been at the center of the digital transformation around data, data transformation, data privacy, data everything around data and value and AI. Amit, great to see you, and congratulations on the new CEO role at Informatica. >> Thank you. Always good to be back here, John. >> It's been great to follow you, and for the folks who don't know you, you've been a very product centric CEO. You're a product set CEO, as they call it. But also now you have a company in the middle of the transformation. CloudScale is really mainstream. Enterprise is looking to multicloud, hybrid cloud. This is something that you've been on for many, many years. We've talked about it. So now that you're in charge, you've got the ship, the wheel in your hands. Where are you taking it? What is the update of Informatica? Give us the update. >> Well, thank you. So look, business couldn't be better. I think to give you a little bit of color where we're coming from the last couple of years Informatica went through a huge amount of transformation. All things trying to transform a business model, pivoting to subscription, all things have really been into Cloud, the new workloads as we talked about and all things new like AI. To give a little bit of color, we basically exited last year with a a billion dollars of ARR, not just revenues. So we had a billion dollar ARR company and as we pivoted to subscription, our subscription business for the last couple of years has been growing North of 55%. So that's the scale at which we are running multimillion dollars and if you look at the other two metrics which we keep very clicked near and dear to heart, one is innovation. So we are participating in five Magic Quadrants and we are the leader in all five Magic Quadrants. Five on five as we like to call it Gartner Magic Quadrants, very critical to us because innovation in the tech is very important. Also customer loyalty, very important to us. So we again, we're the number one in customer sat from a TSI survey and Gartner publishes the vendor ratings. We basically have a very strong positioning in that. And lastly, our market share continues to grow. So last IDC survey, our market share continued to grow and with the number one in all our markets. So business couldn't be at a better place where we are right now. >> I want to get into some of the business discussion. We first on the Magic Quadrant front, it's very difficult for the folks that aren't in the Cloud as to understand that to participate in multiple Magic Quadrants, what many do is hard because Clouds horizontally scalable Magic Quadrants used to be old IT kind of categories but to be in multiple Magic Quadrants is the nature of the beast but to be a leader is very difficult because Magic Quarter doesn't truly capture that if you're just a pure play and then try to be Cloud. So you guys are truly that horizontal brand and technology. We've covered this on theCUBE so it's no secret, but I want to get your comments on to be a leader in today, in these quadrants, you have to be on all the right waves. You've got data warehouses are growing and changing, you got the rise of Snowflake. You guys partner with Databricks, again, machine learning and AI, changing very rapidly and there's a huge growth wave behind it as well as the existing enterprises who were transforming analytics and operational workloads. This is really, really challenging. Can you just share your thoughts on why is it so hard? What are some of the key things behind these trends? We've got analytics, I guess you can do if it's just Analytics and Cloud, great, but this is a, this horizontal data play Is not easy. Can you share why? >> No, so yes, first we are actually I would say a very hidden secret. We're the only software company and I'll say that again, the only software company that was the leader in the traditional workloads legacy on premise and via the leader and the Cloud workloads. Not a single software company can say that they were the leader of and they were started 27 years ago and they're still the leader in the Magic Quadrants today. Our Cloud by the way runs at 10 trillion transactions a month scale and obviously we partnered with all the hyperscalers across the board and our goal is to be the Switzerland of data for our customers. And the question you ask is is a critical one, when you think of the key business drivers, what are customers trying to do? One of them is all things Cloud, all things AI is obviously there but one is all data warehouses are going to Cloud, we just talked about that. Moving workloads to Cloud, whether it is analytical, operational, basically we are front and center helping customers do that. Second, a big trend in the world of digital transformation is helping our customers, customer experience and driving that, fueling that is a master data management business, so on and so products behind that, but driving customer experiences, big, big driver of our growth and the third one is no large enterprise can live without data governance, data privacy. Even this is a thing today. You going to make sure that you would deliver a good governance, whether it's compliance oriented or brand oriented, privacy and risk management. And all three of them basically span the business initiatives that featured into those five Magic Quadrants. Our goal is to play across all of them and that's what we do. >> Pat Gelsinger here said a quote on theCUBE, many years ago. He said, "If you're not on the right wave, your could be driftwood," meaning you're going to get crashed over. >> He said very well. >> A lot of people have, we've seen a lot of companies have a good scale and then get washed away, if you will, by a wave. You're seeing like AI and machine learning. We talked a little bit about that. You guys are in there and I want to get your thoughts on this one. Whenever this executive changes, there's always questions around what's happening with the company. So I want you to talk about the state of Informatica because you're now the CEO, there's been some changes. Has there been a pivot? Has there been a sharpening focus? What is going on with Informatica? >> So I think our goal right now is to scale and hyperscale, that's the word. I mean we are in a very strong position. In fact, we use this phrase internally within the company, the next phase of great. We're at a great place and we are chartering the next phase of great for the company. And the goal that is helping our customers, I talked about these three big, big initiatives that companies are investing in, data warehousing and analytics, going to the Cloud, transforming customer experiences and data governance and privacy. And the fourth one that underpins all of them is all things AI. I mean, as we've talked about it before, right? All of these things are complex, hard to do. Look at the volume and complexity of data and what we're investing in is what we call native AI. AI needs, data, data needs AI, as I always said, right? And we had investing in AI to make these things easy for our customers, to make sure that they can scale and grow into the future. And what we've also been very diligent about is partnering. We partnered very well with the hyperscalers, like whether it's AWS, Microsoft, whether it's GCP, Snowflake, great partner of ours, Databricks great partner of ours, Tablo, great partners of ours. We have a variety of these partners and our goal is always customer first. Customers are investing in these technologies. Our goal is to help customers adopt these technologies, not for the sake of technologies, but for the sake of transforming those three business initiatives I talked about. >> You brought up, I was going to ask you the next question about Snowflake and Databricks. Databricks has been on theCUBE, Ali, >> And here's a good friend of ours. And he's got chops, I mean Stanford, Berkeley, he'll kill me with that, he's a cowl at Stanford but Databricks is doing well. They made some good bets and it's paying off for them. Snowflake, a rising star, Frank Slootman's over there now, they are clearly a choice for modern data warehouses as is, inhibits Redshift. How are you working with Snowflake? How do you take advantage of that? Can you just unpack your relationship with Snowflake? >> It's a very deep partnership. Our goal is to help our customers as they pick these technology choices for data warehousing as an example where Snowflake comes into play to make sure that the underlying data infrastructure can work seamlessly for them. See, customers build this complex logic sitting in the old technologies. As they move to anything new, they want to make sure that their transition, migration is seamless, as seamless as it can be. And typically they'll start something new before they retire to something old. With us, they can carry all of that business logic for the last 27 years, their business logic seamlessly and run natively in this case, in the Cloud. So basically we allow them this whole from-to and also the ability to have the best of new technology in the context of data management to power up these new infrastructures where they are going. >> Let me ask you the question around the industry trends, what are the top trends, industry trends that are driving your business and your product direction and customer value? >> Look, digital transformation has been a big trend and digital transformation has fueled all things like customer experiences being transformed, so that remains a big vector of growth. I would say Clouded option is still relatively that an early innings. So now you love baseballs, so we can still say what second, third inning as much as we'd like to believe Cloud has been there. Customers more with that analytical workloads first, still happening. The operational workloads are still in its very, very infancy so that is still a big vector of growth and and a big trend to BC for the next five plus years. >> And you guys are in the middle of that because of data? >> Absolutely. Absolutely because if you're running a large operation workload, it's all about the data at the end of the day because you can change the app, but it's the data that you want to carry, the logic that you've written that you want to carry and we participate in that. >> I've asked you before what I want to ask you again because I want to get the modern update because PureCloud, born in the Cloud startups and whatever, it's easy to say that, do that, everyone knows that. Hybrid is clear now, everyone that sees it as an architectural thing. Multicloud is kind of a state of, I have multiple Clouds but being true multicloud a little bit different maybe downstream conversation but certainly relevant. So as Cloud evolves from public Cloud, hybrid and maybe multi or certainly multi, how do you see those things evolving for Informatica? >> Well, we believe in the word hybrid and I define hybrid exactly as these two things. One is hybrid is multicloud. You're going to have hybrid Clouds. Second is hybrid means you're going to have ground and Cloud inter-operate for a period of time. So to us, we in the center of this hybrid Cloud trail and our goal is to help customers go Cloud native but make sure that they can run whatever was the only business that they were running as much possible in the most seamless way before they can at some point contour. And which is why, as I said, I mean our Cloud native business, our Cloud platform, which we call Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, runs at scale globally across the globe by the way, on all hyperscalers at 10 plus trillion transactions a month. But yet we've allowed customers to run their on-prem technologies as much as they can because they cannot just rip the bandaid over there, right? So multicloud, ground Cloud, our goal is to help customers, large enterprise customers manage that complexity. Then AI plays a big role because these are all very complex environments and our investment in AI, our AI being called Clare is to help them manage that as in an as automated way, as seamless a way and to be honest, the most important with them is, in the most governed way because that's where the biggest risk or risks come into play. That's when our investments are. >> Let's talk about customers for a second. I want to get your thoughts on this 'cause at Amazon reinvent last year in December, there was a meme going around that we starred on theCUBE called, "If you take the T out of Cloud native, it's Cloud naive," and so the point was is to say, hey, doing Cloud native makes sense in certain cases, but if you'd not really thinking about the overall hybrid and the architecture of what's going on, you kind of could get into a naive situation. So I asked Andy this and I want to ask you any chance and I want to ask you the same question is that, what would be naive for a customer to think about Cloud, so they can be Cloud native or operated in a Cloud, what are some of the things they should avoid so they don't fall into that naive category? Now you've being, hi, I am doing Cloud for Cloud's sake. I mean, so there's kind of this perception of you got to do Cloud right, what's your view on Cloud native and how does people avoid the Cloud naive label? >> It's a good question. I think to me when I talk to customers and hundreds of them across the globe as I meet them in a year, is to really think of their Cloud as a reference architecture for at least the next five years, if not 10. I mean technology changes think of a reference architecture for the next five years. In that, you've got to think of multiple best of breed technologies that can help you. I mean, you've got to think of best of breed as much as possible. Now, you're not going to go have hundreds of different technologies running around because you've got to scale them. But think as much as possible that you are best of breed yet settled to what I call a few platforms as much as possible and then make sure that you basically have the right connection points across different workloads will be optimal for different, let's say Cloud environments, analytical workload and operational workload, financial workload, each one of them will have something that will work best in somewhere else, right? So to me, putting the business focus on what the right business outcome is and working your way back to what Cloud environments are best suited for that and building that reference architecture thoughtfully with a five year goal in mind then jumping to the next most exciting thing, hot thing and trying to experiment your way through it that will not scale would be the right way to go. >> It's not naive to be focusing on the business problems and operating it in a Cloud architecture is specifically what you're saying. Okay so let's talk about the customer journey around AI because this has become a big one. You guys been on the AI wave for many, many years, but now that it's become full mainstream enterprise, how are the applications, software guys looking at this because if I'm an enterprise and I want to go Cloud native, I have to make my apps work. Apps are driving everything these days and you guys play a big role. Data is more important than ever for applicants. What's your view on the app developer DevOps market? >> So to me the big chains that we see, in fact we're going to talk a lot about that in a couple of months when we are at Informatica World, our user conference in May is how data is moving to the next phase. And it's what developers today are doing is that they are building the apps with data in mind first, data first apps. I mean if you're building, let's say a great customer service app, you've got to first figure out what all data do you need to service that customer before you go build an app. So that is a very fundamental shift that has happened. And in that context what happens is that in a Cloud native environment, obviously you have a lot of flexibility to begin with that bring data over there and DevOps is getting complimented by what we see is data Ops, having all kinds of data available for you to make those decisions as you're building an application and in that discussion you and me are having before is that, there is so much data that you would not be able to understand that investing in metadata so you can understand data about the data. I call metadata as the intelligent data. If you're an intelligent enterprise, you've got to invest in metadata. Those are the places where we see developers going first and from there ground up building what we call apps that are more intelligent apps on the future not just business process apps. >> Cloud native versus Cloud naive discussion we were just having it's interesting, you talk about best of breed. I want to get your thoughts on some trends we're seeing you seeing even in cybersecurity with RSA coming up, there's been consolidation. You saw Dell just sold RSA to a private equity company. So you starting to see a lot of these shiny new toy type companies being consolidated in because there's too much for companies to deal with. You're seeing also skills gaps, but also skill shortages. There's not enough people. >> That is true. >> So now you have multiple Clouds, you got Amazon, you got Azure, you got Google GCP, you got Oracle, IBM, VMware, now you have a shortage problem. >> True. So this is putting pressure on the customers. So with that in mind, how are the customers reacting to this and what is best of breed really mean? >> So that is actually a really good one. Look, we all live in Silicon Valley, so we get excited about the latest technology and we have the best of skills here, even though we have a skills problem over here, right? Think about as you move up here from Silicon Valley and you start flying and I fly all over the world and you start seeing that if you're in the middle of nowhere, that is not a whole lot of developers who understand the latest cutting edge technology that happens here. Our goal has been to solve that problem for our customers. Look, our goal is to help the developers but as much as possible provide the customers the ability to have a handful of skilled developers but they can still take our offerings and we abstract away that complexity so that they are dealing only at a higher level. The underlying technology comes and goes and it'll come and go a hundred times. They don't have to worry about that. So our goal is abstract of the underlying changes in technology, focus at the business logically and you could move, you can basically run your business for over the course of 20 years. And that's what we've done for customers. Customers have invested with us, have run their businesses seamlessly for two decades, three decades while so much technology has changed over a period of time. >> And the Cloud is right here scaling up. So I want to get your thoughts on the different Clouds, I'll say Amazon Web Services number one in the Cloud, hyperscaler we're talking pure Cloud, they've got more announcements, more capabilities. Then you've got Azure again, hyperscale trying to catch up to Amazon. More enterprise-focused, they're doing very, very well in the enterprise. I said on Twitter, they're mopping up the enterprise because it's easy, they have an install base there. They've been leveraging it very well. So I think Nadella has done the team, has done a great job with that. You had Google try to specialize and figure out where they're going to fit, Oracle, IBM and everyone else. As you'd have to deal with this, you're kind of an arms dealer in a way with data. >> I would love to say I dance with it, not an arms dealer. >> Not an arms dealer, that's a bad analogy, but you get my point. You have to play well, you have to. It's not like an aspiration, your requirement is you have to play and operate with value in all the Clouds. One, how is that going and what are the different Clouds like? >> Well, look, I always begin with the philosophy that it's customer first. You go where the customers are going and customers choose different technologies for different use cases as deems fit for them. Our job is to make sure our customers are successful. So we begin with the customer in mind and we solve from there. Number two, that's a big market. There is plenty of room for everybody to play. Of course there is competition across the board, but plenty of room for everybody to play and our job is to make sure that we assist all of them to help at the end of the day, our joint customers, we have great success stories with all of them. Again, within mind, the end customer. So that has always been Informatica's philosophy, customer first and we partner with a critical strategic partners in that context and we invest and we've invested with all of them, deep partnerships with all of them. They've all been at Informatica well you've seen them. So again, as I said and I think the easiest way we obviously believe that the subset of data, but keep the customer in mind all the time and everything follows from there. >> What is multicloud mean to your customers if your customer century house, we hear people say, yeah, I use this for that and I get that. When I talk to CIOs and CSOs where there's real dollars and impact on the business, there tends to be a gravitational pull towards one Cloud. Why do people are building their own stacks which is why in-house development is shifted to be very DevOps, Cloud native and then we'll have a secondary Cloud, but they recognize that they have multiple Clouds but they're not spreading their staff around for the reasons around skill shortage. Are you seeing that same trend and two, what do you see is multicloud? >> Well, it is multicloud. I think people sometimes don't realize they're already in a multicloud world. I mean you have so many SaaS applications running around, right? Look around that, so whether you have Workday, whether you have Salesforce and I can keep going on and on and on, right. There are multiple, similarly, multi platform Clouds are there, right? I mean people are using Azure for some use cases. They may want to go AWS for certain other native use cases. So quite naturally customers begin with something to begin with and then the scale from there. But they realize as we, as I talked to customers, I realize, hey look, I have use cases and they're optimally set for some things that are multicloud and they'll end up there, but they all have to begin somewhere before they go somewhere. >> So I have multipleclouds, which I agree with you by the way and talking about this on theCUBE a lot. There's multi multiple Clouds and then this interoperability among Clouds. I mean, remember multi-vendor back in the old days, multicloud, it kind of feels like a multi-vendor kind of value proposition. But if I have Salesforce or Workday and these different Clouds and Amazon where I'm developing or Azure, what is the multi-Cloud interoperability? Is it the data control plane? What problems are the customers facing and the challenge that they want to turn into opportunities around multicloud. >> See a good example, one of the biggest areas of growth for us is helping our customers transform their customer experience. Now if you think about an enterprise company that is thinking about having a great understanding of their customer. Now just think about the number of places that customer data sits. One of our big areas of investment for data is a CRM product called salesforce.com right? Good customer data sits there but there could be where ticketing data sits. There could be where marketing data sits. There could be some legacy applications. The customer data sits in so many places. More often than not we realize when we talked to a customer, it sits in at least 20 places within an enterprise and then there is so much customer data sitting outside of the firewalls of an enterprise. Clickstream data where people are social media data partner data. So in that context, bringing that data together becomes extremely important for you to have a full view of your customer and deliver a better customer experience from there. So it is the customer. >> Is that the problem? >> It's a huge problem right now. Huge problem right now across the board where our customer like, hey, I want to serve my customer better but I need to know my customer better before I can serve them better. So we are squarely in the middle of that helping and we being the Switzerland of data, being fully understanding the application layer and the platform layer, we can bring all that stuff together and through the lens of our customer 360 which is fueled by our master data management product, we allow customers to get to see that full view. And from there you can service them better, give them a next best offer or you can understand the full lifetime value for customer, so on and so forth. So that's how we see the world and that's how we help our customers in this really fragmented Cloud world. >> And that's your primary value proposition. >> A huge value proposition and again as I said, always think customer first. >> I mean you got your big event coming up this Spring, so looking forward to seeing you there. I want to get your take as now that you're looking at the next great chapter of Informatica, what is your vision? How do you see that 20 mile stare out in the marketplace? As you execute, again, your product oriented CEO 'cause your product shops, now you're leading the team. What's your vision? What's the 20 mile stare? >> Well as simple as possible, we're going to double the company. Our goal is to double the company across the board. We have a great foundation of innovation we've put together and we remain paranoid all the time as to where and we always try to look where the world is going, serve our customers and as long as we have great customer loyalty, which we have today, have the foundations of great innovation and a great team and culture at the company, which we fundamentally believe in, we basically right now have the vision of doubling the company. >> That's awesome. Well really appreciate you taking the time. One final question I want to get your thoughts on the Silicon Valley and in the industry, is starting to see Indian-American executives become CEO. You now see you have Informatica. Congratulations. >> Amit: Thank you. >> Arvind over at IBM, Satya Nadella. This has been a culture of the technology for generations 'cause I remember when I broke into the business in the late 80s, 90s, this is the pure love of tech and the meritocracy of technology is at play here. This is a historic moment and it's been written about, but I want to get your thoughts on how you see it evolving and advice for young entrepreneurs out there, future CEOs, what's it take to get there? What's it like? What's your personal thoughts? >> Well, first of all, it's been a humbling moment for me to lead Informatica. It's a great company and a great opportunity. I mean I can say it's the true American dream. I mean I came here in 1998. As a lot of the immigrants didn't have much in my pocket. I went to business school, I was deep in loans and I believed in the opportunity. And I think there is something very special about America. And I would say something really special about Silicon Valley where it's all about at the end of the day value, it's all about meritocracy. The color of your skin and your accent and your, those things don't really matter. And I think we are such an embracing culture typically over here. And, and my advice to anybody is that look, believe, and I genuinely used that word and I've gone through stages in my life where you sometimes doubt it, but you have to believe and stay honest on what you want and look, there is no substitute to hard work. Sometimes luck does play a role, but there is no substitute for hard work. And at the end of the day, good things happen. >> As we say, the for the love of the game, love of tech, your tech athlete, loved it, loved to interview and congratulate, been great to follow your career and get to know you and, and Informatica. It's great to see you at the helm. >> Thank you John, pleasure being here. >> I'm John Furrier here at CUBE conversation at Palo Alto, getting the update on the new CEO from Informatica, Amit Walia, a friend of theCUBE and of course a great tech athlete, and now running a great company. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

[Music] hello and welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto California I'm John for your host of the cube we're here the very special guest I met while he is CEO of informatica newly appointed CEO about a month ago a little over a month ago had a product before that been with informatics in 2013 informatica went private in 2015 and has since been at the center of the digital transformation around data data transformation data privacy data everything around data and value in AI that made great to see you and congratulations on the new CEO role at informatica so thank you all it's good to be back here John it's been great to follow you and for the folks who don't know you you've been a very product centric CEO your products and CEO as they call it but also now you have a company in the middle of the transformation cloud scale is really mainstream enterprises look at multi cloud hybrid cloud this is something that you've been on for many many years we've talked about it so now that you're in charge you get the ship you get the wheel and you're in your hands were you taking it what is the update of informatica give us the update well thank you solook business couldn't be better I think to give you a little bit of color wavy coming from the last couple of years informatica went through a huge amount of transformation all things trying to transform our business model pivoting to subscription all things heavily bet into cloud the new workloads as we talked about and all things new like AI to give a little bit of color we basically exited it last year with a billion dollars of ARR not just revenue so we're a billion-dollar AR our company and as we pivot it to subscription as subscription business for the last couple of years has been growing north of 55 percent so that's the scale at which we are running multi-billion dollars and if you look at the other two metrics which we keep very click near and dear to hard one is innovation so we are participated in five magic quadrants and we are the leader in all five magic quadrants five one five as we like to call it Gartner Magic Quadrant very very critical to us because innovation in the tech is you know is very important also customer loyalty very important to us so we again were the number one in customer satisfaction continues to grow sore last IDC survey our market share continue to grow and be the number one in all our markets so business couldn't be at a better place where we are and what again some of the business discussed which first method on the Magic Quadrant front it's very difficult the folks that aren't in the club is to understand that to participate in multiple magic quadrants with many many do is hard because clouds horizontally scalable magic partners used to be old IT kind of categories but to be in multiple magic quadrants is the nature of the beast but to be a leader is very difficult because magic question doesn't truly capture that if you just appear play and then try to be cloud so you guys are truly that horizontal brand and and technology we've covered this on the cube so there's no secret but I want to get your comments on to be a leader and today in these quadrants you have to be on all the right waves you've got data warehouses are growing and changing at the rise of snowflake you guys partner with data bricks again machine learning and AI changing very rapidly and there's a huge growth wave behind it as well as the existing enterprises who were you know transforming you know analytics and operational workloads this is really really challenging can you just share your thoughts on why is it so hard what are the some of the key things behind these trends we can analytics I guess you can do if it's just analytics without great but this is a this horizontal data play is not easy can you share why no so yes first we are actually a I would say a very hidden secret we're the only software company and I'll say that again the only software company that was the leader in the traditional world traditional workloads legacy on-premise and via the leader in the cloud workloads not a single software company can say that they were the leader when they were started 27 years ago and there's still the leader in the magic quadrants today our cloud by the way runs at 10 trillion transactions a month scale and obviously we partner with all the hyper scalars across the board and our goal is to be the Switzerland of data for our customers and the question you ask is is a critical one when you think of he business drivers what a customer's trying to do one of them is all all things cloud all things the eye is obviously there but one is all data warehouses are going to cloud we just talked about that moving workloads to cloud whether it is analytical operational basically we have front and center helping customers do that second a big trend in the world of digital transformation is helping our customers customer experience and driving that fueling that is a master data management business so on and so products behind that but driving customer experiences big big driver of our growth and the third one is no large enterprise can live without data governance need a privacy man this is a thing today right you got to make sure that you deliver good governance whether it's compliance oriented or brand oriented privacy and risk management and all three of them basically span the business initiatives that feature into those five magic quadrants our goal is to play across all of them and that's what we do Pat Cal senior had a quote on the cube many years ago he said if you're not on the right wave you could be driftwood its meaning you're gonna get crashed oh sorry well a lot of people have we've seen a lot of companies have a good skill and then get washed away if you will by a wave you're seeing like AI and machine learning we talked a little bit about that you guys are in there I want to get your thoughts on this one is there whenever this executive changes there's always questions around you know what's happening with the company so I want you to talk about the state of informatica because you're now the CEO there's been some changes has there been a pivot has there been a sharpening focus what's going on with informatica so I think I'm cool right now is to scale and hyper scale that's the word I mean we're in a very strong position in fact we use this phrase internally within the company next phase of great we're at a great place and we are chartering the next phase of great for the company and the cool there is helping our customers I talked about these three big big initiatives that companies are investing in data warehousing and analytics going to the cloud transforming customer experiences and data governance and privacy and the fourth one that underpins all of them is all things a I mean as we've talked about before right all of these things are complex hard to do look at the volume and complexity of data and what we're investing in is what we call native ai ai needs data data needs AI as I always said right and we are investing in AI to make these things easy for our customers to make sure that they can scale and grow into the future and what we've also been very diligent about this partnering we partnered very well with the hyper scalars like whether it's AWS Microsoft whether it's GCP snowflake great partner of ours data brick skate part of ours tableau great partner of ours we have a variety of these partners and our cool is always customer first customers are investing in these technologies our goal is to help customers adopt these technologies not for the sake of technologies but for the sake of transforming those three business initiatives I thought you brought up I was gonna ask you the next question but snowflake and data versus data Brooks has been on the cube Holly a great that's a good friend of ours and he's got chops you Stan I'm not Stanford Berkeley he'll kill me with that if it's ow he's but beta Brooks is doing well they made some good bets and it's paying off of them snowflake a rising star Frank's Lubin's over there now they are clearly a choice for modern data warehouses as is any of us redshift how are you working with snowflake how do you take advantage of that can you just unpack your relationship with snowflake it's a it's a very deep partnership our goal is to help our customers you know as they pick these technology choices for data warehousing an example where snowflake comes into play to make sure that the underlying data infrastructure can work seamlessly for them see customers build this complex logic sitting in the old technologies as they move to anything new they want to make sure that that transition migration is seamless as seamless as it can be and typically they'll start something new before they retire something old with us they can carry all of that business logic for the last 27 years their business logic seamlessly and run natively in this case in the cloud so basically we allow them this whole from tool and also the ability to have the best of breed technology in the context of data management to power up these new infrastructures where they are going let me ask you the question around the industry trends what are the top and trends industry trends that are driving your business and your product direction and customer value look digital transformation has been a big trend and digital transformation has fueled all things like customer experiences being transformed so that remains a big vector of growth I would say cloud adoption is still relatively literally inning so no you love these balls we can still say what second third inning as much as we would like to believe cloud has been their customers mode with their analytical workloads first still happening the operational workloads are still in its very very infancy so that is still a big vector of growth and and a big trend that we see for the next five plus years and you guys in the middle of that oh absolutely yeah absolutely because if you're running a large operational workload it's all about the data at the end of the day because you can change the app but it's the data that you want to carry the logic that you've written that you want to carry and we participate in that I have ashes before but I want to ask you again because I want to get the modern update because pure cloud born in the cloud like you know startups and whatever it's easy to say that do that everyone knows that hybrid is clear now everyone that sees that as an architectural thing Multi cloud is kind of a state of I have multiple clouds but being true multi-cloud a little bit different maybe downstream conversation but certainly relevant so as cloud evolves from public cloud hybrid and maybe multi or certainly multi how do you see those things evolving for informatica well we believe in the word hybrid and I define hybrid exactly as these two things one is hybrid is multi cloud you can have hybrid clouds second is hybrid means you're gonna have ground and cloud interoperate for a period of time so to us we sit in the center of this hybrid cloud trend and our goal is to help customers go cloud native but make sure that they can run whatever was the old business that they were running as much possible in the most seamlessly before they can at some point cut over and which is why as I said I've been our cloud native business a cloud platform which we call informatica intelligent cloud services runs at scale globally across the globe by the way on all hyper scalars at ten plus trillion transactions a month but yet we will allowed customers to run their own Prem technologies as much as they can because they cannot just rip the band-aid over there right so multi cloud ground cloud our goal is to help customers large enterprise customers manage that complexity their AI plays a big role because these are all very complex environments and our investment in AI our REI being called Claire is to help them manage that as in an as automated way as seen this away and to be honest the most important thing for them is in the most governed way because that's where the biggest risk risks come into play that's where our investments let's say what customers per second I want to get your thoughts on this because at Amazon reinvent last year in December it was a meme going around on the queue that we that we start on the cube called if you think the tea out of cloud native it's cloud naive and so the the the point was is to say hey doing cloud native makes sense in certain cases but if you're not really thinking about the overall hybrid and the architecture of what's going on you kind of could get into a night naive situation so I asked any of this and I want to ask you any chat so I'll ask you the same question is that what would be naive for a customer to think about cloud so they can be cloud native or operate in a cloud what are some of the things they should avoid so they don't fall into that naive category now you've been you know I hey I'm doing cloud yeah for clouds sake I mean so there's kind of this perception have you got to do cloud right mm-hmm what's your view on cloud native and how does people avoid the cloud naive label it's it's a good question I think to me when I talk to customers and hundreds of them across the globe is I meet them in a year is to really think of their cloud as a reference architecture for at least the next five years if not I'm a technology changes think of a reference architecture for the next five years and in that you got to think of multiple best-of-breed technologies that can help you I mean you got to think best-of-breed as much as possible now you're not going to go have hundreds of different technologies running around because you got to scale them but think as much as possible that you are Best of Breed yet settled to what I call a few platforms as much as possible and then make sure that you basically have the right connection points across different workloads will be optimal for different let's say cloud environments analytical workload and operation workload a financial workload each one of them will have something that will work best in somewhere else right so to me putting the business focus on what the right business outcome is and working you will be back to what cloud environments are best suited for that and building that reference architecture thoughtfully with a five-year goal in mind then jumping to the next most exciting thing hot thing and try to experiment your way through it that will not scale would be the right way to go yeah it's not naive to be focusing on the business problems and operating it in a cloud architecture this is what you're saying okay so let's talk about like the customer journey around AI because this has become a big one you guys been on the AI way for many many years but now that it's become full mainstream enterprise how are the applications software guys looking at this because if I'm an enterprise and I want to go cloud native app to make my apps work yes apps are driving everything these days and you guys play a big role data is more important than ever for applicants what's your view on the app developer DevOps market so to me the big chains of VC in fact we're gonna talk a lot about that in a couple of months when we are at informatica world our user conference in May is how data is moving to the next phase and it's what developers today are doing is that they are building the apps with data in mind first data first apps I mean if you're building let's see a great customer service app you gotta first figure out what all data do you need to service a customer before you go build an app so that is a very fundamental shift that has happened and and in that context what happens is that in a cloud native environment obviously you have a lot of flexibility to begin with that bring data over there and DevOps is getting complemented by what we see is data ops having all kinds of data available for you to make those decisions as you build an application and in that discussion you're near having before is that there is so much data that you will not be able to understand that investing in metadata so you can understand data about the data I called metadata as the intelligent data if you're an intelligent enterprise you gotta invest in metadata those are the places where we see developers going first and from their ground up building what we call apps that are more intelligent apps of the future not just business process apps cloud native versus cloud naive connotation we were just having is interesting you talk about Best of Breed I want to get your thoughts on some trends we're seeing seeing even in cybersecurity with RSA coming up there's been consolidation you saw our Dell Jesolo RSA 2 private equity company so you starting to see a lot of these shiny new toy type companies being consolidated in because there's too much for companies to deal with you're seeing also skills gaps but also skills shortages there's not enough people oh now you have multiple clouds you got Amazon you got Azure you got Google GCP you've got Oracle IBM VMware now you have a shortage problem true so this is putting pressure on the customers so with that in mind how are the customers reacting to this and what is best to breed really mean so that is actually a very good point look we all live in Silicon Valley so we get excited about the latest technology and we have the best of skills here even though we have a skills problem over here right think about as you move away from Silicon Valley and you start flying and I fly all over the world and you start seeing that if you're in the middle of nowhere there is not a whole lot of developers who understand the latest cutting-edge technology that happens here our goal has been to solve that problem for our customers look our goal is to help the developers but as much as possible provide the customers the ability to have a handful of skilled developers but they can still take our offerings and we abstract away that complexity so that they are dealing only at a higher level the underlying technology comes and goes and you know it will come and go 100 times they don't have to worry about that so our goal is abstract away the underlying changes in technology focus at the business logic layer and you can move you can basically run your business for over the course of 20 years and that's what we've done for customers customers were invested with us have run their businesses seamlessly for two decades three decades while so much technology has changed with a period of time and the cloud is right here scaling up so I want to get your thoughts on the different clouds I see Amazon Web Services number one the cloud hyper scalar we're talking pure cloud that gets more announcements more capabilities then you got a sure again hyper scale trying to catch up to Amazon more Enterprise focused are doing very very well on the enterprise I was I said on Twitter they're mopping up the enterprise because it's easy to have an install base there they've been leveraging your very well stuff in atella has done team done a great job that you got Google trying to specialize and figure out where they're gonna fit Oracle IBM everyone else as you'd have to deal with this you're kind of an arms dealer in a way with data I would love to say no hands but not absolute I'm dealing that's the bad analogy but you get my point you have to play well you have to it's not like an aspiration show your requirements you have to play and operate with value in all the clouds one how is that going and what are the different clouds like well I always begin with the philosophy that its customer first you go with the customers a queen and customers choose different technologies for different use cases as deems fit for them our job is to make sure our customers are successful so we begin with the customer in mind and we solve from there number two that's a big market there is plenty of room for everybody to play of course there is competition across the board but plenty of room for everybody to play and our job is to make sure that we assist all of them to help at the end of the day our joint customers we have great success stories with all of them again you get in mind the end customer so that has always been informatic as philosophy customer first and we partner with a critical strategic partners in that context and and we invest and we've invested with all of them deep partnerships of all of them they've all been at informatica well you've seen them so again as I said and I think the easiest way we obviously believe they do this incident of data but keep the customer in mind all the time and everything follows from there what is multi-cloud me to your customers if your customer centric obviously we hear people say yeah I use this for that and I get that when I talk to CIOs and see says with his real dollars and interact on the business there tends to be a gravitational pull towards one cloud a lot of people are building their own stacks in house development has shifted to be very DevOps I'm cloud native and then I'll have a secondary cloud but they recognize that they have multiple clouds but they're not spreading their staff around for the reasons around skill shortage yeah are you seeing that same trend and to what do you see is multi cloud well it is 1d cloud I think I think people sometimes don't realize they're already in a multi cloud world I mean you have so many SAS applications running around right look around that so whether you have work day with your salesforce.com and I can keep going on and on and on right there are multiple similarly multi platform clouds are there right I mean people are using hash or for some use case they may want to go a dime us for certain other negative use cases so quite naturally customers begin with something to begin with and then the scale from there but they realize as we as I talk to customers I realize hey look I have use cases and they're optimally set for some things that are multi-cloud and they'll end up there but they all have to begin somewhere before they go somewhere so I have multiple clouds which I agree with you by the way and talking about this one cube a lot there's multi multiple clouds and then this interoperability among clouds I mean remember multi-vendor back in the old days multi-cloud it kind of feels like a multi vendor kind of value proposition but if I have Salesforce or workday in these different clouds in Amazon where I'm developing or Azure what is the multi cloud interoperability is it the data control plane what problems are the customers facing and the challenge that they want to turn into opportunities do a good example multi-cloud see a good example one of the biggest areas of growth for us is helping a customers transform the customer experience now if you think about an enterprise company that is thinking about having a great understanding of their customer now just think about the number of places that customer data sets one of the one of the big areas of investment viability the CRM product called salesforce.com right good customer data sits there but there could be where ticketing data sets there could be where marketing data sits there could be some legacy applications the customer data sits in so many places more often than not we realize when we talk to a customer it sits in at least 20 places within an enterprise and then there is so much customer data sitting outside of the firewalls of an enterprise right clickstream data where people had parts or shared a partner data so in that context bringing that data together becomes extremely important for you to have a full view of your customer and deliver a better customer experience from there so it is the cost the customers have the problem it's a huge problem right now huge problem right now across the board where cup a per customer like hey I want to serve my customer better but I need to know my customer better before I can serve them better so we are squarely in the middle of that helping and B being the Switzerland of data being fully understanding the application layer and the platform layer we can bring all that stuff and through the lens of our customer 360 which is fueled by our master data management product we allow customers to get to see that full view and from there you can service them better give them a next best offer or you can understand their lives either full lifetime value for customer so on and so forth so that's how we see the world and that's how we help our customers in this really fragmented cloud world that's your primary value proposition it's a huge value proposition and again as I said always think customer first I met you got your big event coming up this spring so looking forward to seeing you there I want to get your take as now that you're looking at the next great chapter of informatica what is your vision how do you see that twenty miles stare out in the marketplace as you execute again your product oriented CEO because your product chops now you're leading the team what's your vision what's the 20 mile stair well as simple as possible we're gonna double the company our goal is to double the company across the board we have a great foundation of innovation we put together and we remain paranoid all the time as to where and we always start to look where the world is going serve our customers and as long as we have great customer loyalty which we have today have the foundations of great innovation and a great team and culture at the company which we fundamentally believe in we basically right now have the vision of doubling the company that's awesome well really appreciate you taking the time one final question I want to get your thoughts on you know it's looking valley and in the industry starting to see Indian American executives become CEOs you now see you have informatica congratulations Arvind over at IBM sathi natella this has been a culture of the technology for generations I remember when I broken the business in the late 80s 90s this is the pure love of tech and the and the meritocracy of Technology is at play here this is a historic moment it's been written about but I want to get your thoughts on how you see it evolving and advice for young entrepreneurs out there future CEOs what's it take to get there what's it like what's your personal thoughts well first of all it's been a humbling moment for me to lead in from it's a great company and a great opportunity I mean I can say like it's the true Americans dream I mean I came here in 1998 I mean as a lot of immigrants Ted didn't have much in my pocket I went to business school I was deep in loans and and I believed in the opportunity and I think there is something very special about America and I would say something really special about Silicon Valley where it's all about at the end of the day value it's all about meritocracy the color of your skin and your accent and your those things don't really matter and I think we're such an embracing culture typically over here and my advice to anybody is that look believe and I genuinely use that word and I've gone through stages in my life where you sometimes doubt it but you have to believe and stay honest what you want and look there is no substitute to hard work sometimes luck does play a role but there is no substitute artwork and at the end of the day good things happen as we say that for the love of the game love attack your tech athlete love to love to interview and congratulate been great to follow your career get to know you and informatica it's great to see you at the helm thank you John pleasure being here I'm John 4 here is cube conversation in Palo Alto getting the update on the new CEO from informatics at MIT Walia friend of the cube and of course a great tech athlete and now running the great company I'm John forever here thanks for watching [Music] you [Music]

>> Announcer: From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering CloudNOW's 7th annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. (lively music) >> Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at Facebook Headquarters. We're here with the CloudNOW Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards, their seventh annual. We're here with one of the award winners, Katherine Kostereva, the founder and CEO of bpm'online. Katherine, it's great to have you here. >> It's honor to be here. Thank you very much, Lisa. >> Congratulations on the CloudNOW award, but also you are no stranger to awards. Even in 2018, you were named one of the Top 50 SaaS CEOs for 2018. Not just female CEOs, CEOs. That's a pretty big honor as well. >> Katherine: Thank you. >> So bpm'online I want folks to understand not just your career path, but also that you're pretty persistent and bold. Bpm'online is a very successful and well-known business in Europe. >> Katherine: Right. >> Founded in 2002 with five people. >> 16 years ago. >> 16 years ago. >> Bootstrapped. >> Bootstrapped by yourself, and here you are recently moved to the US and you're basically kind of start-up in the US. >> Exactly. >> Tell us a little bit about that story. What you grew as a female leader in Europe, and the impetus to say we can do more and bring the business to the United States. >> Absolutely, would love to tell you this story. So 16 years ago we built this company. Bootstrapped it, no investors, no friends and family money. Just from zero, from scratch, and have successfully grown the business until we started to hear from our customers who were large, global organizations using our software in Europe. We started to hear, "Hey guys, "why we don't know you in the United States? "Why our headquarters doesn't know your name?" And then we started to talk to Gartner and Forrester, and they said exactly the same. Your technology is so amazing, and, right now, we are included in five Gartner Magic Quadrants and five Forrester Waves. And technology is amazing, but why you are not here in the United States? So, eventually, I moved to the United States with some of my peers, and we started to build our office in Boston. It happened three years ago. So right now we feel ourselves like a start-up here in Boston. While back like several years ago in Europe, and right now actually in Europe, this is a strong, mature company with 500 people in the company, working in the company in six offices. >> And business process automation, CRM, well-known in Europe, tell us about why did you select Boston and not come out here to Silicon Valley when you decided to move out here? >> (laughs) That's a great question, and I have a very easy answer to this question. As we have so many customers, partners and actually team members in Europe, we just wanted to find something with a shortest time-zone like time difference, right. So the difference between Europe and Boston is five to seven hours while here's it's additional plus three hours. So my day usually starts with Europe, so, when I start working around 7 a.m. in the morning, I work work with Europe, then I work with the United States, and then in the evening I start working with APAC with Asia, with Australia because we have our office in Australia as well. So we have our customers and people working in Australia, so this is my evening hours. >> Oh my goodness, so here you are being recognized tonight as a female entrepreneur. Tell us about your inspiration, and what has kept you persistent. Being a female in technology is challenging, and we all know that and, for many reasons. Hopefully one day it won't matter, gender, but it does. What are some of your recommendations for not only founding a company, and really kind of harnessing that persistence but also growing a culture that supports diversity. That understands and embraces change. >> This is a great question. Honestly, for me those are my customers, and that what I would recommend all women and female and male entrepreneurs to talk more to their customers because when you and your customers have the same vision about how to develop the company, how to develop the product, it inspires you. You just, you move on. You want to develop. You want to develop more, and just to give you an example both our customers and our team we believe that organization just can't have excellent customer relations without very holistic business processes beneath. So we believe that organization, if we're talking about mid-sized and large organization, they need to have holistic processes first, and then, based on this process, they going to have great customer relations. So this is kind of our vision and our mission, and that's what our customers share with us and that what has inspires me to move on and on and develop new products for our customers. >> Well, Katherine congratulations on the CloudNOW Award win. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much for joining us on the program, and we hope you have a great night. >> Thank you so much for your time. Honor to be here. Thank you >> Our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin for theCUBE at Facebook Headquarters. We'll see you next time. (lively, airy music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2018. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and my name is Dave Vellante, and we've been covering IBM Think, this is our second day. IBM's inaugural conference will be here at three days, wall-to-wall coverage. Al Martin is here, he's the IBM VP of Hybrid Data Management, client success, I'm going to get that in there because it's such an important part of the title. Al, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, pleasure. >> We'll start with hybrid data management, what do you mean by hybrid data management, what is that? >> Well I think, it starts with data, and they call it information technology not data technology for a reason, meaning I have the pleasure or the burden, one of the two in terms of being able to set up what we call the AI ladder. Meaning you start with data, you push it up the stack, push value up the stack that being analytics, ML, AI, and data today is a challenge, I mean it's a huge problem. It doesn't matter what size client you are, it's a challenge for you, and so it's unstructured, it's structured, it can be in the cloud, it can be on-prem. So when we say hybrid, it's across- The challenge that I have is across all those different foreign factors. We've got to make data simple and accessible all across all those foreign factors, that's hybrid. >> It's a tall job, tall order. >> Pretty much all jobs. >> Okay, how do you do it? >> How do I do it. Well, very carefully. We develop technologies that do just that. What we do at via is common analytics engine first and foremost. We use an engine like, no matter what foreign factors say when I'm in an appliance, I can query the appliance, and then if I want to take that work load outside that appliance and put it against my own hardware, I can take that database out and still query, do the same analytics, I can put that in the cloud, do the same query and analytics, no different. So, the way we do it is we don't care whether it's structured or unstructured, we don't care whether it's no SQL or SQL, we'll do both, we'll do analytic processing, we'll do operational processing and we try to do it within the same footprint, that's essentially how we do it. >> Okay, so what I like about this is your chan is every customer, I mean of every company (mumbles). >> That's the challenge. >> What's the conversation like when you walk into a client or a prospect, what are the words they're using to describe their problems, helps us understand that. >> That is a great question, because it is very difficult to get those words out very often. A lot of clients are struggling where they are on what I call the maturity curve. So, to that point, what I typically do is start with a conceptual maturity curve, and if you can imagine a graph going from left to right, it's a hockey stick a value relative to maturity, and so we figure out where our client is on that maturity curve. By example, imagine four quadrants. On the left-more quadrant is operations, that's your ERP systems, your billing systems. If they're there the opportunity is cost-optimization, or the deal is operational systems don't typically do well with analytics. So if they're looking at analytics then they'll move to the next quadrant and do data warehousing, then the opportunities tend to be data legs, you might want to get into Hadoop, and then once you graduate from there you go into self-service analytics, that'd be like the third quadrant, and then you're thinking about Spark as a common analytics engine, you're thinking about IOT, and then you start getting into machine-learning, and by the time you hit the fourth quadrant, that is where new models begin and you're really driving machine-learning and driving the progress to AI. When I look at that model, those four quadrants I just walked you through, is I'm pushing as much as I can to both the developer and the business, and give them the empowerment, and when you do that then governance comes into play, data science comes into play, new personas come into play. So it's quite a challenge, but I find where the client is on that graph and figure out where they want to be, current state, desired state, and then we draw up a plan to get them there. >> So let's talk about those, sort of. That is I guess the maturity model, right? We started with a core systems, ERP, transaction systems, you started to build data warehouses, data marts, they were largely bespoke systems, it was sort of an asynchronous data move, you have it build big complicated cubes. Still do, still doing that. >> Still do. Still doing it in many cases. >> And they're driving decision support, but it got really expensive, and a lot of times it was like a snake swallowing a basketball to make a change. Okay, so then along comes Hadoop thrown into a data leg like you say, it's got a reduction of investment, but then you got to get value out of it. Now you're talking about self-service analytics, Spark comes into play, simplifies things a little bit and now you get ML, more automation. My question is, as you proceed, as customers proceed down that journey, is there a hybrid data management architecture that has to be put in place so that these aren't separate bespoke pieces that I leave behind but they all come together in an enterprise data model. >> Here's the way I would explain that, in making the complex as simple as possible. We figure out where they are, and then there's essentially five different key elements that we key on. One is hybrid data management, that's what I'm responsible for, and by example, the database we use supports HDAP, which means it'll do both analytical or warehousing and transactional processing at the same time by example. When you're looking at unified governance that would be number two. Unified governance is, the best way to describe that is, is unified governance is done for data, what libraries do for books, same concept. And then the third one is then when you're pushing that closer to the developer, then that's when you get into data science and the models start building upon themselves and that's where the magic happens. Those are the three, but there's two more. Under data science, I usually call out machine learning, because machine learning is very important. I mean that enables that path to AI that everybody talks about, the bridge to AI. And then finally I think a key to any client strategy is open source. Most people don't know that IBM is one of the largest contributors to open source, like a patchy Spark by example. We believe in open source because it increases the pace to market, so if you have those five different strategies, that's how you be successful. Within my organization you can have an appliance, for hybridated management, you can have an HDAP database, we have one-click data movement, all those things go into that to make up that complete solution. >> HDAP by the way is hybrid transaction and analytic processing. >> That's exactly right. >> You see those worlds come together, I remember the Z 13 announcement a couple of years ago, you guys made a big deal out of that, and so that's actually happening is that right? >> That is absolutely happening, yes. >> So that involves what actually doing the analytics in the transaction system, is that right, in the database of the transaction? >> I mean it depends on work loads, there's a lot of depending factors, but yeah, that's the- >> As opposed to what, putting it in some kind of Infiniband pipe into my data warehouse. >> Well you talked about it earlier, where previously you have to create complete separate data marks, you have to transition and use ETL to go from an operational store or a transactional store, to an analytical store completely separate. Trying to do both those in the same databases is our objective, that's HDAP. >> Excellent. Now you're also running the global elite program. >> I am. >> What is that all about? >> Well, let me back up for a second and tell you how we got here. I am running the global elite program but it started out just as a sheer campaign of driving personalization for our clients, pretty simple right? We have got the technology now to really personalize our experience with our clients. Using ML and some of the same technologies that I talked about. By example, we use ML and Watson to both internally and externally with clients, in other words, internally we make recommendations to our analyst, externally you can use a bot and ask them the questions. We're pushing all our content out, essentially free-of-charge, opening it up, we have very aggressive push to push that content out, and we're driving direct to expect. So that's just standard now for us, that's the basic, but then we've taken that further because we want to treat each client relative to their needs and profile, so what we've done is, for the platform offerings that we have, we just came up with a new offering called Enhanced Support. So what that does is it's front-of-the-line service. Consider it your airline priority service, so it's front-of-the-line, it's faster response time targets, and it also provides some consulting, and then on top of that, we've got what's called a premium tier, and that premium tier does everything of what I've already described, but then it adds a named context, and experts, to work directly with you with one foot within IBM, and one foot within whatever client in that expertise required. So I give you all that, global lead is at the top of that. These are our partners that are innovating with us, that are rewarding us with their business but they're innovating with us, they're serving as references, and together we're partnering and transforming together whether it's retail, insurance, or otherwise. So those are a small set of our global elite clients, and I encourage any clients that are listening out there, if they feel like, hey I want to partner directly with IBM, I want to push the envelope, references are in my future, I'm in. >> What are some examples that you can share with us? >> What we've done, we tend to have a motto with the global elites that we never say no, and I'm still waiting, I haven't said no yet, but we'll see if that ever comes. Well we never say no, and what we've done by example as an evolution of the global elite program is think conferences like this, a lot of times you can only send so many people. So what we've done is we've taken a mini conference, and we call it Analytics University, and we've taken that directly to clients, and we'll do a day or two and do this conference in a miniature scale focused on the areas and the content that they prefer. The other thing we've done is then a lot of times when we do that, we'll find interests and visions that they have that they have not been able to really get into a road map or progress. So then we'll bring them into the lab and we'll do design thinking sessions, and then we'll work together. And in terms of doing the design thinking sessions, what we essentially, ultimately accomplish is one independent road map between two different companies, because they help set our road map, we help influence theirs, and all of a sudden they've got a strategy to the future, and it's organically aligned with ours. >> Excellent. Alright Al, let's put the bumper sticker on IBM Think 2018, it's only day two here but what's your takeaway from the conference. Trucks are pulling away, what's the bumper sticker say. >> The bumper sticker says, make data simple. >> There you go. >> That's where my head's at, make data simple. I got a podcast out there that's called Make Data Simple. I'd encourage everybody to listen to it, we get into all these different technologies, but I think we make data simple with a- The wider the breadth we get data we can drive value up the stack. >> So, Make Data Simple podcast, right? >> It's actually under Analytics Insights in iTunes. >> Analytics insights under iTunes. >> That's all me. >> Alright, beautiful. Yeah, Make Data Simple podcast, Google that and you'll find it. Al, thanks very much for coming to CUBE. >> Alright, thank you. >> Pleasure having you. Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back, right after this short break.

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special presentation, The Future of Converged Infrastructure, my name is David Vellante, and I'll be your host, for this event where the focus is on Dell EMC's converged infrastructure announcement. Nearly a decade ago, modern converged infrastructure really came to the floor in the marketplace, and what you had is compute, storage, and network brought together in a single managed entity. And when you talk to IT people, the impact was roughly a 30 to 50% total cost of ownership reduction, really depending on a number of factors. How much virtualization they had achieved, how complex their existing processees were, how much they could save on database and other software licenses and maintenance, but roughly that 30 to 50% range. Fast forward to 2018 and you're looking at a multibillion dollar market for converged infrastructure. Jeff Boudreau is here, he's the President of the Dell EMC Storage Division, Jeff thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. So we're going to set up this announcement let me go through the agenda. Jeff and I are going to give an overview of the announcement and then we're going to go to Trey Layton, who's the Chief Technology Officer of the converged infrastructure group at Dell EMC. He's going to focus on the architecture, and some of the announcement details. And then, we're going to go to Cisco Live to a pre-recorded session that we did in Barcelona, and get the Cisco perspective, and then Jeff and I will come back to wrap it up. We also, you might notice we have a crowd chat going on, so underneath this video stream you can ask questions, you got to log in with LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, I prefer Twitter, kind of an ask me anything crowd chat. We have analysts on, Stu Miniman is hosting that call. We're going to talk about what this announcement is all about, what the customer issues are that are being addressed by this announcement. So Jeff, let's get into it. From your perspective, what's the state of converged infrastructure today? >> Great question. I'm really bullish on CI, in regards to what converged infrastructure and kind of the way the market's going. We see continued interest in the growth of the market of our customers. Driven by the need for simplicity, agility, elasticity of those on-prem resources. Dell EMC pioneered the CI market several years ago, with the simple premise of simplify IT, and our focus and commitment to our customers has not changed of simplifying IT. As our customers continue to seek for new ways to simplify and consolidate infrastructure, we expect more and more of our customers to embrace CI, as a fast and easy way to modernize their infrastructure, and transform IT. >> You talk about transformation, we do a lot of events, and everybody's talking about digital transformation, and IT transformation, what role does converged infrastructure play in those types of transformations, maybe you could give us an example? >> Sure, so first I'd say our results speak for themselves. As I said we pioneered the CI industry, as the market leader, we enabled thousands of customers worldwide to drive business transformation and digital transformation. And when I speak to customers specifically, converged infrastructure is not just about the infrastructure, it's about the operating model, and how they simplify IT. I'd say two of the biggest areas of impact that customers highlight to me, are really about the acceleration of application delivery, and then the other big one is around the increase in operational efficiencies allowing customers to free up resources, to reinvest however they see fit. >> Now since the early days of converged infrastructure Cisco has been a big partner of yours, you guys were kind of quasi-exclusive for awhile, they went out and sought other partners, you went out and sought other partners, a lot of people have questions about that relationship, what's your perspective on that relationship. >> So our partnership with Cisco is strong as ever. We're proud of this category we've created together. We've been on this journey for a long time we've been working together, and that partnership will continue as we go forward. In full transparency there are of course some topics where we disagree, just like any normal relationship we have disagreements, an example of that would be HCI, but in the CI space our partnership is as strong as ever. We'll have thousands of customers between the two of us, that we will continue to invest and innovate together on. And I think later in this broadcast you're going to hear directly from Cisco on that, so we're both doubling down on the partnership, and we're both committed to CI. >> I want to ask you about leadership generally, and then specifically as it relates to converged infrastructure and hyper converged. My question is this, hyper converged is booming, it's a high growth market. I sometimes joke that Dell EMC is now your leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrants, 101 Gartner Magic Quadrants out of the 99. They're just leading everything and I think both the CI and the HCI categories, what's your take, is CI still relevant? >> First I'd say it's great to come from a leadership position so I thank you for bringing that up, I think it's really important. As Micheal talks about being the essential infrastructure company, that's huge for us as Dell Technologies, so we're really proud of that and we want to lean into that strength. Now on HCI vs CI, to me it's an AND world. Everybody wants to get stock that's in either or, to me it's about the AND story. All our customers are going on a journey, in regards to how they transform their businesses. But at the end of the day, if I took my macro view, and took a step back, it's about the data. The data's the critical asset. The good news for me and for our team is data always continues to grow, and is growing at an amazing rate. And as that critical asset, customers are really kind of thinking about a modern data strategy as they drive foreword. And as part of that, they're looking at how to store, protect, secure, analyze, move that data, really unleashing that data to provide value back to their businesses. So with all of that, not all data is going to be created equal, as part of that, as they build out those strategies, it's going to be a journey, in regards to how they do it. And if that's software defined, vs purpose built arrays, vs converged, or hyper converged, or even cloud, those deployment models, we, Dell EMC, and Dell Technologies want to be that strategic partner, that trusted advisor to help them on that journey. >> Alright Jeff, thanks for helping me with the setup. I want to ask you to hang around a little bit. >> Jeff: Sure. >> We're going to go to a video, and then we're going to bring back Trey Layton, talk about the architecture so keep it right there, we'll be right back. >> Announcer: Dell EMC has long been number one in converged infrastructure, providing technology that simplifies all aspects of IT, and enables you to achieve better business outcomes, faster, and we continue to lead through constant innovation. Introducing, the VxBlock System 1000, the next generation of converged infrastructure from Dell EMC. Featuring enhanced life cycle management, and a broad choice of technologies, to support a vast array of applications and resources. From general purpose to mission critical, big data to specialized workloads, VxBlock 1000 is the industry's first converged infrastructure system, with the flexible data services, power, and capacity to handle all data center workloads, giving you the ultimate in business agility, data center efficiency, and operational simplicity. Including best-of-breed storage and data protection from Dell EMC, and computer networking from Cisco. (orchestral music) Converged in one system, these technologies enable you to flexibly adapt resources to your evolving application's needs, pool resources to maximize utilization and increase ROI, deliver a turnkey system in lifecycle assurance experience, that frees you to focus on innovation. Four times storage types, two times compute types, and six times faster updates, and VME ready, and future proof for extreme performance. VxBlock 1000, the number one in converged now all-in-one system. Learn more about Dell EMC VxBlock 1000, at DellEMC.com/VxBlock. >> We're back with Trey Layton who's the Senior Vice President and CTO of converged at Dell EMC. Trey it's always a pleasure, good to see you. >> Dave, good to see you as well. >> So we're eight years into Vblock, take us back to the converged infrastructure early days, what problems were you trying to solve with CI. >> Well one of the problems with IT in general is it's been hard, and one of the reasons why it's been hard is all the variability that customers consume. And how do you integrate all that variability in a sustaining manner, to maintain the assets so it can support the business. And, the thing that we've learned is, the original recipe that we had for Vblock, was to go at and solve that very problem. We have referred to that as life cycle. Manage the life cycle services of the biggest inner assets that you're deploying. And we have created some great intellectual property, some great innovation around helping minimize the complexity associated with managing the life cycle of a very complex integration, by way of, one of the largest data center assets that people operate in their environment. >> So you got thousands and thousands of customers telling you life cycle management is critical. They're shifting their labor resource to more strategic activities, is that what's going on? Well there's so much variation and complexity in just maintaining the different integration points, that they're spending an inordinate amount of their time, a lot of nights and weekends, on understanding and figuring out which software combinations, which configuration combinations you need to operate. What we do as an organization, and have done since inception is, we manage that complexity for them. We delivery them an outcome based architecture that is pre-integrated, and we sustain that integration over it's life, so they spend less time doing that, and letting the experts who actually build the components focus on maintaining those integrations. >> So as an analyst I always looked at converged infrastructure as an evolutionary trend, bringing together storage, servers, networking, bespoke components. So my question is, where's the innovation underneath converged infrastructure. >> So I would say the innovation is in two areas. We're blessed with a lot of technology innovations that come from our partner, and our own companies, Dell EMC and Cisco. Cisco produces wonderful innovations in the space of networking compute, in the context of Vblock. Dell EMC, storage innovations, data protection, et cetera. We harmonize all of these very complex integrations in a manner where an organization can put those advanced integrations into solving business problems immediately. So there's two vectors of innovation. There are the technology components that we are acquiring, to solve business problems, and there's the method at which we integrate them, to get to the business of solving problems. >> Okay, let's get into the announcement. What are you announcing, what's new, why should we care. >> We are announcing the VxBlock 1000, and the interesting thing about Vblocks over the years, is they have been individual system architectures. So a compute technology, integrated with a particular storage architecture, would produce a model of Vblock. With VxBlock 1000, we're actually introducing an architecture that provides a full gamut of array optionality for customers. Both blade and rack server options, for customers on the UCS compute side, and before we would integrate data protection technologies as an extension or an add-on into the architecture, data protection is native to the offer. In addition to that, unstructured data storage. So being able to include unstructured data into the architecture as one singular architecture, as opposed to buying individualized systems. >> Okay, so you're just further simplifying the underlying infrastructure which is going to save me even more time? >> Producing a standard which can adapt to virtually any use case that a customer has in a data center environment. Giving them the ability to expand and grow that architecture, as their workload dictates, in their environment, as opposed to buying a system to accommodate one workload, buying another system to accommodate another workload, this is kind of breaking the barriers of traditional CI, and moving it foreword so that we can create an adaptive architecture, that can accommodate not only the technologies available today, but the technologies on the horizon tomorrow. >> Okay so it's workload diversity, which means greater asset leverage from that underlying infrastructure. >> Trey: Absolutely. >> Can you give us some examples, how do you envision customers using this? >> So I would talk specifically about customers that we have today. And when they deploy, or have deployed Vblocks in the past. We've done wonderful by building architectures that accommodate, or they're tailor made for certain types of workloads. And so a customer environment would end up acquiring a Vblock model 700, to accommodate an SAP workload for example. They would acquire a Vblock 300, or 500 to accommodate a VDI workload. And then as those workloads would grow, they would grow those individualized systems. What it did was, it created islands of stranded resource capacities. Vblock 1000 is about bringing all those capabilities into a singular architecture, where you can grow the resources based on pools. And so as your work load shifts in your environment, you can reallocate resources to accommodate the needs of that workload, as opposed to worrying about stranded capacity in the architecture. >> Okay where do you go from here with the architecture, can you share with us, to the extent that you can, a little roadmap, give us a vision as to how you see this playing out over the next several years. >> Well, one of the reasons why we did this was to simplify, and make it easier to operate, these very complex architectures that everyone's consuming around the world. Vblock has always been about simplifying complex technologies in the data center. There are a lot of innovations on the horizon in VME, for example, next generation compute platforms. There are new generation fabric services, that are emerging. VxBlock 1000 is the place at which you will see all of these technologies introduced, and our customers won't have to wait on new models of Vblock to consume those technologies, they will be resident in them upon their availability to the market. >> The buzz word from the vendor community is future proof, but your saying, you'll be able to, if you buy today, you'll be able to bring in things like NVME and these new technologies down the road. >> The architecture inherently supports the idea of adapting to new technologies as they emerge, and will consume those integrations, as a part of the architectural standard footprint, for the life of the architecture. >> Alright excellent Trey, thanks very much for that overview. Cisco obviously a huge partner of yours, with this whole initiative, many many years. A lot of people have questioned where that goes, so we have a segment from Cisco Live, Stu Miniman is out there, let's break to Stu, then we'll come back and pick it up from there. Thanks for watching. >> Thanks Dave, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at Cisco Live 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. Happy to be joined on the program by Nigel Moulton the EMEA CTO of Dell EMC, and Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks Stu. >> Looking at the long partnership of Dell and Cisco, Siva, talk about the partnership first. >> Absolutely. If you look back in time, when we launched UCS, the very first major partnership we brought, and the converged infrastructure we brought to the market was Vblock, it really set the trend for how customers should consume compute, network, and storage together. And we continue to deliver world class technologies on both sides and the partnership continues to thrive as we see tremendous adoption from our customers. So we are here, several years down, still a very vibrant partnership in trying to get the best product for the customers. >> Nigel would love to get your perspective. >> Siva's right I think I'd add, it defined a market, if you think what true conversion infrastructure is, it's different, and we're going to discuss some more about that as we go through. The UCS fabric is unique, in the way that it ties a network fabric to a compute fabric, and when you bring those technologies together, and converge them, and you have a partnership like Cisco, you have a partnership with us, yeah it's going to be a fantastic result for the market because the market moves on, and I think, VxBlock actually helped us achieve that. >> Alright so Siva we understand there's billions of reasons why Cisco and Dell would want to keep this partnership going, but talk about from an innovation standpoint, there's the new VxBlock 1000, what's new, talk about what's the innovation here. >> Absolutely. If you look at the VxBlock perspective, the 1000 perspective, first of all it simplifies an extremely fast successful product to the next level. It simplifies the storage options, and it provides a seamless way to consume those technologies. From a Cisco perspective, as you know we are in our fifth generation of UCS platform, continues to be a world class platform, leading blade service in the industry. But we also bring the innovation of rack mount servers, as well as 40 gig fabric, larger scale, fiber channel technology as well. As we bring our compute, network, as well as a sound fabric technology together, with world class storage portfolio, and then simplify that for a single pane of glass consumption model. That's absolutely the highest level of innovation you're going to find. >> Nigel, I think back in the early days the joke was you could have a Vblock anyway you want, as long as it's black. Obviously a lot of diversity in product line, but what's new and different here, how does this impact new customers and existing customers. >> I think there's a couple of things to pick up on, what Trey said, what Siva said. So the simplification piece, the way in which we do release certification matrix, the way in which you combine a single software image to manage these multiple discreet components, that is greatly simplified in VxBlock 1000. Secondly you remove a model number, because historically you're right, you bought a three series, a five series, and a seven series, and that sort of defined the architecture. This is now a system wide architecture. So those technologies that you might of thought of as being discreet before, or integrated at an RCM level that was perhaps a little complex for some people, that's now dramatically simplified. So those are two things that I think we amplify, one is the simplification and two, you're removing a model number and moving to a system wide architecture. >> Want to give you both the opportunity, gives us a little bit, what's the future when you talk about the 1000 system, future innovations, new use cases. >> Sure, I think if you look at the way enterprise are consuming, the demand for more powerful systems that'll bring together more consolidation, and also address the extensive data center migration opportunities we see, is very critical, that means the customers are really looking at whether it is a in-memory database that scales to, much larger scale than before, or large scale cluster databases, or even newer workloads for that matter, the appetite for a larger system, and the need to have it in the market, continues to grow. We see a huge install base of our customers, as well as new customers looking at options in the market, truly realize, the strength of the portfolio that each one of us brings to the table, and bringing the best-of-breed, whether it is today, or in the future from an innovation standpoint, this is absolutely the way that we are approaching building our partnership and building new solutions here. >> Nigel, when you're talking to customers out there, are they coming saying, I'm going to need this for a couple of months, I mean this is an investment they're making for a couple years, why is this a partnership built to last. >> An enterprise class customer certainly is looking for a technology that's synonymous with reliability, availability, performance. And if you look at what VxBlock has traditionally done and what the 1000 offers, you see that. But Siva's right, these application architectures are going to change. So if you can make an investment in a technology set now that keeps the premise of reliability, availability, and performance to you today, but when you look at future application architectures around high capacity memory, adjacent to a high performance CPU, you're almost in a position where you are preparing the ground for what that application architecture will need, and the investments that people make in the VxBlock system with the UCS power underneath at the compute layer, it's significant, because it lays out a very clear path to how you will integrate future application architectures with existing application architectures. >> Nigel Moulton, Siva Sivakumar, thank you so much for joining, talking about the partnership and the future. >> Siva: Thank you. >> Nigel: Pleasure. >> Sending back to Dave in the US, thanks so much for watching The Cube from Cisco Live Barcelona. >> Thank you. >> Okay thanks Stu, we're back here with Jeff Boudreau. We talked a little bit earlier about the history of conversion infrastructure, some of the impacts that we've seen in IT transformations, Trey took us through the architecture with some of the announcement details, and of course we heard from Cisco, was a lot of fun in Barcelona. Jeff bring it home, what are the take aways. >> Some of the key take aways I have is just I want to make sure everybody knows Dell EMC's continued commitment to modernizing infrastructure for conversion infrastructure. In addition to that was have a strong partnership with Cisco as you heard from me and you also heard from Cisco, that we both continue to invest and innovate in these spaces. In addition to that we're going to continue our leadership in CI, this is critical, and it's extremely important to Dell, and EMC, and Dell EMC's Cisco relationship. And then lastly, that we're going to continue to deliver on our customer promise to simplify IT. >> Okay great, thank you very much for participating here. >> I appreciate it. >> Now we're going to go into the crowd chat, again, it's an ask me anything. What make Dell EMC so special, what about security, how are the organizations affected by converged infrastructure, there's still a lot of, roll your own going on. There's a price to pay for all this integration, how is that price justified, can you offset that with TCO. So let's get into that, what are the other business impacts, go auth in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, Twitter is my preferred. Let's get into it thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you in the crowd chat. >> I want IT to be dial tone service, where it's always available for our providers to access. To me, that is why IT exists. So our strategy at the hardware and software level is to ruthlessly standardize leverage in a converged platform technology. We want to create IT almost like a vending machine, where a user steps up to our vending machine, they select the product they want, they put in their cost center, and within seconds that product is delivered to that end user. And we really need to start running IT like a business. Currently we have a VxBlock that we will run our University of Vermont Medical Center epic install on. Having good performance while the provider is within that epic system is key to our foundation of IT. Having the ability to combine the compute, network, and storage in one aspect in one upgrade, where each component is aligned and regression tested from a Dell Technology perspective, really makes it easy as an IT individual to do an upgrade once or twice a year versus continually trying to keep each component of that infrastructure footprint upgraded and aligned. I was very impressed with the VxBlock 1000 from Dell Technologies, specifically a few aspects of it that really intrigued me. With the VxBlock 1000, we now have the ability to mix and match technologies within that frame. We love the way the RCM process works, from a converged perspective, the ability to bring the compute, the storage, and network together, and trust that Dell Technologies is going to upgrade all those components in a seamless manner, really makes it easier from an IT professional to continue to focus on what's really important to our organization, provider and patient outcomes.

>> Hello everyone, welcome to this special presentation, "The Future of Converged Infrastructure". My name is Dave Volante and I'll be your host for this event where the focus is on Dell EMC's converged infrastructure announcement. Nearly a decade ago, modern converged infrastructure really came to the fore in the marketplace and what you had is compute, storage, and network brought together in a single managed entity. And when you talk to IT people, the impact was roughly a 30 to 50% total cost of ownership reduction really depending on a number of factors. How much virtualization they had achieved, how complex their existing processes were, how much they could save on database and other software licenses and maintenance, but roughly that 30 to 50% range. Fast forward to 2018 and you're looking at a multi-billion dollar market for converged infrastructure. Jeff Boudreau is here, he's the president of the Dell EMC storage division, Jeff thanks for coming on today. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, so we're going to set up this announcement. Let me go through the agenda. So Jeff and I are going to give an overview of the announcement and then we're going to go to Trey Layton who's the Chief Technology Officer of the converged infrastructure group at Dell EMC, where he's going to focus on the architecture and some of the announcement details, and then we're going to go to Cisco Live to a pre-recorded session that we did in Barcelona and get the Cisco perspective and then Jeff and I will come back to wrap it up. We also you might notice if you're in a crowd chat, we have a crowd chat going on, so underneath this video stream you can ask questions, you got to login with LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. I prefer Twitter. Kind of an ask me anything crowd chat. We have analysts on, Stu Miniman is hosting that call. We're going to talk about what this announcements is all about, what the customer issues are that are being addressed by this announcement. So Jeff, let's get into it. From your perspective, what's the sort of state of converged infrastructure today? >> Oh, great question, so I'm really bullish on CI in regards to converged infrastructure and kind of the way the market's going. We see continued interest in the growth of the market of our customers, driven by the need for simplicity, agility, elasticity of those on-prem resources. Dell EMC pioneered the CI market several years ago with the simple premise of simplify IT, and our focus and our commitment to our customers has not changed of simplifying IT. And as our customers continue to seek for new ways to simplify consolidate infrastructure, we as expect more and more of our customers to embrace CI as a fast and easy way to modernize their infrastructure and transform IT. >> You talk about transformation, we do a lot of events and everybody's talking about digital transformation and IT transformation. What role does converged infrastructure play in those types of transformations, maybe you could give us some examples. >> Sure, I mean so first I would say our results speak for themselves, as I said we pioneered the CI industry. As the market leader, we enabled thousands of customers who are allowed to drive kind of business transformation and digital transformation. And when I speak to customers specifically, converged infrastructure is not about just the infrastructure, it's about the operating model, and how they simplify IT. I'd say two of the biggest areas of impacts that customers highlight to me are really about the acceleration of application delivery, and then the other big one is around the increase of operational efficiencies allowing customers to free up resources, to reinvest however they see fit. >> Now since the early days of converged infrastructure, Cisco has been a big partner of yours. You guys were kind of quasi-exclusive for awhile, they went out and sought other partners, you went out and sought other partners, a lot of people have questions about that relationship. What's your perspective on that relationship? >> So our partnership with Cisco is as strong as ever. We're proud of this category that we created together. We've been on this journey for a long time and we've been working together and that partnership will continue as we go forward. In full transparency there are of course some topics where we disagree, just like any normal relationship where we have disagreements. An example of that would be HCI. But in the CI space our partnership is as strong as ever. We'll have thousands of customers between the two of us that we will continue to invest and innovate together on, and I think later in this broadcast you're going to hear directly from Cisco on that, so we're both doubling down on the partnership and we're both committed to CI. >> I want to ask you about sort of leadership generally and specifically as it relates to converged infrastructure and hyperconverged. My question is is hyperconverged is booming. It's a high growth market, I sometimes joke that Dell EMC is now- you're a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrants, 101 Gartner Magic Quadrants out of the 99, (Boudreau laughs) you're just leading everything in I think both CI and the HCI categories. What's your take - is CI still relevant? >> First I'd say it's great to come from a leadership position so I thank you for bringing that up, I think it's really important and as Michael talks about being the essential infrastructure company, that's huge for as Dell Technology so we're really proud of that and we want to lean into that strength. Now, on HCI versus CI, to me it's an "and" world. Right everybody wants to get stuck into "either" "or". To me it's about the "and" story. All our customers are going on a journey in regards to kind of how they transform their businesses. At the end of the day, if I took my macro view and took a step back it's about the data. The data's the critical asset right, the good news for me and for our teams is data always continues to grow and is growing at an amazing rate. And as that critical asset- customers are really kind of thinking about a modern data strategy as they drive forward. As part of that they're looking how to store, protect, secure, analyze, move that data, really unleashing that data to provide value back to their businesses. So with all of that not all data is going to be created equal, as part of that is they built up those strategies. It's going to be a journey in regards to how they do it and that's software defined versus purpose-built arrays, versus converged or hyperconverged or even cloud, those deployment models. We, Dell EMC and Dell Technologies want to be that strategic partner that trust and advise them to help on that journey. >> Alright Jeff thanks for helping with the setup, I want to ask you to hang around a little bit-- >> Sure. >> We're going to go to a video, and then we're going to bring back Trey Layton, talk about the architecture so keep it right there, we'll be right back.

>> Announcer: From the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's the Cube. On the ground with Accenture Labs 30th Anniversary Celebration. >> Hello and welcome back to our special on the ground coverage of Accenture Labs 30 year celebration. Here's to the next 30 years is their slogan and I'm John Ferry with the Cube and I'm here with Marc Carrel-Billiard who's the Senior Manger that runs R&D Global for Accenture Labs. Welcome to the Cube conversation. Thanks for joining me. >> Marc: Thanks, John. >> So, I got to ask you, Accenture 30 years, they weren't called Accenture back then, it was called Arthur Anderson or Anderson Consulting and then it became Accenture, now you got Accenture Lab. But you have had labs all throughout. >> You're right. I mean, it's pretty amazing. And I think this is absolutely right. So we had this organization for 30 years, believe it or not. And that organization is doing applied research. So what we do is we leverage new technology innovations and everything to really solve business challenges or societal pacts and social changes and everything. >> State of the art back then, if I remember correctly my history was converting an S&A gateway to a technet to a TCP/IP network. >> Yeah we just improved a little bit. We went to quantum computing, to Blockchain, to different type of things like that. >> What a magical time it is right now >> It is magic. >> Share some color on today's culture, the convergence of all this awesomeness happening. Open source, booming. Cloud, unlimited compute. You have now more developers than ever, Enterprise is looking more and more like consumers. So a lot of action. What's the excitement? Share the cutting edge lab's activity. I think you said something absolutely right. I mean, I think there's a combinatorial effect of two different technology working very well together, and is a compression on time, all those technology waves that are maturing very fast. So one thing that we been doing is a great example for that, is quantum computing. You heard about quantum computing, you know? >> Of course. >> That's the new Paradigm of computing power. Leveraging like, quantum mechanics, you know? I mean it's really amazing stuff. And believe it or not, we've been working with D-Wave, they have a quantum computer in Vancouver, and a companies called 1QBit, it's a software company, and we've built, on top of that, an algorithm that has molecule comparison. And we worked with Biogen, a pharmaceutical company, to work on this. Now, the really staggering thing about it, is that we talked about it like six months ago, we build the pilot in two months time. Done. And then now, I mean, it's already made. >> Well, this is amazing. This is what highlights to me what's exciting. What you just described is a time frame that's really short. >> That's right! >> Back in the old days, it was these projects were months and months, and potentially years. >> Absolutely. >> What is the catalyst for that? Is it the technology leverage? Is it the people? Is it the process? All three? What's the take? >> I think it's all three. I would say that definitely the technology, as I said, get combined faster. You said very right, there's a lot of capability in term of high performance computing we can get through the Cloud, the storage as well. The data that we're going to be accessing, and then I think the beauty is that, putting all the people together for the quantum work. We had mathematicians, we have from Biogen, we have our own labs, and all people together, they make the magic happen. >> 30 years ago, just a little history 'cause I'm old enough to actually talk about 30 years ago, the Big Six Accounting Firms, accounting firms, ran all the big software projects. How ironic is that, that today Blockchain disrupts the even need for an accounting firm, because with Smart Contracts, Blockchain is turning out to be a very, very disruptive operation in technology, because you don't need an accounting firm to clear out contracts. Blockchain is very disruptive. What are you guys doing on Blockchain? >> You're absolutely right, John. And you know, the first thing. So, we have seven labs in Accenture Labs. And we have one lab didn't get it on Blockchain, and it's Sophia Antipolis inside of France, where I'm from, by the way. We're doing a lot of things with Blockchain. A lot of people are thinking about Blockchain as a system that's going to regulate, basically, transfer a transaction, financial transaction. We want to take Blockchain to the next level. And one thing we're doing, for example, We're using Blockchain for Angels. How we're track, basically, donation you're going to do. We going to use Blockchain for-- >> Well that's because people want to know their money's actually going to good. >> That's right! That's right! >> Not to scams that have been out there. >> You got it. >> We going to use Blockchain as a DRM system, Digital Rights Management system. We're going to use that in manufacturing industry, in many industry, and it goes on and on and on. >> What is the big buzz right now with Cryptocurrency? You're seeing a lot of these ICOs out there. Are those legit? In your mind, is it just a bubble? Is it just a normalization's going to come, what's your take on Initial Coin Offerings? >> I think, to be honest with you, I think this is a progress with thing. I mean, we discuss about Blockchain and everything. We see some trains going there. I think it's accelerating as well, because it's got a lot of take up and everything. We see, also, the world changing, and I think we need to look at the geo-political context of the world and what could happen. So I think those kind of new regulation, the way it's going to work. I mean, it's coming on time, people's going to leverage it, so I think it's not some fad stuff. This is something that's going to stay. >> It's just a Wild West. >> But it was, exactly. Right now, we need to work on the right standard, we need to figure out how it's going to work and everything. >> What is the exciting things that you see out there right now? I mean, Blockchain just kind of gets us excited 'cause you can imagine different new things happening. But the clients that I talk to, customers, your clients, or CIOs, they have to reimagine the future. >> That's right. >> With preexisting conditions called legacy infrastructure. >> Exactly >> Legacy software. How do they get the best of the magic and manage the preexisting conditions? >> So, there's a lot of innovation in term of software development. You take energy in everything that we have, basically, to connect to your legacy, and leverage it as much as you can. You know, there's a big progress in artificial intelligence today. I mean, I've live a lot of winters of artificial intelligence. I think finally, maybe there's going to be some spring. Why? Because of what we talk about. The iPad from one's computing the data available, and then also, some new type of algorithm like deep learning and everything. That data that is somewhere into this company called the Dark Data, people is going to be able to leverage it, and then make those artificial intelligence systems even more intelligence, smarter, and everything. So, legacy's here, but we're going to leverage it, and we're going to give a second life to those legacy environment. So those technology like artificial intelligence, new analytics and all those different things. >> So I got to ask you a kind of politically hot question, which is the digital transformation. >> Yes. >> So there's doubt we're in a digital transformation. No brainer. Yet, I go to conferences over and over again, and I see Gartner Magic Quadrant. I'm number one on the Magic Quadrant, and everybody's number one in the Magic Quadrant. So, the question is, what's the scoreboard of the new environment? Because, if you use the old scoreboard, and the world's horizontally scalable, you're going to have a blending of Magic Quadrants. So there's going to be a disruption, and that's causing confusion to the CIOs and CXOs because you got Chief Data Officer, Chief Security Officer, you got no perimeter for security, you have quantum computing, you have Cloud. So, people are trying to squint through all the nonsense and saying, how do you measure success? >> Yeah. >> Certainly customers is a good one. >> I think this is the typical question. I mean, this whole digital transformation, I understand that is important, and we need to understand. I mean, Accenture, and especially the lab, it's all about result. And you know what? The mission of the lab is new, it's applied, is now. New technology applied for real challenges, and I want to deliver it now, and I want to work for six months. So my word is that our research is outcome driven, and that's exactly what we're seeing. So, I told you about the quantum computing, and I have other example where we are really laser-focused on making an outcome. I think that's where-- >> So, to your point, people shouldn't buy promises. >> No. >> They should buy results. >> That's right. >> So, Peter Barris, who runs our research, said to me, and I asked him the question, he goes, ah, that's just a bunch of BS. The ultimate metric is how many customers you have. So, someone should be touting their customers. >> Sorry? >> They should be touting their customers, not some survey. >> No, absolutely. And I'm really for that. >> I want to tell you something, that I'm a very pragmatic person. I'm coming from the field, where I was serving 400 clients doing, every day, project delivery, you know? >> John: God bless you. >> And I've always been doing innovation at the same time, but my view was that innovation needs to be scalable, it needs to be tangible, it needs to be outcome driven. So again, this is really the matter of the lab, and if you look at how the lab works with the rest of the organization of Accenture, this is exactly what we're doing. We connect with our studio, where we can do prototyping front of the eyes of our client. We connect with Open Innovation, where we connect with the best start ups in the world. I think, you remember when I told you combinatorial effect. There's a combinatorial effect with technology that is a combinatorial effect with people. If you put the people from start up, the best guys from the lab, the best guys from the studios and everything, that's where the magic happens. >> So this is a new configuration? >> We collect the innovation architecture. >> So this is a scalable model for being agile, and the results are what? Faster performance? >> Faster performance, innovative performance, and tangible outcome. >> Okay Marc, you're an excitable guy, I like talkin' with you, what are you most excited about right now in this world that you're living in? So, I told you about the technology, and there's one thing that the lab is doing, and we'll be launching that this year, and we'll continue expanding. It's what we call Tech For Good. Tech For Good is how we're going to apply technology to change society. What we're going to do for fighting hunger in India. How we're going to give situational awareness to blind people using augmented reality immersion learning. That keeps me awake at night, because this is technology for best usage, it allows for our people to sleep well at night. My kids are proud of me, and I think we can-- >> Change the world! >> That's right! We can attract great people. >> Alright, final question. Here at the celebration, at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, what's the big scene here? Share with the folks who are watching, who aren't here, what's happening. >> I think, first of all, the venue is amazing. Computer Historic Museum is probably one of my favorite museum here in Silicon Valley. I mean, you need to understand that, 15 years old I started to work on a IBM 360 of my uncle, so the machine over there, I know it. I worked on it. And when I see the completed progress where we are today, when we see the Cray, when we see the quantum and everything, I feel so lucky that we're celebrating 30 years. Now I'd to go for the next 30 years of the lab. That's what I want to do. >> Let's get that on our next interview. Marc, thanks for sharing, here's to the next 30 years. This is the Cube coverage of Accenture Lab's 30 year celebration. The Computer History Museum, I'm John Ferry. Thanks for watching.

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

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco it's the CUBE, covering Informatica World 2017 brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live in San Francisco for our wrap-up of day one, the CUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017. So our flagship program, we go out to the events, and extract the signal and the noise. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, the CUBE. My co-host this week is Peter Burris, Head of Research at SiliconANGLE Media, also the General Manager of Wikibon.com. Go to Wikibon.com and check out all the great research, great stuff behind the paywall, subscription required but also some free content there as well and our special guest is Neil Raden, who's the new analyst on the Wikibon team. Welcome to the team. You're covering the value of data, and analytics industry veteran, great to have you on the team. Thanks for joining us on our wrap-up here. >> Thank you. >> Welcome Peter, look here, this is kind of a coming-out party for Informatica. We've been following them for multiple years. Some of their top exec has been CUBE alumni for many, many years. I think I admit Wallie's going to be on his eighth year, eighth time on the CUBE, but look behind as you see a new branding. Informatica has a new CMO, and she's got swagger and she's got brand impact. Informatica is now going to start bragging about their products. Although I have some critical analysis of Informatica we'll get to in a second but I've always said they've brought in a team of folks during the going private that have product chops, and they've had an install base, and their goal has been from the beginning let's go private close the curtain, and get stuff where you organize, and really work on the product and install base. Can they pivot? That was my question three years ago. Every year they keep on coming out with not a land grab but an incremental and moving the ball down the field to use your football analogy first and then do it again but starting to get into that horizontally scalable cloud model and with good cloud deals, looking poised, in my opinion, for being a data layer, potentially for making that data fabric on. So to me, I think that's the big story here. So far is some good news around the brand, product increases got AI, augmented intelligence with CLAIRE. Some interesting dynamics, which means the interface the data is changing, not only the underlying value of the data, which we want to get into but Informatica is trying to up level the interface. Your thoughts? >> So I think you're absolutely right, John. I think we've seen three things here. First off, Informatica has always had a pretty decent product kit, well embedded within some really first-rate customers. Number two, they've been talking about the need to accommodate some of the new trends around cloud, and how they're going to move in that direction. They've been talking about it. This is the first year we've really seen it. Number three, they even, when Informatica talks, people have historically not listened as much. Sally Jenkins, the new CMO has gotten an enormous amount of work done in a very, very short period of time. This is a bang so and it's manifesting itself in that people are buzzing about it. >> Yeah. >> It's even if Informatica has a lot to do to really be that enterprise cloud data management leader, a lot left to do but it all starts by presenting themselves in a coherent way. That's something that we're seeing for the first time. >> The value proposition has changed significantly. I was talking about the Amazon stock price. Since 2010, it's just been a skyrocket growth for Amazon across the board. Yeah, I got the retail but AWS certainly has been powering it. Having a good brand behind you is going to really energize the channel, ISV, software developers. Like I always joked about the old days, when I used to work at Hewlett-Packard, the joke was I used to call cold dead fish versus sushi. HP would be so accurate, so engineering-oriented, they would be so accurate around the products. They didn't really have a lot of marketing, and the joke was if they had sushi, they called it cold dead fish because that's what it is. Sushi sounds better but again back to marketing, they need to bring the brand out, and put a message around the shift to value. >> Well think about how important it's going to be to a company that increasingly acknowledges or acknowledges increasingly. Their customers are going to find it in something like the Amazon Marketplace or in Google, or in some other cloud environment. It means that they have to bias the customer to choose Informatica versus a range of tools that may not be as good but some of them are going to be open source to get people to bias at that moment, you got to get your brand out there. You have to get your identity out there. Informatica was not going to be a success when the customers making that decision as they're looking at that Amazon Marketplace just by word-of-mouth. They have to get their name out there. So this is big. The products are still good and making, and improving. Getting to the cloud is a big deal. Delivering on their promises, and now having a marketing platform that allows them to scream a little bit louder from the rafters, about who they are and what they want to be. A lot of it's coming again. >> Day two, we're going to have a lot. All the top execs on, they were in an off-site down the street right here at Intercontinental in San Francisco with Executive Customer Day, but we had SVP on for cloud business. We had the board member, Jerry Hill, who's five decades in the business. I mean he essentially laid it out. Hybrid cloud is here to stay, and it's not going to be an overnight success. It's going to be a transition, and that favors the legacy vendors, who are sharpening their saw, and getting their products in line. Of course we have the Chicago Cubs on, and we took the ring, almost put in my pocket in a very Putin-esque like style. We all know Robert Kraft waltz Super Bowl ring, to the biggest criminal in the world, Putin, but kind of a fun there. But the baseball team highlights the customer journeys. They have customers that love them and stay with them 'cause of the install base. >> Absolutely and Informatica is deeply embedded, and has been, Neil has been on the vanguard. Look, they got a lot of work to do but they've been on the vanguard of tying together the idea of data, data is an asset, tooling. So you can get more value out of the data through analytics. >> That's right, I'll tell you a little story. I mean, I brought Informatica in to one of my clients the first time in 1996. They were pretty much a brand new company. >> Peter: About a year after they started? >> Yeah and what motivated me to think about Informatica as opposed to any other way we were trying to get data into a data warehouse was that they understood metadata. They were the only company that had an active metadata repository. So this is their heritage. I know that Informatica claims they have, I don't know 10,000 customers. I think a significant number of those are not going to be interested in this whole thing. They don't have the budget for it. They don't have the time or the staff or anything but they've got the elite. When you look at the companies that are clients of Informatica, those are the people that would be interested in and spend time and money on this sort of thing. >> Well let me get you guys perspective as analyst because let's turn this into the analysis of what's happening here with Informatica, and compare that to what's happening in the industry. SAP Sapphire is happening right now in Orlando. We got CUBE coverage in our studio in Palo Alto. But Oracle, SAP, these are database guys. They have systems of record. IBM, Amazon is now a new player in that. They have to balance the install base, systems of record of their data. Now granted old techniques for walls, data warehouse, whatever you want to call. It was an old way. Now the new way's to empower developers to actually build and use that data. So the question is how do they get their product from old to new and modernize quickly, and highlight data as value because this is the thing that you guys are both researching heavily, is that data now is going to start to be evaluation discussion. Are we getting the data through the pipes, if you will, into the hands of the developers, into the apps, into the decision-making process in the value chains that are being reconstructed. This is a top conversation that not a lot of people are laying out there with best practices. Your thoughts? >> Well I think the first thing, then I'll start, like the first thing is that that's probably my biggest thing on Informatica here, is that they need to be more of a beacon about what is the new data management. It's more than just the combination of tools. It's more than just getting data out of applications, and getting data out of databases, and freeing it up so they can be applied. The notion of data management is evolving rapidly, and businesses are trying to as they try to use data as an asset is going to require some significant changes to how we think about-- >> Do you think they could put that stake in the ground right now and owned that right now? >> I think somebody has to. I think they need to take a crack at it. >> I think they're weak on the value. I think they're weak on, you know what happens, I always have this idea that you see their layer cakes, and the things that go from left to right but on the right-hand side of the diagram, there are no people right. What happens when you implement all this? How do people use this okay? That's true of everybody in this industry, not just Informatica. So that's one weakness. Last year when I was here, I thought they had a real weakness in governance but with the dike who acts on acquisitions, I think they made a giant step towards that. They've got a lot, they've got a lot of the piece, parts, and then putting them together but I don't think they're addressing what happens next. I call it the Jordan River problem. We wandered around for 40 years. We got to the Jordan River. We can't get across the damn river right. >> Is it a river or lake or an ocean? I mean it's a data river. It's something happening. It's a lake or something. >> I think that's where they are because it's a whole different discipline. >> But is that on Informatica? I mean they're now a smaller company or is that an industry issue? >> No, it's an industry issue but companies like Informatica, if they really want to be a leader as he flings his grad classes around, that's all passionate I have about this. If they want to be a leader or the leader, they have to put a stake in the ground don't they? >> I believe so. >> Okay so what about positives? Neil what's your thoughts on how are they well-positioned in your mind? >> Well, putting together all these different pieces so that they operate together is phenomenal. Moving to, I still don't understand how enterprise software companies move to a subscription model smoothly. That's got to be a real headache but they're moving to that. They've adopted the cloud. They still have the data integration. I mean that's their keystone. It works beautifully, it gets better every year, and that's what attracts people to them. So I think these are all good things. >> And the good news is they're private so they can do that subscription, kind of hide the ball a little bit then come out. But they're not doing bad. I mean they have a spring to their step. >> Here's, I think Neil's absolutely right. Here's what I would add to it. They're executing, they have demonstrated over the past couple of years, certainly that we've been here, and listening to them, they made promises, they've delivered. They've made new promises, they've delivered. Some of these promises have been complex. Some of them have been extremely hard. They've still delivered. That is a real important piece of the story because this notion of data management is changing. Developers are going to want to work with companies that have competent management, that deliver on the promises they're making and Informatica is proving that they're up to that progress. >> I think, I think-- >> Another thing John, they have brilliant people. Everybody I've met here from Informatica is really special. I mean you know maybe they kept the clunkers in the closet somewhere but they've got brilliant motivated people working here. >> John: You've got a ton of experience. >> Peter: We're passionate about this stuff. >> They've got a lot of experience too, and they brought in some new guns the product side we're going to admit has a fantastic product executive and he obviously has that background but I want to shift now to the end user now. They're now living in the world of massive business transformation. Yeah, digital transformation, rah-rah. It's kind of overhyped but what that translates to is business transformation. That's the conversation on all CXOs. >> Peter: Business transformation around data. >> Around data so I want to get your thoughts now vis-a-vis that the customers perspective. I'm looking at Informatica. How do I feel about them? >> Well before I march off this mortal coil, this is what I want to happen. I want to say look computer I want to put together a new pricing model all right. Here are a couple variables I'm interested in. One of my competitors just issued a press release with some new pricing data. Go get that and come back to me with some data. Recommend some data I need to build a model to do this. >> Peter: Give me some updates. >> Yeah. >> That's CLAIRE, I mean that's something to talk about doing some automation machine learning. Peter, do you think that's the nirvana, that is a nice position to be? It's like hey Alexa, play some music, and you know they play a genre for you. So I mean give me some data, pricing data. >> So let's think about the elements that are going to be important as we think about this new notion of data management. Again, I don't think Informatica is too far from this. A new notion of data management suggests number one, that if your business is going to use data differently, you have to introduce some notion of some concept of design. How do I design business around data, and how do I design data around business needs? Part of that problem is going to be being able to go out and capture inventory catalog metadata. No question about it. You're going to need the next generation of data management. It's going to be very metadata focused. Secondly, you need a lot of the tooling that's capable of doing the transformation and creating derivative value out of data. That's something else that they have. The third one and this is a really, really important piece, and we talked about it for example with (faint) and a couple of other people. Data has to move but it has to move not just based on point to point interfaces that are programmed and built but based on patterns of utilization, and in a way that the system recognizes that. That is going to be crucially important, that whole notion of data that's moving in response to what the business needs, and not what the people recognize and do. >> Okay, so that reminds me. I was speaking to someone who is part of their security stuff right and I said well have you considered how data security could benefit analyst as opposed to keeping the company out of trouble? >> Peter: Business analysts? >> Yeah, just couldn't answer the question right. Because I said, so tell me how this works, and she said "Well, if someone has a pattern "of how they work with data, "if suddenly they work out in that pattern, "it's going to send off a signal." I said what's a signal? Are they going to get a skull and crossbones like oh you can't have this data. >> It sends off a policy flag. Okay, hey you're out of your swim lane. It's like get back into your jail cell. I mean it's restrictive, Absolutely restrictive. >> But think about it this way. Don't you want your analysts to be thinking out of the box? Which means on a regular basis, they would be requesting data they don't normally want. >> Here's what I like about Informatica from my perspective. Again, you guys are in under the hood in a deeper way but from my perspective is that what they're doing with the horizontally scalable is interesting, and this is interesting on the metadata side, you mentioned that with SPAN, Google SPAN are now available. They're in Amazon. If they can somehow create that addressable data sets that could be horizontally scalable and freely available, I think that is a winning strategy because most of the vendors in the data take a siloed stack approach. Okay here's our stack, you own it. So I think they're on this genius play of okay we can get this horizontal layer, that is now the lock spec, because now I mean I'm agnostic on cloud. So to me I think that directionally is correct. Where that is when the rubber meets the road, is a whole another story. So your thoughts on that. >> It's very exciting, I hope they pull it off. >> Yeah, I think it's very exciting. So if you think about it-- >> How do they pull it off? >> Let's well, so there's, let's-- >> We're not being shot by the other income with bigger guns. >> Let's think about it a couple of different ways of thinking about this right. On the one hand, you have new ways of thinking about how data is going to be spread in a multi or a hybrid cloud world. So that's happening. Secondly, we're thinking about data control, and a data control plane above that, and they're a bunch of companies that are talking about how you bring control across all these different multi cloud instances. On top of that, now we're talking about some of the analytics and how data gets huge from a metadata standpoint. So this is extremely relevant to where the industry is going to be in five years. Somebody is going to get there. It's best to look for the folks who are skating to that puck. Informatica seems to be skating to that puck. >> All right, I want to ask you guys a question. I want you to tell me if I'm smoking crack or not. When I say this the whole goal of getting data from any database at any given time in less than 100 milliseconds, no matter where it came from, when it came from, IOT included all the stuff that's coming in, I'm an app developer, I want data programmability. Meaning I have an app, and I'm doing some some cognitive, cognition thing and all sudden, Neil you bought something at Nordstrom's from three years ago. It's some database. Yeah, that means let's think about the logic on that query. But that data could be cross connected with other relevant data, your Twitter stuff or whatever you're doing, and pull together, provide some insight for you. Now that sounds like I'm smoking crack to pull that off. Is that possible? Can it be done in the kind of low latency mechanism? >> You know it can be done but I don't think we know enough about the data. There are four types of metadata still leave out deep semantic information. I'm hoping they're going to work on that. I mean I was in here 10 years ago pitching ontologies, and they threw me out. (laughs) But I think that the four types of-- (fast crosstalk) Yeah, I think the four types of metadata are great but they're still generating it mechanically from datasets as opposed to some knowledge about what the data really means. To do what you want to do, I think you need some kind of semantic metadata. >> I agree with that, and you also need semantic information about the underlying network as well. So the idea of a semantic-- >> So a lot more work to do to make that happen. >> A lot more work. So final question-- >> It's probably not going to be 100 milliseconds, 140, 150, maybe 200. >> Yeah, well I mean anything, just getting the data would be a win. Okay final question this is kind of more on the stuff we were talking about in leading to the intro of the work you guys are doing. The valuation concept of data, I mean I say valuation, I could mean financial valuation. How valuable a firm is? Or what is our CFO goes, where's our assets, where's our data assets? So there's a combination of data hygiene, and also in heart surgery, right, if it's the heartbeat of your organization, who the hell's the surgeon? Who's the doctor? When do you do CPR? Who does the hygiene? Who does the amputation? I mean who does, I mean this is like, I mean this is a data nightmare of a reconstruction of a company. The nature of the firm is completely upside down when you start thinking data. Just your reaction to that concept. >> Well, they have a very loyal customer base. So I think that they can get out with this before it's completely cooked, and have some success. Maybe I'm being optimistic. I don't know but I think-- >> John: Valuation of data. >> I think that there is a way of thinking about it is not to value data in a narrow sense but to think about data, what we're calling data dynamics. The idea that data's value is founded in its use. It's not something that has value when it's just sitting there and not being used. >> It's, yeah, it's like that old saw. I don't know how to define pornography but I know it when I see it, right. That was a Supreme Court Justice. I didn't say that. >> John: Looks like teenage sex. The hero things they're having it, pull the notch. >> This goes back to the notion of data management. It's how am I going to use data? How am I going to get value out of data through its use? That suggests a whole different set of principles and practices that are quite different from how we normally value assets. >> Okay, tomorrow we got the top execs coming in. We got the CMO, we got the CEO, we got the EVP of Products. What should we be asking them tomorrow? What should I be opening up the kimono and digging into them on? >> I'll ask him what the roadmap is in terms of getting this implemented in their best customers. Not the software development roadmap. So tell us. (fast crosstalk) How this is going to roll out for you? >> You're going to be here up 'til two o'clock. We'll be there, what are you going to be looking at? >> I'll look for two things. One is I would continuously push on the execution. Are they really executing as reliably as we think they are? 'Cause they're making some big promises this year too. The second one I'd look at is again, that beacon, that touchstone, what is this new data management? What are you really going to be leading? >> I'm still blown away by the conferences I go to, everyone's like what is a new way, new modern era's evolving and it's transforming. We're number one in five magic quadrants. I mean how can you get magic quadrants as the scoreboard if you go into a new definition? So again, our metric KPI on that is customers. What is your customer traction? Show me the proof points. I don't care what magic quadrant you're in. That's an old metric. That's siloed based. That's not reality based, in my opinion. So we will drill them on customers. To me that's the scoreboard. Okay it's the CUBE breaking down day one wrap up here at Informatica World. This is CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, and special guest new Wikibon analyst, Neil Raden, covering the value of data and analytics. See you tomorrow, stay with us for more continuing coverage tomorrow for full day. Be right back.