 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2016. Brought to you by Informatica. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Okay, welcome back. When we are here live at Informatica World 2016, exclusive coverage with SiliconANGLE Media is theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, CEO of SiliconANGLE, co-CEO of SiliconANGLE with Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconANGLE Media and general manager Wikibon Research. Our next guest is Bruce Chisholm, who's a board member of Informatica. He's on the board of Oracle. I mean, so many boards you're on. I can't even say them all. You're also on the board of Elemental Technologies, which we interviewed at Amazon. Great team acquired by Amazon during re-invent. Welcome to theCUBE. Welcome to being a CUBE alumni. It's great to be here. Great to have a luminary like yourself on. You've been in the industry for, God, since the computer industry. Luminary. I'm just an old retired guy. But you're active on your Oracle board. So I got to ask you the first question, because many of you, Mark, heard clearly their cloud end-to-end, and you heard Larry. Larry also hasn't yet been on the CUBE. We'll get him on. But when Mark was on the CUBE, he said, look, we're end-to-end cloud. Informatica is all cloud. They can be cloud on-prem. So you're on boards with both those companies. What does Informatica have to do to survive? Because you can argue that Oracle is kind of going down that road. Is there an intersection? Can Informatica stand on their own? What's your take on that? So Oracle is successful. They're a nice little $40 billion company, generating $15 billion or so free cash flow. They're going to do just fine, and Larry is certainly driving the transition to the cloud. The advantage that Informatica has as relates to data management is that they are truly Swiss in their approach. The company is able to go to their customer and say, look, we'll take data from anywhere and help you manage it in a way that you can really use it for your business. So if someone's using the Oracle stack, yeah. They'll take advantage of Oracle's DI capabilities. If somebody's using SAP stack. Oracle works great. That's correct. But if somebody truly is working in a diverse environment, a diverse ecosystem, with data coming from all kinds of places, they will feel more comfortable with somebody who doesn't control the stack. Is there another Switzerland out there? Is there another independent entity out there that you, competition-wise? I just don't, I mean, I don't see it. Not of scale. There's a whole bunch of smaller players that I would consider ankle buyers, and then you have the stack guys. Which is one of the reasons when I was working with Primera and looking at Informatica, that I got excited about the opportunity. This is a billion dollar company. Well, they went private so the opportunity to make more money on an IPO certainly is on the horizon. I interviewed Anil at Amazon Reinvent 2014 on theCUBE, and he was the lowly chief product officer that now he's the CEO. What a great team. But he laid out two years ago, this is not like they're groping for a strategy. They've been on this now. You can see the movement to go private. Does that take the pressure off of being a board member, being private? No, no, no, no. So first of all, the big, the great news about the company is in a lot of ways it reminds me of Adobe. I spent 14 years of my life at Adobe, serving as CEO. When I took over as CEO, the company was struggling. The company was about 800 million in revenue, had a whole bunch of money in the bank. Know that the EV was around 1.7 billion. The street had written the thing off. Had it been today, activists would have come in and forced something to happen. Fortunately, that didn't exist back then. So what they had was great products, great technology, loyal customers, passionate customers, and a macro environment that was in their favor. I looked at them for a minute and I'm going, wow, this is just like Adobe. This is a billion-dollar company with incredible products. You look at Gartner, where they're positioned, you look at Forest or Wave, where they're positioned. This is an awesome product company. Customers love them. We interviewed customers. They love Infamanica. The MPS scores are off the chart. The employees passionate about what they do. And you look at the macro dynamics of more and more data, more and more data needs to be integrated, cleanse, secure, and so on. That's great. It's also a company that has the business maturity and the business processes of a company that's about 200 million dollars. The challenge management team's pretty solid. I mean, the team's very, you know. The biggest challenge was to go to the market. And silos, redundancies, lots of room for business efficiencies. Just like Adobe. I'm going, this is great. I could just take my playbook of what I learned at Adobe and help this company get to become a 2 billion, 3 billion, 4 billion. So are they actually doing that playbook? Yeah, so we, if you look at what we've been able to do, taking a shining star, Neil, and who's the product guy, making him the CEO, taking what looked like a really good product guy in Amit, Walia, and making him head of products. Bringing in a CFO that knows how to deal with efficient business processes and work with private sponsors, a guy like Doug Barnett, bringing in a senior marketing guy the senior guy at SAS, at SAS, and making him our CMO, Jim Davis. And now bringing in a senior sales executive, Luana Nassio from IBM. We have the team to take this to the next level. That's awesome. And I got to ask you about the, just you mentioned a comment about Adobe. I love the reference. The activist market that's in now, how many Adobe's are being killed today? Because your point, Adobe was not a dead company. They had innovation money in the bank. And obviously it's a brand, it was phenomenal. Is Yahoo that similar thing? I mean, Yahoo had a great brand. I mean, they're getting destroyed by after this. Being a public company today is much more painful than when I was CEO. I was CEO 2000 and 2007. And I think back to that time, yeah, the quarterly earnings were important. But I had a board that encouraged me to continue to pay attention to the long term. You can't do that now. Unless you're somebody like Oracle, where you have a founder who owns 27% of the stock, you could think about the long term. Or in the case of Facebook, where you control the stock or Google, where you have voting power over the stock. But if you're a typical tech public company today, you're at risk. And if you don't want to be at risk, you have to manage to the short term. Infamanica has the pleasure of doing things for the long term. So we're able to give the customer what they want. So we talk about on-premise cloud. We don't have to worry about it. We could deliver it to the customer. You don't want to buy subscription. You don't have to worry about Michael Dell. He used the term 90 day shot clock. And it's like, that is just, he's like, I was, it sucked. Basically what he said, I didn't even say that alive on the queue, but he's like, it was miserable. And Michael's a small guy. Michael hasn't changed. He knows what he needs to do to run a successful company. He just couldn't do it as a public company. Okay, so I got to ask you one question I had written down and I wanted to ask you was, what's changed with data? I mean, you've seen, you know, the old school IT world grow from, you know, obviously client server, PC revolution, all the way through the internet now here. Real times, obviously on front and center. But what's changed from your perspective? There's a lot of it. What is the highlight? It was the highlights. The volume of data that is being generated is just mind boggling to me. I think back to when I was running Adobe and trying to make decisions, I would struggle to get the data that I needed to feel confident in my decision-making. And many times I just had to rely on my intuition. Which, yeah. Like, give me an example, like sales data? Pricing, pricing. Okay, you know, Photoshop is selling for $4.99. I really think we could raise the price. What should we raise the price to? I'm thinking, okay, I'm a consumer. This is a considered purchase. I'm going to buy a TV. If I'm going to buy a flat screen TV for $9.99. Or for $8.99, if it was $9.49, would I not buy it? No, because I made a decision to buy Samsung TV XYZ model. So I had to use my own intuition. My competitors pricing it. Maybe they figured this out and I'll just follow up. I didn't have any competition. I didn't have any competition at the time. It was more about what is, how far can I go without really alienating my customer? And yeah, I could go to $7.99. So I'm trying to rely on my own intuition versus looking at real data where I could do some market tests and say, okay, why am I pricing here at this price and see what the customer reaction is? I didn't have the time to, I didn't have the tools. I didn't have the infrastructure to give me the answers I needed. Whereas today, there's so much data because of what's coming in through the social networks, what's coming in through traditional data, through your ERP system, what's coming in through real time activity, what's being generated in the cloud. I could use all that data to make a truly informed decision. So volume is a big deal. So just looking at your career, you've had all these kind of like pioneering roles. You mentioned Aldous PageMaker, that was desktop published now as part of that wave of innovation. Elemental, obviously video with Amazon. You mentioned Adobe, they were on the front end. Now you got Informatica, which looks a lot like Adobe, but now it's private. So I've got to ask you, data is big, a lot of volume, but now this new roles emerging, this new CDOs, and so we're constantly hearing data is now a board level conversation. So what the hell does that mean? Do they say, hey, we should get more data? What is the, well, one, is it a board level conversation? And what kind of conversations, you see, and the CDO role? Yeah, so there's, from a board perspective, and I sit on not only Oracle, other public board synopsis, private board's charge point, which is the electrical vehicle charging station company, amongst others. And one side of data from a board perspective is corporate governance. So especially for the public companies, as a board, we need to have the confidence that the information that the company has is secure, that we're dealing with privacy issues, whether it's employee issues or customer data, we want to make sure that's being used appropriately in the right places, right countries. We want to make sure we have the right data to deal with any kind of foreign corruption issues because we're liable to the regulators elected department of justice. So the huge corporate governance issue around data. And then, as a board, more so today than ever before, the board is responsible for validating and questioning the strategy of a company. Well, if it's the opinion of management team that we should go off and do something, that's one thing. When that opinion is backed up by data, that gives the board much more comfort that what they're suggesting and what they're recommending. Well, a harmonious relationship between management and board members. That's correct. So the company, therefore the management team is required, both from a corporate governance perspective and from a strategy perspective to generate the right data to support what they're doing. How they do it within the organization is going to vary enterprise by enterprise. In some cases, they'll have a chief data officer. In some cases, that person will report to the CIO. But would you say early for a CDO? It's kind of an early trend. It's an early trend. I think about the CSO, which has become more and more common. The CDO will become more and more common as the CIO, the CFO, the CEO begin to realize that data is really critical. And it's a hard job being able to homogenize, rationalize all the data that's coming in is hard. Plus the user of the data has changed. I started my career at Microsoft. So I was at Microsoft in the mid 80s, pre-IPO, post-IPO. And I think about Lotus 123, Microsoft Excel. Job's not done till Lotus doesn't run. Were you on that team? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was helping to launch Excel. Okay. And I remember when I first started, there were guys who were using, and there was guys that were using Lotus 123 with a financial analyst within the finance department. People didn't do a lot of spreadsheet work outside of that. Now every business user uses Excel. The same is going to happen with all these business analytics tools like Tableau and Click and Power BI, which means making sure that the company's data is rationalized, is collected in the right way, is cleansed, is secure, is more important than ever before, which is going to put pressure to have somebody in charge of doing that, regardless of title. So you mentioned the team that has been recruited in Informatica, you are a great pedigree and obviously pulling together very nicely. What role will data have on leadership generally? And as you look forward, what are you going to look for in a leader as it pertains to data? I'll say this, at the end of the day, every decision that a leader has to make will never be based 100% on data. If it was that easy, we wouldn't need leaders. Everybody could just look at the data and move on. So there was always a piece of experience, intuition, charisma, observation, prediction skills that is unique to an individual leader. However, because data is so available, that leader has to be able to use and leverage that data like never before. So whereas when I was running a company, the fact that I wasn't that good at analyzing data, who cares? Today, I wanted a leader who's going to recognize the value of data and incorporate that into that decision-making. It's data first, then I'll apply business judgment to it. So what skills are mid- Analytical. So analytic skills, understanding data, so in many respects, you are starting to draw an association between the adoption of data-oriented empirical management skills within a business that Informaic is trying to provide a tool for, two career paths. So one of the best things that someone could do today is implement a lot of these toolings, figure out how to apply it, and then run the business accordingly, because it not only helps the business, but it helps people move in the organization. Absolutely, one of the ah-has for me during the conference this week was when we first bought the company, I was thinking, okay, it's really interesting, the need for data management is greater than ever before because of just the volume, everything we just talked about, the volume of data, the diversity of data, the need to secure it, and so on. The ah-ha for me was, wow, data management is critical for business success and for career success. That was ah-ha for me. It's like, wow, all of a sudden, wood driving, this sector, is driving success of business versus strictly being an enabler. It's no longer just a tool, it's necessary for the future. In many respects, I would presume that one of the chief jobs of the CDO, and whether it's a permanent or transitory job, in many respects, we'll see how that plays out, but the CDO has to be in a position to communicate to the business that clear relationship between using data, but more importantly, culturally, you won't succeed here unless you're part of the team that's using data. The same way that the finance organization said, you know, I could do the Excel spreadsheet for the Lotus 1, 2, 3 spreadsheet for you and the macros or here, why don't I give you a tool that you could use and then you could learn and you could do your own analysis and empower yourself to make the right decisions. Absolutely. Same exact thing. So as you think about the role that products are going to play from Informatica and the development of an ecosystem, which we perhaps might better characterize as kind of a business graph of expertise and capabilities and customers and needs, what role does that play at the board level of Informatica and thinking about where this company's going? This is such a, you know, the volume is enormous, no offense to Informatica, there's no way they're going to be able to do this on their own. We, by no means can we do that on our own and what we don't want to do is lose our focus. And again, I'll draw the analogy to Adobe. When I was at Adobe, there was a lot of people in the company said, hey, we should get into the productivity software business, we should compete against Microsoft with word processing and maybe spreadsheets, go away, time out. I know what we do good, we make stuff look pretty. And we help, we give people tools to make stuff look pretty. Imaging, illustration, and the buyers of stuff look pretty. So why don't we keep doing that? Informatica is really good at data management and it's getting more and more complex. It does mean we need to work with the likes of the Tablo's and Click and Microsoft with Power BI on the visualization of that data and make sure we're seamlessly integrated. It means we need to work with the cloud providers like Azure and AWS and Google and Oracle and others to make sure that we are comfortably sitting on top of their stack. We need to make sure we work with the system integrators who are providing the vertical solutions because we could only take a solution so far. We can't address the unique needs of an insurance company that's doing property insurance and they want to really understand 360 of the customer. We could provide them a 360 platform and MDM, we can't do the verticalization. So working really closely with system integrators critical. And open source? And absolutely, so guys like Hortonworks, we need to make sure that we're taking advantage of what they're doing and in case of Hortonworks, the tons of data. You have to fuel the ecosystem. We have to fuel the ecosystem. We have to be a great partner and do what we do extremely well. Working with the SaaS guys. Microsoft Playbook is perfect here. You got to make sure they make money. And they're on the right side of the line. Yeah, and having Hortonworks come and be on stage with us this week was a big indication of that. Some of it having Microsoft and Salesforce invest in Informatica alongside Primera and Benadio. That's a big deal. So everybody kind of gets it. We just need to encourage it to happen. And we have a team in place that we'll be able to make it happen. Congratulations, this is a great move. Love the strategy of going private and really bringing some value. And watch us when we go public again. We will. We'll be covering you guys. We'll certainly be doing a live video. Certainly, they're reporting on it as well. I'll give you the final word of the segment. Share with the audience, people who are watching that might be sitting back. CXO, senior leaders of companies who hear you and say, hmm, this guy's got some great advice. He's seen a lot of studies involved in a lot of big companies. They're trying to figure out what to do. They all know they got to go to the clouds. Not pretty obvious what has to happen. What should they do? What's the mindset? Give them a quick advice on those senior executives that are watching. Yeah, I've had the benefit of working four Bill Gates, working with Steve Jobs for better and worse, and then trying to oversee Larry Ellison. And if I look at the three things, or if I look at those three individuals who were quite successful, and I think about the common theme between all three, they are or were driven and surrounded themselves with really smart people. And they stayed focused and hands-on in their business. And regardless of what position you have as an executive, you want to be hands-on, you want to be driven, you want to be in the details when you have to, and you want to have really smart people. Bruce, thanks so much. We could do a whole segment on those three people with you. Another time we'll come to your office and do a sit-down. Love to get that. It would be a great one-hour interview. Bruce, thanks for sharing the insight here at Informatica. We'll really appreciate it. My pleasure. Great perspective, great story here. Inside the Cube, we're live at Informatica World. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. We'll be right back with more. You're watching The Cube. It's always fun to come back to The Cube.