 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 everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Peter Burris. We're excited to have back on theCUBE Jim Davis, executive vice president, chief marketing officer for Informatica. Good to see you. Welcome back to theCUBE. This is your event. Yeah, thank you. And thank you all for being here. This is great. Appreciate the support. Obviously, yeah, yeah. As a marketing officer, this is your event. This is, it's sold out. But this is where you bring everybody in. And you have a comprehensive offering. You're from deep tech to sea level conversations. You were emceeing also the executive summit yesterday. What's going on? What's the key message that you're putting out there? What's the center of gravity for Informatica here at this show? Yeah, that's a great question. There's a lot we can talk about here. I think this is an important show for us because this is our first show under new ownership being a privately held company. So hopefully people can appreciate the fact of where we're headed. Going private is actually a very good thing in terms of being able to really look at our business and how we want to evolve. The message here is really one of disruption and data creating that disruption among business right now. So as you look at what's going on in the marketplace right now, what is it that organizations need to do to not only thrive but also survive in these particular markets? And it's not just about talking about the technology. Let's talk about why we're using the technology and what sort of business problems we're trying to solve. And as we talked about at the executive summit, we talked about the importance of disrupting your own organization before somebody else comes in and disrupts it. And you guys talk about data 3.0, which it's kind of oversimplifying it, but basically data is at the center of everything that you guys do. So from an informatic standpoint, you're not like groping into other markets. It's just clearly about data. It is about data and it's about, and I like what our CEO laid out with 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. And it is simple, but it's a great way of looking at it. The data has reached a point where it's a strategic asset within an organization. It's something that we have to be able to leverage. We have to appreciate it and we have to respect it. You know, as an entrepreneur and founder of SiliconANGLE and the team, and we're growing, I can appreciate what Informatic has done. And what's interesting, I love to get your thoughts on this because just how hard it is to be a public company with a 90-day shot clock going on, and then going private and all that. But what you guys have done on the product side has been very interesting. And I'd like to get your thoughts and your view on how that's translating into execution now from your standpoint. You know, two years ago, 2014, I interviewed Anil when he was just a lowly chief product officer. Now he's the CEO. Very important position on my dad. Now he's the CEO, so you can see how things are turning out. We'll get to that. I want to blow the ending of my story. But he laid out, essentially, we were talking about that time, pretty cutting-edge concepts. At that point, Amazon was clearly on the horizon. None of the analysts except for Wikibon pegged a $10 billion horizon quickly. Everyone saw this as a toy. It's a joke in the enterprise. It's clearly all wrong. And he laid out, essentially, he's talking about engagement data, and he's talking about data at a deep level. That product roadmap panned out. Yeah, it did. To this story today. How is that translating into execution? Because you have this competency, kind of scorecard or benchmark or progress. I don't know what you call it, but wait for people to understand the complexity of how the products have moved into the market, and how they've changed the deployment options. Yeah, the deployment options and the technology is extremely robust now. I think you're absolutely right in terms of what Informatica has accomplished over the last two years. Everything from dealing with a very robust MDM environment where we can help people create this customer 360 view or a product 360 view. Those things are great. And so where we are today is, all right, all the tools are there, and you have the data within your organization. But then the question becomes, what the, and we utilize this thing called the enterprise competency, the data competency model, is how ready is your organization to tackle the task of bringing data up to a level? Where is the strategic asset that everybody relies on in support of decision-making? And so we kind of introduced these five stages, with the purpose being, if you want to make progress, you've got to look in the mirror first and appreciate where you are on a foundational level. Get the entire management team to say, oh, I see where we are in this model. I see what we can do. I see what we could do if we moved up the model. And I got a feeling our competitors might be at these stages. So it gets everybody focused in on the effort of utilizing data and support of decision-making. Yeah, and the thing also, I think I may have said the comment of, you get the keys to the kingdom, because he was thinking about the horizontal data, really early on about that, and hearing it here, that's paying off, because as you get more pressures, regulatory pressures, the store stuff, having the MDM, Cloud MDM is a big deal. It is a big deal. Talk about how that's being well received. How do you message that? Because it's complicated, data's hard. How do you message that? How do you talk about it? That's a really good point, and that's where we are today. It's not just about feature functions, speed, speeds and feeds. We should be implementing these things and establishing an intelligent data platform within our organizations, but we should be doing it with business benefit in mind. We shouldn't be doing anything less so we can quantify the business benefit associated with a particular project. It's not a big bang approach. It's not about IT going out and saying I'm going to take all these pieces and parts from Informatica, and I'm going to massage my data and I'm going to put it over here so people can start using it. No, let's talk about the problems within the organization. Is it customer profitability? Is it risk? Is it fraud? What are the things that we want to accomplish in short periods of time that has a quantifiable business benefit? Then look at the technology necessary to solve that problem, and then within the organization promote the fact that you just had the success and you saved a bunch of money or you made a bunch of money, and it was because of this technology investment that you made. How does that change your target audience? Now the TAM increases because obviously when you look at the bigger picture you're told just what market's going to be pretty big. And so you got to have to have a bigger play out so the revenue will kick in behind that and that's working from what we can see in the interviews. But the old Informatica would target, there's the data guy, we're going to target him, he's doing data warehousing, all this stuff. Now it seems to shift. As it shifted, who's the primary target audience that you guys are talking to and who's the secondary target audience? There are two audiences and you got to take them in tandem. So the IT audience does not disappear by any means, they're still doing the heavy lifting, they're making things happen. So we need to continue to be the gold standard from an IT perspective. They need to see us as somebody who is absolutely the best in class and the leader in terms of what we can do. But the budgets are shifting. The budgets are shifting to the business users. So you look at marketing departments, you look at production departments, you look at finance departments, they have problems that need to be solved utilizing data. Why all of a sudden? Well, I think people have come to the realization that data can be a differentiator within the business. So that's why things are shifting. So we have to have those discussions at a business level with not only the business unit but also the IT organization. Because whether people believe it or not, you know, there's always been this feeling that there's a separation between IT and business. It's IT and business are not as far apart as people think anymore. They are working together. Yeah, and also the SaaS apps coming from the business lines of business as well. Yeah, well, I mean, IT has certain characteristics with marketing too. It's a shared services organization that many elements within the business are laying claims on and you have to prioritize accordingly. It's not an easy thing to do. But come back to this notion of data as an asset. Yes. Big statement, not broadly understood, has an enormous impact ultimately on the tools that you built and the habits that people exist or exhibit as they think about data as a resource to be employed. Where are we really when we think about data as an asset? Well, and that is interesting. That's a great question because that gets back to this enterprise data competency model. You look at where people are in terms of their usage of data, what the potential is. And most people are stuck right now. They're using data, but they're using it at a departmental level. So the marketing department might have a particular view of a customer, but the organization doesn't understand what the customer represents to them across business units. The good news is management teams, executive teams and boards understand the importance of that effort. Are they there yet? Have they accomplished it yet? No, they haven't, but they understand the importance. We had at our executive summit yesterday, we actually had a session, which was board level issues around data. We had a private equity guy on, we had a CEO on, and we had a board member on. And we talked about how do boards look at data? And today when evaluating a company and the value of that company, they're looking at data and how the organization's using data and they are putting a premium on an organization if they are valuing data as an asset. But today that's goodwill. And it's got to be a little bit more, it's got to be a little bit more specific than that. Don't you think? It does. And one of our board members, senior board members that was on the panel, said that his expectation today is that people have to use data. He doesn't want anybody coming to him or the rest of the board and say, I think we ought to do this. He wants to see the data. So show me the data in support of why you think we need to move in a particular direction. So that begins to filter down. So is it the board's responsibility to make sure data's an asset? No, it has to come at it from all angles. Well, the board has to set the overall stage for how the corporation needs to look at data as an asset. But it's not going to put a price on everything individually. That's what that would take forever. But for example, so you're in marketing, you're a CMO, you look at your customer lists which have a very specific context within marketing for perhaps doing an email campaign. And so that list, that data has a specific value in the context of an email campaign. But that same data can be applied to a dozen or hundreds of other applications, all of which have different profiles, different value profiles. How is Informatica helping not just putting the tools in place to think about that, but actually getting the business to think way beyond specific applications and start to look at more broadly how you go about valuing your data. Yeah, and that's part of the educational process, right? Because it's possible to do these things with technology, but we also need to talk about what's possible. And to your example of, I've been marketing and I want to do an email campaign to an individual. I don't want to do it just based on a list I bought or my install-based list. I also want to look at the demographic of that individual and I want to look at the experience that they've had with Informatica over time. So I want to look, what have they been doing from a call center standpoint, a tech support standpoint? What about a finance standpoint? Are they a customer in good standing? Data which is in finance or service or somebody else in the world. Got to bring it together. And this is where things like master data management come together and these are very powerful technologies that are within the IT organization. That can do that work for the CMO. Can do that work for the finance officer. Can do that work for somebody in tech support. To really understand what's the total value of this individual to the company. And most people aren't there yet. And but it's interesting at this conference, everybody's talking about it. They know that that will give them that edge that they're looking for to better serve their customers. Because today it is all about customer experience. Talk about the valuation thing. Peter and I were talking about how hard it is to try to put a value on it. And he had a phrase yesterday that we talked about which was data with purpose, data in context. And the purpose of the data is really where this data lake thing comes in. We had some of the informatic folks talking about like you can data swamp but it can be great when you get to write data out of it. It's no longer a swamp. It's actually good data. So the whole data quality thing is nuanced but the point is it's how you use the data. It is. How do you value that? Like how do you put on the balance sheet? We had someone say, hey, how does that? No, Jim and Jerry Held said CFOs know where all the numbers are. They can put it back on the napkin. They can provide reports where the assets are. But a chief data officer might be like scratching their heads like, well, I really can't value. Hasn't a hard time valuing data. How does that fit into your view of things? Yeah, if I look at it and I say, number one, if I'm looking at an organization and kind of grading them on scale in terms of how well they're using data, you can kind of feel it from a cultural perspective. You can talk to people and you can say, how are you making decisions? Up and down the organization. Not just at certain levels. You want to see, is it truly ingrained into the culture in terms of how people make decisions? The other thing that a chief data officer, you brought the CDO into play here, what they can do is help people understand there's lots of data in the organization. What data sources do you trust? And what data sources do you say, I might explore here, but I'm not going to make a significant business decision based on that data. And I think that's important. And if you see in organizations that's doing that, saying this is grade A data, this is grade C data, you know that they're headed in the right direction and they're getting into the data governance and data quality. You can kind of get a feel for who's got the data mindset and employee. Yeah, you can. At MIT, we did the chief data officer event in Cambridge last year. One of the things that came out, I want to ask this question specifically around this, around the chief data officer, is the conflict between compliance and holding down the fork and organic innovation. Because really your message here at Informatica World, the kind of the theme that's coming out of all the different releases and conversations is innovation. The innovation opportunity and the strategies that your customers is to use the data to create innovation value. Yes. Get that. That's very clear. But now that might be in direct conflict with the guy who's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we'll get the keys of the kingdom, lock them down, let's not make the data too free, freely available, but yet you also want to make the data freely available. So how do you see that evolving? And what have you seen working in the marketplace where you want to kind of have some security and compliance, but yet foster a bottoms up innovation? That's a great question. I've been thinking a lot about this. And if you think about the Chief Data Officer, the CDO, one of the things you can check out immediately when you walk into an organization is where does the CDO report? And I've seen it report in one of the three places. So is the CDO reporting to the Chief Finance Officer, the CFO, I've seen that. So they're looking at exposure, they're looking at risk, they're looking at things like that. Does the CDO report to IT? No, that could be a control issue or maybe not. Does the CDO report to the Chief Operating Officer? Okay, chances are if it does, then maybe that they're looking at data as an asset and looking at what they can do to use data to help to support the business. But there has to be more in place too. I always ask people, and I may have talked about this before, is ask yourself, do you have a help desk for data in your organization? You have a help desk for logging onto your computer in the morning, if your internet fails, if you need to understand a function in Excel, what value is that? Well, it just kind of keeps people going. But how are you containing and retaining the institutional knowledge associated with how data is used across the enterprise? Somebody new comes to work and you give them a task. Do you want them to run around the building for three months trying to figure out who really knows what they're talking about and what data can I use? Why not go to this help desk and say, hey, what's been done before? What tools work? What data is of value? And who can I talk to and help me? So as we move. That's interesting. Shree from Potonini, GTO of JLL, big real estate guy, was just on the Cube, and he was saying the millennials in the younger generation, they're self-discovering. They love self-service. So that seems to be kind of like if there's a help desk kind of concept, that means there's some sort of facility out there or operationalized portal or app. And combine that with, so you've got the help desk and say you have a data lake capability. So you get pointed in the right direction, you've got a data lake that you can use for discovery purposes. And you're going to say, hey, I might have something going on here. And then you can take stuff from that data lake and start to do something that's very specific and focused. Innovation usually requires, at some point in time, some human-human interaction. It does, discovery. And data's hard. And so while someone who perhaps is very familiar with the concept of data and the use of data, and very familiar with the structures in place and the terminology and the concepts that are used, you might be able to do that self-service. But that's not everybody in the organization. And we're not building these enormous data assets so that 87 business analysts out of a population of 20,000 employees can do their jobs better. We're building these assets so 20,000 employees can say, what is it that I do? How do I, and when do I do with customers? And how can I do my job better? And is there data that can help me do my job better? And so the entire goal is to get this flowing within the business more broadly and we're going to need people to grease those wheels. And so I think it's a great idea, the notion of a data help desk, if we're really serious about these assets and in reality as we move to cloud, as we get BYO, bring your own devices and whatnot, it means that the perspective needs to move up into what's really generating value in the business, even if it's not properly accounted for, which is the data. Yeah. And you bring up an interesting point. If you want 20,000 people to use it as opposed to 100 people using it, you have to understand that you've got to surface the data with the usage and access patterns of a particular user community in mind. So one size does not fit all. And that's something that we understand at Informatica is that as we work with organizations, what the data analysts might need or a modeler might need might be very different than the casual line manager who just wants to know what's going on. And a lot of times people overlook that. So if you want to get this thing going within the organization where data is this amazing asset that people can't live without, make sure you give them the tools that where they can look at the data, the way they need to look at the data. In their context and the work that they're doing. So the flip side of providing, and John touched upon this, the flip side of providing greater access is also making sure that you put in place the appropriate IP protection. Yes. Because digital businesses are, if nothing else, discovering that their core asset is their data. It's very difficult to talk about digital without talking about data. I mean, people do it all the time and it's kind of folly. So how... Contents data too. I mean, everything's data. Yeah, exactly. Well, code is data. At the end of the, if Turing were here, you would tell us that data and code are all data. How is Informatica communicating the need to start raising intellectual property up beyond just patents and beyond just copyrights and trademarks, but to actually think about this holistically? Yeah. And that gets back to the enterprise data competency model where we look at an organization's usage of data. And as you hit this sort of critical point in the organization, this tipping point in the model, where data is recognized as an asset, you better secure it. Number one, it's a wonderful thing when you hit that point because data not only supports the existing business, but it then represents an asset that could act, you can actually monetize for as a new business. So, what Informatica does in this particular case is offer some security, very good security. We assume, unfortunately, that there will be, somebody will break into your network. So, we're not doing it at the hardware level. We are securing data at the data itself. So, data is truly the center of the universe within the organization as a success. So, you're not doing it at the hardware level, the programmer level, you're doing it at the data level. We're doing it at the data level. We're assuming that people are going to get in, whether it's through the air conditioning, the thermostat, or wherever it is, they're going to get an IP address and they're going to start pinging that network. So, we need to accept that, maybe use some tools from other vendors that deal at the hardware level to reduce that risk, but let's look at how we can mask the data such that if people get to it, it doesn't make any sense to them. And there's no, it's of no value. So, John, I had a great conversation. Unfortunately, I couldn't be here, but a great conversation with the Senior Vice President looking at partnerships. And clearly, this role of the data is going to play an increasingly specialized role because partnerships which had historically been associated, well, we have this contract, this segment, this geography, increasingly the partnership's going to be defined in terms of the data that we share in pursuit of whatever commercial activities. How are you taking the experience that Informatica is having as they think about partnerships differently and applying that to your customers and helping them understand the crucial role the data's going to play as they conceive partnerships differently? Yeah, I think that's a good point. Again, it's helping them understand what's the value that they have there? So, if you look at a bank and the credit card data that they have, what does that credit card data represent? It's transactional data that historically has been used to build a customer and hopefully gain some interest from them as well. But there's also all sorts of information that you could provide that you can get out of that in terms of spending habits by demographics. You know, if you stay at this hotel, are you also shopping in these particular places and eating this kind of food? Well, this could be very valuable for somebody. And I think that's where people really need to think about their businesses differently. You know, they've got this asset. Don't think about it simply as supporting your existing business model. Think about what you could do with it and what value it might be to somebody else creating new business opportunity. I guarantee that if you're a financial services institution and you've got that credit card data I'm talking about, if you can anonymize it in some fashion so you're not dealing with any privacy issues, that could be very valuable. And you can find that in every single industry. Well, in many respects, as John and I have talked about with other guests, it starts to erode the very concept of industry in certain respects. Historically, industry has been defined in terms of the, we have common arrangement of assets. So a bottler had a common arrangement of assets with another bottler, a financial services firm and a common arrangement of assets within a financial services firm. As we bring data into the equation and reduce the specialization of those assets, then a business that's currently financial services might find itself being able to move into tangential but proximate industries and the whole notion of industry starts to shift around a little bit, doesn't it? And that's a good thing, right? Because you think about it, it's all about the consumer, it's all about the customer. And what does the customer want to do? Does the customer want to deal with their life in silos? Well, we've all got these devices now, we're connected. I saw a stat that said that by 2020 there are going to be more connected devices on this planet than there are people. That's astonishing. What does that mean? That means when I pull that phone out, I don't want to have to have an app for a bank and an app for a grocery store and an app for a retailer. I would like my experience to start coming together. So the expectation is there. So if these traditional institutions don't see that and don't get it, there are a lot of frictionless models out there where people are coming in, they're disrupting. They'll be displaced. They'll be displaced and we're seeing it in some industries, right? Well, the cloud's a horizontal disruptor and I think that's why I think you guys got the product right years ago when you saw that horizontal sharing across apps as a winning formula. Jim, I know we got a wrap. I want to get your thoughts on your objectives for the year. Obviously, it's so clear you guys have a good product strategy, it's winning. Messaging, getting there, you got the sea level, but you got to balance the audiences, which is going to be a challenge for you. What's your objectives for the year? How are you going to tackle this year? Can you bring the product to market? You got to manage both those important groups of people, IT and the sea level. What's your plans? What are you going to do as a more education, more focus on the partner ecosystem? Is it more product development, all of the above? Yeah, the reality is we want people to understand that while we have this gold standard in IT, we'll continue to nurture that and continue to advance that, not abandon that by any means. Well, it's core to our business. We want folks to understand what that means in business terms. How do you quantify the benefit? Impact of that. Yeah, the impact. How do you quantify the benefit? And also because we own this particular space, it opens up a tremendous opportunity for partners who have a very specific domain expertise and point solutions around various industries. They need us, we need them. Let's come together, let's solve industry problems and just keep moving. Final question, how early are we? Jerry Held basically said, we're so early. I mean, he's ridiculous about this. He's like, hey, people are overhyping it. It's still early as heck. How early is it relative to the, I mean, we're talking about things that are evolving in real time. Yeah, I think it is. You guys pegged this, I mean. No, I do see it as early on a number of fronts. Are these industries ready for it? No. Do they want to go out and buy some big giant data platform? No. So the way we continue to move forward is we tackle individual business problems. We look at business issues that we can solve in a few weeks, not a year or two years. Show the value and try to help organizations kind of build this momentum so that data becomes more and more important to them. Great. Jim Davis, EVP Chief Mars, thanks for your support with theCUBE here. Thanks for inviting us to cover your event. Extracting all the data. Of course, ton of data here at Informatica World. We're sharing that with you in real time, live on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. We'll be right back with more after this short break. Hi, this is Chris DeVanny from D-