 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2018. brought to you by Informatica. Hello, welcome back everyone. We're here for exclusive CUBE coverage here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Gay won, getting set up for the Solution Pavilion opening kickoff party. We've been here all day. For two days I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, but Peter Burris, analyst at SiliconANGLE, we keep on theCUBE. Our next guest, board member of Informatica for 10 years now. CUBE alumni, Jerry Held, industry legend, veteran, been there, done that, seen all the ways of innovation. Jerry, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to be here and nice to see you guys again. 10 years at the board of Informatica. A lot, that's like, how many ways can happen in 10 years? What's been the journey? What's been your view? You and all the board means approving all the hires, the stock option grants and all the action. You've seen in front row what's happening. What's the story? Well, it's been a great ride. It's an interesting company. I've been on a lot of boards. I've lost count of how many, both startups and then big public company boards. But Informatica's been a really fun ride. When I joined, we're going through super growth. My really good friend, Sohi Babasi, was running the place. He had a phenomenal 10 year run, like 36 quarters of record growth and profit. Just unbelievable. Look at from an ETL company back when it started to a full data integration company. Kind of went from the first phase of data to the second phase where it was more than just moving data to a data warehouse, but all phases of data integration. And that was terrific. And then we got to a point where it was time for another phase and a lot of things were happening. Not only in terms of where the company was going, but where the industry was going. And what year was that when that happened? So that was about two and a half, three years ago when we decided that the best route was actually to go private, because some of the transitions were going to be pretty profound. For instance, just the model of selling software going from license to subscription requires a dip in revenue. It requires restructuring your field. A lot of changes. A lot of product work. Yeah. So we did go very successfully. We went private and I don't know for some reason they asked me to stay on the board through that transition. And it's been interesting being on the private side. Now that it's a private company, it's run differently. We have some great private equity firms who are the investors, owners of the company. The board makeup is completely different. And we have a lot of people with the financial look at the company. But they're growth investors. There are some PE firms that come in and take a company apart and just try to get the most they can out of it. Luckily, the investors that we found believed in the future of the company. It's a growth company. It just needed to go through some restructuring. We're also really fortunate when SOHAB decided it was time to retire to promote Anil to be the CEO. And he's turned out to be fantastic. And we've had a number of changes really bringing in some fresh blood, new people into positions. Really strengthened the team. And in the last couple of years of SOHAB's tenure, he put a real focus on innovation. Because we had gone down a path of acquiring a number of pieces, putting them all together. But the innovation had sort of slowed down. Well, he started the process and it really picked up speed through this transition. So the company has come out with a series of really new, innovative products. So now Informatic is like one of the hottest pre-IPO companies in the industry. If you think about enterprise software companies. Yeah, we documented them. You've been here from the beat watching 23, four years ago. We talked to Anil before he was the CEO when he was running the products. They brought in some product people. They did the work. They buckled down. Okay, so I got to step back. Before you came on, you and I were talking about Waze. You've seen Waze, a relational database wave. And our comment was, people tend to poo poo the wall. That's never going to happen. It is going to happen. So I got to ask you, take us through what the wave is right now. What are you excited about? Because certainly there's no doubt that horizontally scalable cloud has opened up a new, kind of a new aperture, if you will, of opportunity. And it's impacting everybody. Data is not just a category. It's fundamental in the fabric of this next big wave. What is your vision of this wave? What's exciting you? Take us through that. Well, as we were saying, I've been in this data management business for 50 years now, so I've seen a lot of waves. But every 10 years, you get a big wave. And I was there back at the birth of the relational database, the client server, and web, and cloud, and SaaS, and all of these. Each one, when they start, people poo poo, oh, it's very cool, but never take off. And there's a lot of people who miss great opportunities at the beginning of a wave. Now we're clearly well into the cloud wave, as I think most people realize it's for real and there's a lot happening. The one that I'm most excited about right now is in what I would call, you know, we've got had DBMS, database management systems. I'll make up a new term right here. I've never used this before, so this is the first on your show. So instead of DBMS, how about D-A-M-S? Data Asset Management System. That's what we need. We have got such a proliferation of data, relational databases, no SQL databases, Hadoop databases, we've got structured, unstructured, text, image, every kind of data. But it's proliferating at an amazing rate, right? We've got all kinds of types of data, sources of data, users of data. People now want to use data, not just the IT people, but end users. But it's out of control. We have this asset and everybody talks about it. You can see here at these sessions, what's going to transform your business? Data, data disruption. But it's out of control. Nobody knows where the data is. Ask the CFO where all the financial assets, they can show you the spreadsheets, they can show you the reports. Ask the Chief Information Officer, Chief Data Officer, they can't tell you. So what we need to do is manage the data asset. And how are we going to do that? As far as I'm concerned, the single most exciting thing coming out of Informatica, there's a lot of exciting things at this conference, far and away to me the most exciting thing, Enterprise Data Catalog. That is a data asset management system. It allows you to look across every type of data in the enterprise, on-prem, in the cloud, all kinds of data and get your hands around it. And you need to do it for two big reasons. One, risk reduction. And two, is reward enhancement. In other words, you have a way to reduce risk, improve governance. And boy, you can just look at the news every day, Facebook, GDPR, which is coming this week. This week is very timely. Europe is way ahead of us here. They're forcing companies to get their act together. But how do you do it? You need to get your act together on managing the data asset. It's not managing the actual data, it's managing the metadata. Where is the data? Who has access to it? What's the security? How many copies do you have? How many different views of a customer do you have that are inconsistent? The way you need to do that is through an enterprise data catalog. And Informatica has a super exciting product. The most exciting product, in the 10 years I've been on the board, is the single most exciting product that companies come out with. Sounds like you're bullish on this one, so who does a check mark on that one? Let me ask you a question, just to kind of take that to the next level. Jerry, what is this order of magnitude impact in your opinion? Obviously, it's a big wave. Can you kind of just give us a perspective? Waves have multi-year lives, sometimes 10 plus years. Pat Gelsinger, former Intel, always talks about waves. Sometimes they're 10, 20 year waves. What is the impact of this one, specifically around the catalog? What's it going to impact? Order of magnitude, share your color, commentary on how you see it shaping out. What's going to have these two huge impacts? Let's just talk about on the risk reduction side, on the governance side. Think about the potential impact to Facebook of losing controller data. That company could well get split up. I mean, there's a lot of talk about splitting up. How big an impact is that? Pretty damn big, right? Pretty big, yeah. I mean, it's huge. Yeah, billions, trillions. Yeah, and those kinds of risks are out there, and they've reached a point where the public, the government is no longer willing to put up with it. Now think about the reward side of it, the positive side. If you can get control over your data, and now you're doing all this great analytics, people create data lakes. You know what's in those data lakes? Most of them are data swamps. They put a lot of data in there, but they don't know what's there. If you could take all that data in the data lakes, plus the stuff you have in the cloud, plus stuff you have other places, and now you want to answer that hard question, get your analysts to be way more productive. How important is when you get that insight, how do you measure the business value? I'm sure on your show you have had dozens of people give you a specific instance of, oh, look what I did with Tableau, great product. I did all the stuff and I discovered this and I changed my business, right? You've had that. Oh, insights come out of the woodwork, everywhere. However, ask the question, how many insights didn't come out because these analysts didn't know where the data is. They didn't have access to all this data. They did find something, but think about what they could have found if they had a complete view of all the enterprise data and how it related to all the other data coming in from social media and everything. So what's the value of an enterprise data catalog? I think it's enormous, enormous. But Jerry, so I think that's an interesting, that's an interesting gain, you know, thought experiment. But if I were to combine that with another thing that excites me about what I'm hearing this week, the reality is there aren't enough analysts in the world to find it all. When we start applying machine learning to the process of creating, maintaining, sustaining the understanding of data assets, reforming, reforging data assets, ensuring that we are not dependent on manual processes in the catalog, it's that combination that makes it possible to actually augment the way that human beings look at these things. Ultimately, these types of systems are going to provide options to the business. Yeah, and you hit on an absolutely key point. What does it take to have a great data catalog? There are a number of companies that are trying to do data catalogs. Some are doing small pieces, cataloging, bits and pieces of the enterprise. Interesting, but the word enterprise is key. You need something that spans the entire enterprise. And when you get that complicated, the human brain can't deal with it. So you've hit on maybe one of the most important points. You must have an enterprise data catalog that's based around AI, machine learning, at least tool assistant. You're going to still have people that are going to be curating, you're going to have people that are going to be adding glossaries and all kinds of things. But at the core, there's so much data that you need to take the machine learning technology that's moving along quite quickly and try to figure out what are all these relationships? That is at a core component of it. So we talk, so I'm going to throw this at you. You tell me if you agree with me. What that comes down to is if everybody talks about AI, we talked about earlier, taking jobs away, doing the work. Increasingly, I think we're going to look at AI as a technology that provides humans options. Better forged, better formulated, well-structured options based on data. And that increasingly to think about creating data value is, is your system creating new classes of options for pursuing the value of data? And this combination of things, AI augmenting by presenting options to human decision makers so that they can look at all that range, all those possible vectors that they could be pursuing and choose the ones that are most attractive. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think there's two things. So there's two parts to it. One, you're exactly right. It can augment and give choices. But before it does that, it can eliminate a massive amount of just grunge work. Most analysts, this is a well-documented fact, most analysts spend 80% of their time in data prep and 20% in analysis. That's pretty well industry standard right now. If you're doing better than that, you're doing great. And what you can do if you do the right forum of catalog and get the data organized and then you use things like MDM and data quality to cleanse it, now you get to the point where the analysts is doing analysis and they're doing things, number one, that are more interesting, number two, that are more productive, and number three, that are going to have a bigger effect on your bottom line. Talk about the role of data when it comes to IoT edge, for instance, in the cloud. Okay, this is now, because of the scale, you mentioned scale with AI, that helps with the scale of data coming in. You get that. Now a customer's looking at an architectural shift with cloud, multi-cloud, and IoT, whether it's edge or whatever that's defined as. How does the cataloging and the data that vision you put forth impact by that? Accelerates it, does it change it radically for the buyer, the user, the enterprise? How does that enterprise customer think about? Well, it's another important source. So we have all these different sources of data and a growing source is going to be IoT data. And if it's streaming in, going into some repository, it needs to be cataloged and correlated with the rest of the data in your enterprise. Right now a lot of IoT data is just going into some system off on the side, not correlated with the mainstream data. The thing that I think is the big shift when you go from DBMS, database management system, we're focused typically on a single database, IoT data, or it could be accounting data. The focus was on just that data. The difference when data asset management system is think about your data as a whole, across your whole enterprise. A portfolio. The whole of your data asset, how do you manage that? It's not the bits and bytes, it's the overall thing. It's not the actual data, it's actually the metadata that you're managing. Or it's the data as it's being used and the metadata describes data that's being used. So data, like anything else, you apply it to work, it generates value. Metadata describes how it's being applied and then the underlying data elements are given context and semantic richness by the metadata. Exactly, exactly. All right, so here throughout the old, if I'm Joe Sixpack out in the street, I see, I hear catalog. He's talking about this stuff all the time. I go, whoa, catalog. In my mind I get a mental model of a centralized database, I think hacker. Because in government and all the hacks going on, decentralized data is probably better or de-distributed data. So I hear catalog, my mind goes centralized. Is that the right way to think about it? Or I'll see, you know, I mean, share. Because that's, security's critical on this. Absolutely, and so as you bring this view of data, just like when you have your financial books, where you have a central view of all of your financial assets, there needs to be security. You have to have, allow access for people for the appropriate level of information they're going to pull out. The data asset is no different. So you want to have a full view of all of your data and you want to have ways to allow and restrict access to the information. It's not the data, it's just where is the data and each of the data systems then have secondary. So it's not centralized, it's just metadata for visibility and auditing. I think there's an important point, I want to test this on you because you're asking a great question. The information model from IBM, we've had catalogs with databases, we've had catalogs all over the place. Highly stylized processes, stylized data stuck in a catalog. One of the things that's especially interesting is not the idea that we're going to start with a whole bunch of designs and put them in the catalog, but we're going to discover stuff about our data and the catalog will emerge out of the attributes of data and how it's working and how it's being used. If you, let's rewind back. So the answer is no, not centralized. Well, but it's not, Metadata may be so much centralized, but the data's not. We're not trying to do a centrally designed architecture, so let's rewind 50 years and go back to the beginning of relational databases. We had schemas. And back in the 70s, people were talking about, oh, let's come up with the schema for the corporation. We'll have one group go off and they'll design everything, failed. Then they had data dictionaries where they were going to put it all in place, failed. And all of these things where there was an attempt to centrally define and control the structure of data around the enterprise failed. That is not what we're talking about. Data exists in all forms with all sorts of schemas and definitions and all types of databases in Oracle and SAP and everything. All we're doing is taking the metadata and relating it and using it. Allowing it to merge. So that we have a view of where everything is. That data's different than this data. It's managed by different software. But we have one view so that now when an analyst wants to know how do I get the latest information on customer preferences for purchasing this, I can go here, here, and here and I'll correlate those and I'll pull them together with some too. Final question, and what do you say? Final question for you. If you take that to the next level, you're almost implying or actually saying that that philosophy of a catalog implies that it's okay to have a zillion databases. I might have a postgres database on this application. I might have an unstructured database over here. So in the future world where we're living in a tsunami of data, apps need databases. So the idea of, and they're going to be, yeah, data, different databases proliferating is not a bad thing under your model. Absolutely, we've tried having one answer, it doesn't work. And even if you could ever get a company, a large company, you can't do it, but if you get a company to get one form, then they do an acquisition and now they've got other forms. So that concept just doesn't work. It has to be a heterogeneous world and you have to have a way to pull a piece together. And that's why, just as a final point, I think what Informatic has done with this enterprise data catalog, which is a phenomenal product, still early days, but growing at a phenomenal rate, fastest growth of any product ever. You need a company that's independent, that's not a stack company. It's not an Oracle or an SAP. It's not a cloud company. It's not an AWS or Azure or Google. It's not a SaaS company. It's somebody who is the Switzerland of data who can take data from every place and just collect that metadata. And it has to be a company that understands machine learning and AI that can use it to pull it together. And they got to work with the clouds too. They got to work with all the clouds. And it has to be a company that has interfaces to everything, which is what Informatic is. So it's a perfect fit. And it's not going to try to then use that to exact significant control for how everything operates. Exactly. And it's not trying to sell you an application or a database. So you need that Switzerland. And I think that's why, to me, in the 10 years I've been on the board, I haven't seen a more exciting product, nor have I seen a customer reaction as dramatic as this. Every customer is talking about EDC. And if they haven't before this conference, they will after this. And the timing is critical on this too. Look, talk about timing. The tailwinds for this movement right now, more than ever. It's sometimes timing is- This week is, I mean, GDPR is a big deal. A big deal. And what's going on with Facebook and others is a big deal. So the timing is appropriate. And the product is fantastic. And I think it's going to be, when we look back next year, and we do this show- It's great. We have nine years of history. You can go back and say, hey, remember you said that, right? Data is the central strategic asset, not some corner case. GDPR is a signal to shot across the bow for all companies to get in the center. We coined the new term, database asset management system. Data asset management. We actually have research on that from a couple of years ago. Okay. We hear on exclusive on theCUBE here, data asset management system. Asset is data. It's going to work. It's going to be on the balance sheet soon. theCUBE is here out in the open. Informatica World 2018. Jerry Health board member bringing his insight. Thank you for sharing the data on theCUBE. We'll be back with more. Stay with us after this short break.