 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. Hey, welcome back everyone live here in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE theCUBE. My co-host, Peter Burris with Wikibon Research. Our next is Justin Delano's the application man, business applications manager, Carbonite, a customer of Informatica. Welcome to theCUBE. It's great to be here. So you've done a lot of interesting things. We just talked before you came on camera. You took some really hard moves of the cloud. It was really easy. It's a cloud that helped you. It helped us big time. So tell us about some of the interesting things you got going on. Okay, well this is a great use case which we've been speaking about here at Informatica World. We sell through a number of distributors and through probably 8,000, 9,000 partners. But two of our distributors, we didn't have an e-com way of interacting with them. So we built up this kind of manual, semi-manual process. We actually called it the manual automated order process. Right? That's what we called it. And so we built up this process and we just thought we can't keep going like this. We'd receive a purchase order in email, send it over to sales ops. They'd open it, validate it. Does this make sense? They'd agree, sign it off, pass it on to finance. Finance would open it, say yep, makes sense. Key it into our great plane system. They would capture it in, pass it on to provisioning. This is for a SaaS product that we sell. It's just not scalable at all. So... A lot of touch points through there. Too many touch points and a delay for something that should be instant. So we spoke to these distributors and said, well, what can we, what do you have? What can we do? We didn't have any options for API integration. So they said, well, we've got EDI. So we said, okay, first question, what does that stand for? Because we're a cutting-edge company, you know? And everything that we do is kind of... It's so 1918. I know, kind of bleeding edge to it. So we kind of did our homework a little bit and found out what EDI is. EDI is what we sign up for. Yeah, electronic data interchange. And we said, all right, how are we going to do this? So we kind of looked around, a little bit spoke to our partners at Informatica. And they said, yeah, we've got an EDI, we've got an EDI capability in the cloud. So we said, great, let's do a POC. So we did that POC, banged it together pretty quickly, which is the beauty of a SaaS offering for the beauty of the cloud. And as we were building this out, we were working with our counterparts at these distributors, these guys who lived and breathed EDI for all their partners. And at some point, I just thought, you know, we're building this thing. I don't have anything to compare it to. How do we know if we're even building the right thing? We're just going on what we think seems to be making sense. So I phoned them up one day and I said, listen, would you mind just taking an hour and let me walk through what we're building here. Let me just show you what we're building, see if it makes any sense. And so I said, yeah, sure, I'll be happy to do that. He knows EDI, you know, back to front. And as you mentioned just now, it's a very complex, very in-depth, old school kind of system, old school way of processing transactions. So I showed him what we had built out and it leveraged Informatica, Salesforce as a front end. It was a really, really kind of bolted on solution, but we managed to put it together in a few months. So I showed him each part and at some point, or at many points I was waiting for him to interrupt and say, well, hang on a second, why are you doing that? But he didn't, he was silent through everything. So I thought, okay, what have we done here? And so I turned it over to him and I said, what do you think? Is this okay? Are we doing the right thing? And he paused for a second and he said, yeah. He says, this is actually quite an elegant solution that you've built out in a few months. This is what's taken us 10 years to mature into. He was mad. I think it was a little mad and for me, it was just a big sigh of relief. As I thought, okay, we actually are on track and we've actually been able to do something really quickly and elegantly through a SaaS product, through these cloud offerings. Well, that's a great use case of Informatica because you've taken something that's hard. Cloud made it easy for you to do and you had no baggage, in this case it was a green field for you. What other end-to-end examples that you guys are working on? Because data is now going into end, sometimes it's a multi-vendor, of course. But cloud's going to help you get there. Anything you got else going on and any IoT, big data stuff happening? No, IoT, more especially big data is becoming more and more important to us. So as we've kind of grown through our consumer business, Carbonite started out as a consumer product and has well over one and a half million consumer subscribers and has moved into the very small business then into this kind of SMB space and a little bit into the enterprise space and as we've been doing that, we needed to understand what we're doing, especially in that very small business through the enterprise space, we've acquired these companies. One of the key things we need to do as we acquire companies is identify opportunities for cross-sell and for upsell. And in order to do that, we've got to get that data into one repository where we can figure it out pretty quickly. So that's a huge initiative at Carbonite at the moment is building out our data vaults and our data lakes and getting some accurate and good data governance as we feed this data into these data vaults with our analytics team. And that's on the operational side? Yeah, that's on the operational side. So has what Carbonite does as a service to your customers, which is, I'm not going to say it's standard, but it's some really value complex things that you do as the engineering that you've done there informed the process by which you're starting to re-engineer your digital footprint on the operational side? Yeah, I know that there are conversations that kind of happen between engineering on the product side and the analytics side, but I think we'd love to see more of that discussion happening. Often what happens in any company, I think, is that you get the silos as we know, but the more we can facilitate these discussions, I think the better it will be for us. So as you look at the Informatica Toolkit or the presence, where are you starting, where do you anticipate you're going to use more some of these tools, whether it's PowerCenter, MDM, et cetera, as you try to do this, as you try to replicate the experience you just had with this EDI in the Cloud Transaction Manager? That's a really good question. So we've used application integration, so real-time application integration, which is a tool called ICRT. We've used Informatica Cloud Services, which is kind of batch transferring of information to and fro. We've just with the EDI implemented B2B Gateway, which is for that connectivity with partners. And I think one of the key things for us moving forward is going to be data governance. As we have these different sources and different companies coming in, we've got to make sure that we govern and steward and shepherd and can I say sheriff the data into its rightful homes accurately. So we're trying to do that at the moment and we're doing it through spreadsheets and SharePoint and Lucidcharts and Diagrams and Visio. And one of the tools which I saw, which is an Informatica Acquisition, Informatica Axon, is a data governance tool. So it doesn't store any data, but it just helps you manage and control your data. I think that's going to be crucial for any company which is working at amalgamating systems and data from various sources. I think it's- What's the biggest challenge with data integration? One of the things is, companies have different views of the problem and opportunity. What's the biggest challenges that people have? You know, this is going to sound silly, but one of the biggest challenges that we have right now is just defining our data, defining what this term means. Even just this week, we've got one term, sale type, and still we're trying to figure out exactly what that means. That's one field that we want to be able to present to the business. And we're still saying, well, hang on a second, what about this scenario? I mean, I think that that's the biggest deal is that you is to have a uniform definition of your different metrics and KPIs and attributes across the business. But to do that, you've got to find the sources. Yeah. You've got to understand the degree to which synonyms are or are not synonyms. Absolutely. Then you've got to go through the social engineering of getting people to agree. So does Clare, for example, do you see that as a facilitator for this process? I think it will be. I definitely think that will be, especially with the self-discovery or the intelligence structure discovery. I think that's going to be an exciting thing to see moving in the future. I really like that intelligence structure discovery. Yeah. That is, that's not available in today's marketplace. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. But I think we're steps away from that. I really do think so. You guys are. Yeah. And as an industry, I think we are. With Informatica, partnering with Informatica. Anything Informatica? How are you guys working with Informatica? You guys are as a customer. What specifically are you guys doing with them? Sounds like the EDI thing was an enabler. What else are you working with them on? Share some specific... Yeah, that's right. It's still at this stage, it's kind of the, it's all cloud. We don't have any on-prem Informatica. So it's all the cloud stuff. And we use it extensively for our cloud systems, our cloud business applications. Marketo, Salesforce, Zora, NetSuite, those are the four big ones that we're using and those are some of the de facto, I guess. So we're using Informatica to bridge the gap between these different systems a lot. And so that's our kind of bread and butter with Informatica at the moment. How about developers on site for data and dealing with data? How do you guys organize staff and skillsets and mostly engineering? Is there data analyst, data science? Yeah, good question. We've got engineering, which kind of sits under product. Then we've got IT business applications, which is where I fit in. And that's a combination of kind of business analysts as well as developers who build out these, a lot of the systems. And then we have an analytics team, VP of analytics with advanced analytics, analytics platform, data lake, data vault. And so those are the three big groups that we look at where Informatica splits across the different groups. And you guys are pretty solid on Informatica. Happy with them? Yes, very much so. Yeah, we've got a great partnership with them. Every time we've bought, it's not because it's been a hard sell at all. It's we've said, okay, we need that. And this is what we need. So we've got- Not a hard sell. How long have you been a customer? Just curious. Almost three years. So you're not like, you're not legacy Informatica. Not at all. You're not locked in from the old days. No, I've never even seen the on-prem. I've never even seen PowerCenter. I hope to never see it. I'm not interested. You're cloud native. Cloud. You're all cloud all the time. That's right. How about you guys multiple clouds? What kind of clouds do you guys have? Yeah. With Informatica? Yeah, for you guys. For us? We've got Salesforce Marketo. Yeah. Those are the things. All those business applications. Salesforce Marketo, a little bit of hybrid stuff. We've got our own on-prem. You have your own data center? Systems. We do have it. As Carbonite? Yeah, absolutely. That's what we're storing all our customers' data. Would you put that in the cloud? Customer data? Yeah. That is, in fact, moving to the cloud. Okay. You are. Put it under your control. It's effectively a true cloud. So as you think about, working with Marketo, Salesforce, Zara, I remember the last one you mentioned. Oh, that's sweet. That's sweet. As you look at those four. Now we're working. Look, everybody, everybody is, all these SaaS companies are making, have a realization that if I can get the data, then I get the customer. Right. Are they starting to make it more or less easy for you to perform these integrations across how they handle things? Where do you think their willingness to expose their APIs, give more information about the metadata, et cetera, is going so that you can do a more effective job of bringing them together and creating derivative value out of these very rich cloud-based applications? Yeah. I think that's an excellent question. And for me, as somebody who is not a developer, but for me, as somebody who is very, very interested in moving and blending and transferring and transforming data, I have to rely on a tool like Informatica because I don't want to go digging in the bowels of NetSuite to try and pull data out. I don't even want to have to write an API call. I honestly don't want to do that. And I don't really want my team to be doing that. I want to be able to point Informatica at a system and say, what have we got? So for me, that's crucial. So I think that's where the partnership between Salesforce and Informatica, I'm relying on that. And I think that those sources like the NetSuite and the Salesforce, I think that they're going to continue to hopefully have this really good open partnership with these middleware or these integration tools. We have to have that. If we don't have that, we're stuck. Because then people are going to start breaking into Salesforce and breaking into NetSuite to get the data because we're going to get it one way or the other. Justin, great success story. I'd love to hear the cloud native being, taking advantage of Informatica, really highlights that they've got the modern approach. Right. Appreciate you coming on. Who's on Carbonite Applications Manager. This is theCUBE with coverage from Informatica World 2017. More live coverage here after this short break. Stay with us.