 Hi, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2018, brought to you by Informatica. Hello everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2018. It's our fourth year covering Informatica in the front lines. Every year it gets bigger and bigger. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE with Peter Barris, my co-host with Chief Analyst at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE on theCUBE. Our next guest is CUBE alumni Mith Walia who's been on many times. Even before he was president, now he's the president of products and strategic ecosystems for Informatica. Great to see you, great to have you on. Congratulations on your keynote. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks John, glad to be here. Always good to be back. You're super, well I love talking with you because one, you know, the business is growing. You've been in the product side. You guys are all great products folks and this is shipping products. It's not like it's like vaporware. It's like great stuff. Azure deal was announced. But now the timing of the data play with Switzerland, we talked about this fabric. Better time than ever. This year you got data lakes, turn into data swamps last year. This year it's about governance in Catalan. Good timing. What's your assessment? Give us your point of view from the keynote timing product. Well I mean, I think you're exactly right. We see that it's a unique time. It was building over the last couple of years. So you know, we have this phrase that this is a data 3.0 world where data has become its own thing. It's no more captive to an application or a database. That's, those days are gone. And I think in data 3.0 world, I think we talked about it this morning in my keynote that you know, customers have to step back and think differently. You can't just do the same old things and expect to be different. And especially as they're driving digital transformations. So we introduced this concept of system thinking 3.0. Whereas you're thinking about a data. You have to think about it as a platform. You know, a nimble platform. Not a ERP-ish platform. Think of it at scale. It's doubling every year. Think of it metadata, in metadata, out. Let AI assist you. You know, you got to have, these humans are just going to be swamped with so much data. We can't process it. And last, very important these days, as you all know, is right, governance, security and privacy have to be design principles. They cannot be an afterthought. Last year you announced Clare, AI component of the system. How has that evolved this year? I mean, I know it was a strategic centerpiece for you guys. Obviously the catalog is looking really strong right now. A lot of buzz in the show around the enterprise catalog. Where's the AI, the Clare piece fitting in? Can you just give us the update on Clare? Clare's come along with basically part of every product we have. So it manifests itself probably most holistically in the catalog, but whether in the data lake, it's in the context of surfacing data, discovering data, giving recommendations of data to an analyst in a very business user context, or in the context of an MDM, giving you a relationship discovery of, let's say John, who you are, or Peter, who you are. So it is in security source, helping anomaly detection happen. So Clare has now made its way into every product. Now as you said, the one product where it basically surfaces itself in its full bloom is a catalog, which by the way has been the fastest growing product in informatica's history. One year since launch, it has just gone taken off. And presumably there's a relation, sorry John, presumably there's a relationship there. Catalogs have been around for years, but they've been very, very difficult to build and sustain and maintain. Clare presumably is providing a capability that removes a lot of the drudgery associated with catalogs, and that's one of the things that's making it possible. I got that right? No, absolutely right. Actually, building the new catalog also has been a hard thing. So in some ways, building it for scale has been a massive computer science problem that we've been solving for the last three, four years. You know, collecting metadata across the full enterprise is a non-trivial activity. So it was never done across the enterprise ever. If you remember when I was your last time, our vision for the catalog was very simple. We want to be the Google for enterprise data through metadata. And that's what we were able to do through the catalog. But as you rightfully said, it's very hard to consume it if you don't let AI help it. That's where Clare made a very big role. So the UI is very straightforward, it's a Google UI and any business user can, with the help of Clare, start using it. But it persists. So unlike just putting a search term in and getting a page of stuff back, a catalog has to persist. It has to persist. And so describe, now that you have that in place with Clare, as John asked, where does it go? So many use cases. Actually, I'll give you a little preview tomorrow. I'll do the closing keynote. And usually what I do, closing keynote is all about futures. So actually it's a whole demo on Clare, where we are taking Clare to the whole next level. That's a great example. You know, building data supply chains. You know, it's a manual activity that you have to do. With the help of the catalog, we actually understand the system architecture. So if you want to add new sources of data or change anything you want to do, you don't have to go through those steps again. We will surface it to you, and we'll tell you what to do. In fact, tomorrow I'll show what we call a self-integrating system. It'll happen by itself. You have to just go and say, whether I agree or not agree, and the machine learns. Next time it gets smarter and smarter. Or in the context of governance, if a new policy comes up in an enterprise, the biggest challenge is, how do I even know what the impact of the new policy is? Look at GDPR right now. So with the help of Clare, we can understand across the entire enterprise, what would be the impact of that policy across different functions and what the gaps are. Those are the kind of places we are taking Clare towards more bigger business-driven initiatives. In fact, tomorrow there'll be a whole demo on that one. I mean, GDPR is interesting because it really exposes who's ready, who has had invested there, the engineering and data, understands the data. So that's clear. We're seeing some, and there's also a shot across the bow of companies saying, look, you got to think strategically around your data. And we talk about this all the time with you guys, so it's not new to us. But it is new to the fact that some people are right now sitting there going, oh no, I need to do something. How is Informatica going to help me if I have a GDPR awakening? Oh man, I got to do something. We'll just call you up and do the roll-in, the catalog, do I? That's a great place to begin, by the way. So GDPR, by the way, is a data problem. So GDPR is not necessarily a compliance security problem because you want to understand which data pass through boundaries, who's accessing it, it's a true data problem. So today, I mean, in fact, at Informatica World, you have customers like PayPal talking about their journey with us on GDPR. And so you begin with the catalog and then we have three products that help in the GDPR journey. The catalog, secured source, and the data governance axon product. And again, each company's GDPR implications are slightly different. And there are companies, as I said, like PayPal that are using our products to run the GDPR activity right now. So we are seeing that going through the roof. And in fact, one of the big use cases for catalog has been in the context of governance and GDPR. I was talking about the trends that are impacting you guys. Again, I was saying earlier, the tailwind for you guys, the timing's perfect. Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. I'd say hybrid cloud is probably in its second year, maybe third year hype, but now multi-cloud is real. You have announced Azure relationship. You guys have a growing ecosystem opportunity. How are you guys looking at this? It's really emergent. It's happening right now. How are you guys targeting the ecosystem, whether it's business development, partnerships, joint product development, go to market or and or on the business side. What's the orientation? What's the posture? Are you guys taking a certain approach, expecting certain growth? What's the update on ecosystem, the global partner landscape? You know, the way we think about ourselves is that we've been the Switzerland of data always. And customers, actually, I always say, it's always customer backed. You solve for the customer, everything goes good. Customers expect us to do that. And customers are going to be in a heterogeneous world. Nobody's going to ever pick one stack. You know, you all know right there, customers who are still large enterprises still running mainframe for some processing and they're all the way using new platforms for IoT. So they have to somehow manage this entire transition and they will be in multi-cloud, ground-cloud hybrid world. So they naturally expect us to be a Switzerland of data across the board and that's our overall strategy. We will always be there for them. In that context, we have learned the art of working with every ecosystem. So you saw Azure today and we are very close partners, hundreds of customers, Amazon, hundreds of customers, Google's coming up, salesforce.com always. So we, Adobe, tomorrow you'll have Adobe. You'll be the coot of a cloud player. And you know, I always look at this way. If you solve for the customer, everybody will work with you. And I think they're doing meaningful work. So that has been our strategy. But what we have done two very different things is that we've gone deep in terms of product integration. I mean, you saw today, we're making it easy from a customer experience point of view to get these jobs done, right? If you're spinning up a data warehouse in the cloud, you don't want to repeat the mistakes of the last 20 years. So now it's a five clicks, you should go to go. That's an area we've invested a lot to make sure that those experiences are a lot simpler and easier and very native. We had Bruce, just not early, he was implying that you guys have significant R&D. He was trying to get me to get to the number. I think it was on Twitter. I think, I'll ask Neil, I think he's out there already. But it's not so much the numbers, but it's about the investment and the mindset you guys have for R&D. I know you went private with a private equity company. We talked about that. You guys are growing. This is a growth company. You need R&D. What is the priorities? How are you looking at that? How would you talk to the industry and customers about your R&D priorities? Well, I'll tell you, we've been very blessed. And I think our investors, I think Bruce, when we sit at the board meeting, we always joke around, they have never skimmed on investing in products. And I think, look, we've been, our belief is that we are the innovation leader in our markets. There is a massive opportunity in front of us to obviously capitalize on. And the only way you do it, where you innovate and innovate means we invest. And I tell you, we've been very fortunate that the investment in products has continuously increased every year. I mean, this year, forget just the products and technologies. We made, John, double digit million dollar investments in building a brand new hosting architecture across the globe. In America's, in Amia, in APJ, and we benchmark ourselves against the Amazons and the Azures of the world, not our competitors. So not just products, but taking the cloud infrastructure across the globe, most secure, most, absolutely. Well, I mean, we run our own stuff, but we leverage both AWS and Azure in that context. But the goal is that we can be in the countries because data should not leave some of those countries. We comply to the biggest regulations. So we've made lots of investment. And hence, we could also innovate and get into new product categories. When you see, we have a whole new cloud architecture out there, catalog, security, these are all brand new markets that actually some of them have all come out since we went private. Actually, more innovation has come out of Informatica since we went private than in the three years previous to going private. So, Neil, let's play a game. Let's say that the catalog doing very well. Let's say that you work with Microsoft, working with AWS. You actually are successful at establishing a standard for how we think about data catalogs in a hybrid multicod world. Combine that with R&D and products. If you have in a data-first world where the next generation of applications are going to be data-first, that catalog gives you an inside edge to an enormous number of new application forms. How far does Informatica go? Well, that's a great question. I mean, I think, I genuinely believe that in some ways, we are barely scratching the opportunity in front of us. I mean, none of us have seen where this world will go. I mean, who would have imagined? Think of all the trends that have happened in front. Look at the world of social, where it has to be brought to bear. I genuinely think that, look, each company that I talk to, each customer I talk to, and I talk to hundreds of customers across the year, they all want to become a tech company. They all want to be an Amazon or a Google. And they realize that they will not become an Amazon Google by replicating them. The best way they can become an Amazon Google is to figure out all of the data they have and start using it, right? Institutionalizing their work around their data. So that's where the catalog becomes very handy. It's a great first step to begin that. And in that context, there are Fortune 5,000, there's Fortune 10,000, there are mid-market customers. I think we have just literally scratched the surface of that. Do you envision catalog-driven applications that get into, with the Informatica brand on them? Absolutely, so we actually have a great course. We actually made the catalog, the rest API-driven. So there are customers who are building their applications on the catalog. In fact, I'll give you a preview of that. Tomorrow I'll show a demo where Cognizant took our catalog, took Clare, within the catalog, used Microsoft's chatbot to create a complete third-party custom application called a data concierge, where you can go ask for data. So it's Microsoft chatbot, our Clare engine, and a custom app written by. So the world where I see is that it will be, that is a central nervous system of the platform and enough custom apps will be written. It's a real enabler. So I got to ask them and I've got a lot of, not a lot of time left to meet, but I want to get thoughts on cloud-native with containers, you don't have to kill the old to bring in the new. And what you guys are doing is with on-prem and some of the coolness, ease of use around getting the data cataloged in with the metadata, you're enabling potentially developers. Where does this lead us with containers, microservices, service meshes? Because that's right around the corner. It's happening as we speak, I mean, so we rewrote the cloud platform I just talked about. It's completely microservices based, completely. We had to, we had a whole cloud platform, we basically said we're going to rewrite the whole thing. Microservices based, and it's containerized. So the idea is that A microservices give you agility as we all very well. No, we can innovate a lot faster. And with the help of containers, you can just rapidly scale. I mean, rapidly deploy. You can test them, becomes a whole lot easy. I mean, today's cycle is so short. Customers want to do things rapidly. So we are just really helping them be able to do that. You see the data actually being an input into the development process. Oh, absolutely. Via microservices and service meshes. I mean, if you don't do that, you don't know what you're building. It's going to be a data first world. My, going back to my point, I think there's an opportunity for you guys to then go to the marketplace with some thought leadership about what does it mean to build data first applications. Historically, we start with a process and we imagine with the data structure to look like we put it in a database. And it was all the plumbing about integration and integration. You guys are saying, get your data assets, get your data objects rendered inside the catalog and think about the new ways you can put them to work and you think of your code as the mechanism by which that happens. Flips everything on its ear. It's a data first world and a data first approach to building applications seems like it's an appropriate next conversation. That, I agree with that. And that's a big opportunity. And obviously there's a task at hand to make sure we can help educate everyone to get there. And I think, you know, it'll take some time, but of course, that's the, anything which is easy is not interesting. It's a hard problem that where you basically, you solve and you kind of make it a big industry. I mean, it's great to see you. We feel like we've been following the journey of the success of you guys. We've been talking to go back four years. You can go back to thecube.net, look at the tape. You can see the conversations. You guys stayed on task, great product team. Great, you guys are taking some butt out there. Congratulations. Final question for you to put you on the spot. Biggest surprise this year for you. What's, obviously the catalog you mentioned has been taken off. What surprised you? Anything jump out in terms of successes, speed bumps on the road, architecture, trends? What's the big surprise? You know, I think I'm actually very warmed up by seeing, I talked about the day zero. It is a data-driven world where we see so many customers looking to come here. We've become the biggest data conference of the industry. In fact, we were reflecting. Informatica World has become the biggest accumulation of people who think data first. And I think that has been more than any technology. To me, at the end of the day, look, as much technology will come and stay. I'm a big believer. It's people that make the difference. And I think seeing all of those people here, seeing them make contributions, learn, and drive change has been my biggest, not only a positive surprise, but biggest gratification that I've seen out of my work. And the emphasis of not having such a big hype. I mean, getting excited about new technology is one thing, but the rubber's got to hit the road. You got to have real performance, the real software, real results. Because the pressure of scale, fast, time to market, all that stuff. Congratulations. Great to see you. I'm John Furrier, president here at Informatica on products and strategic ecosystem. I'm sure he's going to continue to be busy over the next year when we see him, certainly in the next CUBE event. I mean, great to see you. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. Live here at Informatica World 2018, it's the largest data first conference in the planet. We'll be right back with more after this short break.