 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2018, brought to you by Informatica. Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2018. We're here at the Venetian in Las Vegas live. I'm John Furrier, co-host with Peter Burris, co-hosting and head of analysts at Wikibon. It's looking at theCUBE. Our next guest is Shem Dadala, who's the Enterprise Analytics Architecture Engineer at the Sire Pharmaceutical and Sungnam Director of the Enterprise Analytics Solutions Lead at Sire as well. Great to have you guys. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for being here. So love getting the practitioner view of kind of the reality of what's going on. Obviously Informatica is their show. You guys are a customer. You're looking at some of their products. Take a minute first to talk about what you guys do first. See, pharma, you got some stuff going on. Data's involved. Privacy's involved. You're in Europe in the U.S. GDPR is here. Take a minute to talk about what you guys do. Sure. So Sire Pharmaceuticals is the global leader in rare diseases. So there's about 350 million patients who are affected with rare diseases today. And so Art Group is within IT, Enterprise Analytics. So we're focused on making sure we bring the right technologies and capabilities around BI and analytics to the organization. So we look at products, tools, figure out how they fit into our ecosystem of BI stack of tools and make that available to our IT colleagues as well as our business colleagues. So rare disease, can you just explain kind of categorically what that is? Cause I'm assuming this with rare is not a lot of data on it or this data you got to figure out. What is that? How do you guys categorize that? So rare disease, majority of the rare disease are affected by the children. So that's kind of a critical aspect of what we do. Rare disease could be in immunology. It could be in oncology, GI. I mean, there's rare disease, typically, people who are affected probably less than a thousand or a couple of thousand, I think one of our drugs, the population is around 5,000 people. And these are chronic diseases. Typically they're chronic diseases. So they're diseases that affect the quality of life of an individual. So what you guys are doing is identifying what is it about the genealogy, et cetera, the genome associated with the disease, but then providing treatments that will allow, especially kids, an opportunity to have live a better life over an extended time. Yeah. And what do you guys do there in terms of the data side? Can you explain what your roles are? Yeah, so like I said, we're in the enterprise analytics. So we're focused on bringing technologies and capabilities around BI and analytics spaces. So how do we bring data in, ingest it? How do we curate the data? How do we do data visualizations? How do we do data discovery, advanced analytics? So all of those kind of capabilities we're responsible for. So what's your architecture today? You have some on-premises, they're cloud-involved. Can you just kind of lay out kind of the environment as much as you can share? I know maybe some confidential information, but for the most part, what's the current landscape internally for you guys? What are you dealing with, the data? Sure, so we've got a new next generation analytics. We called it our marketplace, our analytics marketplace. We're leveraging both on-prem as well as cloud technologies. So we're leveraging Microsoft Azure, the HDN sites for Hadoop, the big data technologies, as well as Informatica for data ingestion and bringing that data and transforming it. So there are many tools involved in that one. So it's like the whole ecosystem, we call it as marketplace which is backbone for shared enterprise analytics strategy and future. You guys put a policy around what tools people can bring to work, so to speak. And we're seeing a proliferation of tools. I mean, it's a tool vendor everywhere, we look around the big data. I got a tool for this, I got a tool for wrangling. I've seen everything. How do you guys deal with that onslaught of tools coming in, do you guys look at it more from a platform perspective? How are you guys handling that? Right, so look at a platform perspective. And we try to bring tools in and make that a standard within the organization. We look at security, is it enterprise grade technology? And yeah, it's a challenge. I mean, there's people who... You do basically certify it. You kick the tires, give it a pace, test through its paces. And then we have our own operations team so we can support that tool set, the platform itself. So people... And what do your customers do with the data? They do self-service, are they data scientists? Are they like just business analysts? What's the profile of the users and customers of your... We have all set of users. We have technical folks which they want to use the data like traditional EDL reality. So they are folks from the business they want to do like self-serve and analysts they want to do analysis on the data. So we have all the capabilities in our marketplace. So some tools, they enable those guys to get the data for the self-serve like the tools we have. And Dallabar does their own stuff like the ELT. Talk a little bit about the... One of the key challenges associated with pharmaceuticals especially in the types of rare disease, chronic young people types of things that you guys are mainly focused on. A big challenge has always been that people when they start taking a drug that can significantly improve their lives they start to feel better. And when they start to feel better they stop taking it. So how are you using big data to or are you using analytics to identify people, help describe potential treatments for them, help keep them on the regimen. How do you do, are you, first of all are you doing those things? And as you do it, how are you ensuring that you are compliant with basic ethical and privacy laws? And what types of tools are you using to do that? It's a big question. Yeah, yeah. So we are doing some of that. We have looked at things around persistence and adherence and understanding kind of what combination of drugs may work best for certain individuals or groups of people. Yeah, and definitely compliance is a big factor in that. So working close with a compliance group, understanding how we're allowed to use that data between which parts of the organization. Do you anticipate that you'll have a direct relationship with some of these customers or is there an, in other words, does analytics provide you an opportunity to start to alter the way that you engage the core users of your products and services? I believe so. I think one thing that we're looking at with strategic standpoint is how do we diagnose people sooner? A lot of these chronic diseases, they go through two, three years of undiagnosis. So they'll jump around from doctor to doctor trying to understand what the issue is. So I think one thing we're looking at is how do we use data and AI to more quickly be able to diagnose patients. Has a 360 view helped you guys of data? You guys have a 360 view? How do you, because most people look at that as terms of a channel selling a product and serving because we have a different perspective. What's the 360 view benefit that you guys are getting? Yeah, so we have kind of a customer care model, which is kind of a 360 for our customer. So understanding around just drug manufacturing, to making sure they have the right supply, to understanding is it working for the patients? So we've always been talking about the role of Big Data. You mentioned Hadoop. That Hadoop was supposed to be this whole industry and now it's a feature of data, right? So there's a variety of infrastructures of service, platformers of service, some say iPads and Big Data. How are you guys looking at that as builders of IT, next generation IT, the role of iPads and Big Data? We see it as a role enabler. I think what cloud brings us in the past type solutions is agility. We, as the market is evolving so quickly and there's new versions of new software coming out so quickly that everyone will be able to embrace that and leverage that. Give it a benefit of like, give it some sort of comparison. Old way versus cloud, like, has there been some immediate benefits that just pop out? Yeah, there are a lot more benefits with doing the old way and the cloud way because with the cloud, it brings a lot more scalability in olden days. To get like 10 servers, you need to work with the infrastructure team to get it like, it takes three months or two months to get it. With the cloud, based on your workload, you can scale up or scale down. So that's one thing, because you're talking about Big Data. You're getting the volume of data you're getting. You need to scale up your storage or your platform. Yeah, you need compute, you need to jam on some compute, bring it out to the table and then you got to have the custom tooling for the visualization, all that kind of together, right? Talk about, from your perspective, the balance that you guys have to deal with every day. Like, you got to deal with the current situation. In IT, you got cloud, you got analytics, you got customers personas of people using the product. But you got to stay in the cutting edge of like, what's next, because if you're going down the cloud road, you're looking at containers, Kubernetes, service meshes, you know, a lot more stuff coming down the pike, if you will, coming down the road for you guys. How are you guys looking at that and how are you managing it? Do you have some Greenfield projects? Do you do a little, you know, R&D? Do you integrate it in? How are you dealing with this new cloud-native set of technologies? Yeah, it's definitely a balancing act. You know, I think we do a lot of POCs and we actually work with our business and IT counterparts to see, hey, if there's a new use case that is coming down, you know, how do we solve that use case with some of the newer technologies and we try a POC, we bring in a product to just see if it works and then see how do we, then do we then take that to the enterprise? So I got one final question for you guys and maybe you do as well, John, but in life and death businesses, like pharmaceuticals, is a life and death business. The quality of the data is really, really important. Getting it wrong has major implications. The fidelity of the system is really crucial. You say you're using Informatica for, for example, Ingest and other types of services. How has that choice made the business feel more certain about the quality of the data that you're using in your analytic systems? And just standardization. So, you know, between MDM, around mastering the data to ingesting data, transforming the data, just having that data lineage, having that standard around how that data gets transformed. Is that fundamentally a feature of the services that you're providing is you're not only, you know, the ability to do a visualization on data, but actually providing your scientists and your business people and your legal staff explicit knowledge about where this data came from and how trustworthy it is and whether they should be making these kind of very complex, very real, hardcore human level decisions on? Is that all helping? Because it seems like it would be a really crucial determination of what tools you guys would use. Right, it is, yeah, and absolutely. I think also as we move more to our self-service and having these people, having data scientists do their things on their own, being able to have the tools that can do that kind of audit and data lineage is crucial. Great to have you guys on. We had a wrap. I want to ask one more question. I heard you guys were an innovation awardee, Informatica, congratulations. Any advice for your peers out there who want to unleash the power of data and be on the cutting edge and potentially be an honoree? Yeah, I would say just definitely think outside the box and try new things, do POCs. There's so much new technologies coming down so quickly that it's hard to keep up, champ. It's like a moving target. You need to chase your moving target and based on POC that gets you what you want it to do. It's exciting. Yeah, it is. Get out front, don't keep your eye on the prize. Focus on task at hand. Bring in the new technologies. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. Great to hear the practitioners' reality from the trenches, certainly front lines. Life or death situation, the quality of the data matters. Scaling is important. It's the cloud era of data. I'm John Furrier. Peter Burris, more live coverage after this short break.