 He's a star, of course. Cube alumni. From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2018. Not you, bye Informatica. Okay, hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here live in Las Vegas for Informatica World 2018. My co-host for the next two days, Walter Wall Coverage is Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE theCUBE. We're here for Informatica World here in Vegas. We were in San Francisco previous years. Big tables being set here with the role of data. We've covered in the past the role of data. Certainly we've been talking about on SiliconANGLE and researching it on Wikibon. Security data, IoT is the center of cloud infrastructure, AI and then emerging technologies like blockchain and other things. This is where the action is. Peter, we've been looking at Informatica over a couple years and the arc and change is around data, cloud. You got the international component with the GDPR, booming front and center this month. And then you got data as a competitive advantage. You're seeing companies organize around data, but you can't ignore the explosion of AWS putting the stake in the ground with the numbers that are getting with cloud. Microsoft adds yours, dominance with the install base of Microsoft now making a play in cloud and you got Google Cloud and then international with Alibaba, a variety of cloud players. Huge cloud scale, IoT edge data. I mean, these guys are, I mean, they caught in the crosswinds, they have a tailwind, headwind, Informatica, they positioned, what's your take? Well Informatica is amongst that handful of companies that was on a knife's edge as the marketplace started moving towards the cloud. And when the move to the cloud from a software company standpoint is also associated with a move from a traditional business model which is we sell our software, you give us money up front and that's how we pay our sales guys to a services orientation which is we're going to work with you in a services mentality and expect that we're going to operate over time. So Informatica was on that knife's edge. They had a good product set in the sense that they foresaw that data was going to become more important and they are a good data company. They've got a great suite of data management tools that's very relevant to today's marketplace but in many respects the question was were they going to step up and be one of the companies that successfully transitioned to the cloud in a services model or were they going to try to fight against it with products set and they have been making that transition and it seems to be going quite well. We first heard about it a couple of years ago last year we saw it accelerate with some of the new initiatives that they had and their incorporation of AI into their suite and our expectations this year we're going to see it accelerate even further. It's interesting time is a great equalizer to who was right on the vision. We hear a lot of visions and people putting out statements of intent with their organization. You see who pivots and who shifts and who zigs and who zags. Informatica a few years ago really understood the horizontal scalability of the cloud and the data needs to move around very freely but they also understood the challenges of governance. So as we look at applications in the cloud and potentially decentralized applications data is more critical than ever that it be exposed and be addressable but yet compliant. This is a hard challenge. You're researching this and it reveals itself in the IoT edge to the data center and hybrid multi-cloud. How are companies thinking about data as it has to be frictionless horizontally but yet managed with compliance? Well we wrote a piece a couple of years ago that clearly stated that a digital business is one that uses data as an asset and that's it. All this other transformation stuff is noise unless you're focused on the role that data is playing in your business and in fact we believe pretty strongly that the whole notion of digital business transformation is the process by which your organization acknowledges and recognizes what it means to have data as an asset, your culturally set up to do it, your organize to take advantage of it and very importantly you're institutionalizing your work around what it means to use data as an asset. So that's been our perspective for a long time. Companies today continue to, I'd say be half and half. Certainly companies like Amazon, AWS those digital native companies absolutely have got this. They are very much focused on the role that data is playing as a centerpiece asset for their businesses. A lot of the incumbents that are trying to move into and take on some of those digital threats are also starting to recognize this. We've heard at a number of different cube events over the past few months that an acceleration in the, at least the talk track about the role that data is going to play out of a variety of different big companies. So right now most of the enterprises that we're working with are still a little bit behind. We get some arguments about it. You know, well what about this, what about that? But increasingly there's at least an acknowledgement that data as an asset, generating returns on that asset, the differences in how you generate returns in that asset is going to become a feature of all enterprise strategies. You know I've been hearing in hallway conversations over a variety of the events we've gone to and a pattern's kind of emerging when it comes to data. You know whether you're talking to a CEO of a company or a chief data officer or even a CIO, the questions that come up, certainly on GDPR exposes this and the law that's going to be enacted this month. Where's the data? What's it worth? And how do I organize around it? So again to your point about you've identified the digital business transformation. And a lot of times the conversation is, I don't know to all of them. So this is the question I want to explore with you here this week. Why is the data, is it important, is it worth anything? And how do I organize my business around it both architecturally, because you get the cloud right there as an accelerant potentially, or it's a double-edged sword, could hurt you. Yeah, absolutely. So John what we've been talking about with our clients is this notion of data zoning. And the idea basically is kind of an architectural construct where you say okay what is the value proposition, what activities are essential to delivering that value proposition and then where is that activity going to be located and what do I need to get data approximately to that activity. So it's kind of a four-step process. And this notion of data zoning presumes that increasingly businesses have to think about the physical realities of data. Latency, bandwidth, intellectual property, governance, legal considerations, just as you mentioned like GDPR, but also the cost of moving data are very real. And when you start talking about public cloud can be off the charts expensive. So those five considerations are going to be essential to how companies think about their data and how they start institutionalizing work around it. So it's an absolute crucial focus that people have to emphasize. And there's going to be some technologies that alleviate some of the pressures that they have but the bottom line is the issues of cost, regulation and law, latency and bandwidth and intellectual property control are not going to go away and they will guide people's data choices. Intellectual property, zoning of data, these are things that scare me if I'm a data person and leave the throat something at you. So everyone talks about the ecosystem. Oh, we're going to have an ecosystem strategy certain with cloud you have now diverse sets of sharing. We've seen in security, they're sharing data. So there's notion of sharing which gives a collective intelligence and makes data more or have more context as we talk about on the queue all the time. At the same time, more sources of data are coming in from potentially customers, partners. This is a mashup, this is a fusion of data. This is a challenge. What are you hearing for companies on how they're posturing for ecosystem partnerships? Is it just APIs? Is it just, I mean, how are they thinking about it and is Informatica poised for that? Informatica, let's start with the second question. Informatica is poised for it but every company is going to face some challenges. There are a lot of different sectors of the industry that are looking at this and saying and licking their chops saying, man, I can make a lot of money there but if we step back a little bit the first thing is that you're right it is a mishmash and that's a feature of data. Data can be combined, can be copied, you can do things with data without destroying data. It's like a biological catalyst, right? It's very, very important to remain very cognizant of that. But when we think ultimately about where this is going there's going to be a relationship between data protection, being able to locate data where it needs to be at the same time, protect it, being able to move data with some degree of facility, stage it predictably around the enterprise so it's in the zone where it needs to be to support an action. And our expectation ultimately is that we're going to see an increasing merging of the issue of security and data management because ultimately the challenge of data is not is how do you privatize it? Because it is so easy to share and so one of the key concepts is going to be moving a security orientation from restricting access to appropriately sharing as you mentioned with business rules and security becomes kind of the mindset, the approach of how you go about privatizing your data assets and then subsequently protecting them and then putting them where they need to be within the enterprise. And it's also enabling developers and AI for instance you see what the trend in machine learning which is actually the gateway to AI which we're all seeing. Next generation analytics are dependent upon this. Fundamental, whatever architecture whether it's cloud, infrastructure or edge of the network. Next generation analytics have to have a feed, have to have the ability to use machine learning. It's not just next generation analytics. It's next generation applications, right? So it's how do we incorporate some of those new capabilities within applications so that what we talk about is we talk about systems of agency and the idea is how am I going to let technology act on my behalf? So we can think in terms of automation which is a process oriented but IOT with its models and what we call or augmentation with its human data interaction, human application interaction, new styles of it are very data first and so ultimately what we're talking about again is these new styles of applications where either we're doing something based on a model at the edge or human beings are given options to choose from then those options are crafted by the system itself and that is an enormous set of implications. So for example we talk about blockchain. Now blockchain means a lot of things to a lot of people but fundamentally one of the things that becomes interesting about blockchain chain is the degree to which in a computing system, an accounting system doesn't need incentives. You tell it to do something, it doesn't. An edge application also doesn't need incentives. It operates according to the model and the specific conditions but when you talk about some of these high value applications with human beings you have to incorporate incentives into how they work and blockchain has the potential to provide a very powerful way of conceptualizing how you make human beings strong agents within these systems without undermining that notion of agency with the appropriate set of incentives. And also the ability to disrupt intelligently the inefficient systems. And you always talk about inefficiency as an opportunity to make it more efficient with intelligent data and insights. This is essentially the theme at Informatica. 25 years they've been doing data but now more than ever supporting kind of these use cases that are emerging very quickly. Intelligent data and insights drive ton of value from analytics applications. Well, you know, let's go back 25 years. Informatica started on the basis of acknowledging or recognizing that OLAP, that new classes of analytic systems were going to require new technologies. This is a company that's always had good data chops, good data people. It's a magnet for smart people with an orientation towards data and that's why it's remained relevant. Now again, it's not a given. There's still a lot of change in the horizon. The world does not have enough data scientists. The tooling for supporting some of these rich applications has a long way to go. There's a lot in that computer science yet to be developed. But if you think about the handful of companies that are going to be likely in the mix making some of these changes leading the way. Informatica's in that group. We got to wrap it up for the kickoff when we start day one, final question. Well, I'll start by saying, you know, I think Informatica has a great opportunity ahead and they got challenges. They have great product people. They have to engage the ecosystem. If they can effectively bring the product into the market with a robust ecosystem while enabling intelligent data for insights in a way that applications, machine learning can take advantage of it and scale it. I think they got a great opportunity. If they don't forge those relationships and take the draft of the cloud, then I think they might have some challenges. So I think it's accurate. One thing I'd add to that, John, is that they will have to demonstrate to the ecosystem that they have and they want to build that the transition from product to service is good for everybody. If they can do that, if they can move that, because that's a big part of the cloud, if they can be, again, a magnet within the cloud for attracting data-related companies and innovation and entrepreneurs, then this is definitely a company to watch. We said it last year, whoever can crack the code on letting data grow organically and be intelligent while maintaining governance and compliance, which could slow things down, that is the secret sauce. Whoever cracks that code will certainly go to the next level. It's the queue breaking down. Informatica will start in day one of two days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. More live coverage after this short break.