 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2018. brought to you by Informatica. Hey, welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE with Peter Burst, my co-host for the next two days. Live coverage from Informatica World 2018 here in Las Vegas. Our next guest is Graham Thompson, Senior Vice President and CIO Chief Information Officer for Informatica. He handles all of the CIO roles as well inside the company and also speaks with a lot of their customers. Who are also CIOs? Graham, great to see you again. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. You too, John. So last year we had a conversation around your role as a CIO, but also you're doing a lot of stuff internally, certainly using your own product, but you're spending a lot of time with customers. And a lot of those customers can either be project guys, application developers, CXOs, CDOs, CIOs. You're interfacing a lot of customers. What's changed in the marketplace with respect to the CXO chief something officer? Because there's been movement in your thoughts. Yeah, definitely. So as I talked to peers and our customers, it's very clear that data integration, data management has moved beyond just trying to get a big project done. It's no longer about deploying ERP or CRM in the cloud and needing to move data around. The data management part is really in service of something much greater. And it might be getting closer to your customer. It might be using the data that's generated in your company and about your company to generate insights and next best action to improve the operational efficiency of the company or more importantly to improve the customer experience that they have as they deal with your company. So it's moved way beyond just getting a project done and it's now a strategic thing in service of something higher level. And that higher level thing is usually on the radar of the board and the CEO. So our research suggests that we're moving from a world of process first in the IT organization to data first. Is that too far stretched as far as you're concerned? Not for some companies. When you look at the most valuable companies in the world today, companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, you could argue they're data companies. The product that they generate is data. The thing they use to compete upon is data. So for those companies, I don't think that's a stretch at all. For everyone else, they need to figure out what they're going to do about that and figure out whether they're going to try and catch up or whether they're going to try and disrupt. But I think for the world's best companies, you're seeing them more and more focused on the data and the process is turning into just a thing that generates that data, which is the thing that generates the value. We've been seeing companies becoming more data companies and Peter's research and the team has been showing digital business about data assets and Facebook's and the Amazon's, they're obvious examples. We see them as hyperscalers, but there's going to be the end user customers, the traditional enterprises, they're now becoming service providers. They got cloud, they got multi-cloud, they're going to have an IoT edge. They have a bigger set of complexities around this horizontally scalable business, digital business architecture. So your point about projects, it was in old days easy, you shipped, connect everyone, they'd log in, they'd do their job and then they'd go out and sell to customers. It was still hard. Well, I mean, straightforward, known, right? I mean, it was a known enterprise, you had a perimeter. Now you have digital channel, you have more challenges. How do you look at that? And where does Informatica fit in that conversation with the CIO and the CEO who have to report to the board level and saying we got to manage our security, we got to do all this stuff. How do you guys fit into that new world? Yeah, so the thing that differentiates Informatica from everyone else, frankly, is the fact that we look at it holistically and we cover everything from discovering the data. If it's an asset, you have to know that you have it. So you got to go discover it, you got to be able to catalog it so you can keep control of what you have. You need to know the lineage of it. Where does it get created? Where does it get moved to? Who has access to it with GDPR going in effect later this week? It's increasingly important for us to know who has access to the data. It's increasingly important to manage the life cycle of that data so that you know where it's been created, used, moved. You have to secure it. If your aspiration is to have a true enterprise data lake, you got to make sure that the identity governance is in place. You got to make sure that information that might be HR-related isn't accessible by people who don't have the privilege to see it in the HR application. So that's the discovery, the cataloging. Then you have to clean it, master it, and look at an MDM solution for getting a true 360-degree view of your customer or your product or your supplier. And then there's the analytics part which is often the prize at the end of if you can get all the data into your data lake and potentially with the data warehouse on the back of that in the cloud. And then you can choose the presentation layer that you love the most and use that to serve up self-service analytics for your customer. So we're different and then we look at all of it. We've got a lot of nimble competitors that do one thing very well. And if our customer is trying to just get a project done, my advice to them is go do an RFP and pick whatever one you like. But if this is really strategic for you, you need to pick someone that can do all of it and do it all well in a way that's going to be scalable and independent from the big software providers. But I want to come back Graham to this because I think there's one more thing I want to test you on. This is kind of the basis for my comment earlier about moving to a data first as opposed to a process first world. Because I think it also, you have to be able to discover it, catalog it, be able to audit it, all those other things. But you also have to be able to deliver it and deliver it with a high degree of certainty that it's the right data at the right time. Historically, application developers started with a process and they presume that the data would be associated with that process. Now we're starting with these assets that are very, very high value. And we're looking for new ways to leverage those assets. It kind of has a different mindset, doesn't it? It really does and that's the fun part, quite honestly. If you think about the data used to be hostage to its process, the process used to be hostage to the application that it was executed in. And now we're opening up all these opportunities where you can take, just in our company, you can take usage information and make it available to our customer support organization so they can proactively help our customer adopt the product. We can tell which features the customer may be using and not using to help focus our adoption efforts and really help the customer get more value from the product. That's an opportunity that was either unknown or very difficult to take advantage of when you were just looking at the process of fulfilling an order, delivering the cloud environment to the customer, and then 12 months later going back and trying to renew it. It's now a connected lifecycle of the customer's experience with your product and it's all based on the data. The applications and the processes are just the things that generate it. What's changed? Go back, because you mentioned that's an awesome example. The old way with process is now it seems that the data is freed up. What changed? What was the catalyst from going, you know, stuck in the process, slayed to the process, slayed to the app to what you just referred to which seems like the outcome people want to get to, which is create data so that people can innovate on it. What's changed? Yeah, so I think as individuals as humans our expectations have changed. We now know that it's reasonable to expect that if I have an interaction with one part of your company on a Monday, the other part of your company who I interact with on a Thursday should know about it. I think as consumers we've become conditioned to really expect that. And just like we now see in the B2C world, folks are expecting it in the B2B world. So you've got higher expectations and then the capabilities to do it didn't really exist before. And now with all these different, you've got all your different applications in the cloud, you've still got applications on premise and there's an expectation and now the capability to do analytics on all of it. There's an expectation that information about you is known and used to improve your experience as a customer when you're dealing with these businesses. But the whole notion of data as an asset requires different governance, different people. We're strong believers that actually you can measure the degree to which a company is on its digital transformation journey by the degree to which it has in fact institutionalized work around data or change that or organized. When you look at the CIO role and how the CIO role is going to change or is changing and is going to change any more as a consequence of this increasing focus on data as an asset within the business, what are you doing? What do you expect to be doing? What are you counseling other CIOs to do? Yeah, so it's a good one. When I talk to peers, I ask them, I try and create an analogy between the data as an asset and money as an asset. So I would ask them, if you were to take your CFO aside and ask them, do you know where all your money is? They'll say, of course I do. Do you know which currency your money is stored in? Do you know where it is physically? Do you know who has access to it? Do you have a governance process in place to try and figure out the most profitable use of that asset? And they go, yeah, of course my CFO knows that. Say, okay, swap the word money for data and you as the CIO, can you answer yes to any of those questions? And you get a reaction of, oh, I believe I should, but I can't. And when a lot of companies say that data is an asset, but they're really not operating that way, they don't have the governance around it, they don't have the control around it, they don't have the governance in place to make sure they're using it in the most profitable way to get that return that you suggested. So I think that's definitely where we're moving and some of the world's best companies are definitely going in that direction. That is exactly one of the things we were just talking about on our intro here this morning around the CIO and the CEOs don't know where their data is. And I think the GDPR is, I'm not a big fan of it with all the technical challenges and ultimately it's a signal in my opinion, but ultimately it's going to happen. But I think it's a signal to your point. You need to know about your data, not treat it as some fenced off storage thing and the storage administrator, where is it all and the guy left, who's running it now, where's the data, what's the schema, these are all technical storage questions. Now it's not the stuff on the storage assets is the bottom line. Though that paradigm is over, you're talking about something that's fundamental, strategic business aspect. So I think this is a new generation. So with that I want to ask you, you had talked before camera that you have a CDO that reports to you, a change for Informatica. Can you explain that decision, why a chief data officer reports to the CIO, why you guys came to that conclusion and as a result of that what's happening? Yeah, so we're going through a transformation in our company as we move from being a traditional software company that sells license and maintenance to being a cloud and subscription company. The processes and the systems you need to be a subscription company to be a good one are very different. It's a connected end to end process all the way from how you generate your product, your go-to-market strategy all the way through, how you fulfill it, how you drive adoption and value creation with your customer and ultimately how you renew it and sell more. That's a different process than a traditional ship it and forget it license company. So as we go through this transformation where we are solving a lot of the governance problems, we're solving a lot of the system of record and data quality problems and we need to make sure that once we're done with each part of the project it doesn't get broken again. In software companies, IT people are really good at fixing things but they're not always really good at keeping it fixed. So the time was right for us to create this new position and we debated where it should report but we believe that as an action orientated get stuff done function, it has to be co-located with the team who are delivering the new applications and the new processes and for the moment that's within the CIO function. Are they going to be tracking this notion of asset tracking like you treat data like an asset like money? Are you guys down the road on that? How are you viewing it internally as you guys roll out the CDO relationship with you? Actually we're making it strategic on so you guys know that you're in the data business. Where are you on that question that you asked rhetorically for yourselves? Yeah, so I mean. Do you know where your data is? Yeah, I mean we're very, very fortunate to have unfettered access to all of our products. So, you know, we're very, very proud of our intelligent data lake deployment which is on as our cloud. There's more and more of ours and any other customers workload moves to the cloud. It makes more and more sense to have analytics there. People are questioning the wisdom of bringing all the data back on-prem just to do analytics. The only people making money out of that are AT&T and Verizon. There's got to be a better way. So that's one thing that would be under the purview of the CDO. And that would be to enable self-service analytics across the company, get IT out of the way of generating the presentation layer of reporting and enable the great and talented people throughout the company to do that. So that would be the analytics side. And then obviously cataloging and securing is something we have the best solutions in the industry. So those solutions are deployed and that will help us with our GDPR compliance. But it'll also help us make sure that we know what we have and we have a process in place to at least consider what the most profitable use of that data asset would be elsewhere in the company. So you feel good about it? Yeah. All right, so for the people that can't answer that question, a CIO, hmm, you know what, that's a good question. I should know this. What do they do next? How should they, what's the next step of action that a CIO should take when they go, oh no, I can't answer that question. They might have their hands on some fingertips of data but ultimately the strategic question is what do I do next? I must be calling for Medica. I mean, do I do an audit? I mean, what's the- Hopefully they'll call us, but the, if you take the vendor and the technology out of it, if you're trying to figure out how much money you had, you would put a process in place to go discover it all. Yeah, count it. So the equivalent there is cataloging so our enterprise data catalog product is the fastest growing product we've ever had in the company. And what that does is it allows, like Google for your data, you can search for where all your customer data lives, you can search for where all your product data lives, you can figure out where it moves. And that is the first thing that I would advise a CIO to do is figure out what you have, where it's stored, where it moves to, where it's used and who has access to it. And if you have that, then at least you've got a shot at figuring out how to leverage, you still need intelligent people to figure out where the most profitable use of it would be, but at least you know what you have, where it is and who has access to it. And then when someone wants to come and ask you about the GDPR and your compliance level, if you can show them that, then at least it's clear that you have an objective to comply with the regulation. And they're going to be pretty leaning from what we hear, but they're going to want to see people making steps for compliance. And it's kind of some moving train with GDPR and we're going to go in deep on this this week. Graham Thompson, Senior Vice President and CIO. Thanks for coming on. It's great to see you again. Let's keep in touch. Love to explore the CDO relationship with the CIO. I think that's cutting edge. Congratulations. Know where your data is, how much it's worth. If you know where your money is and how much it's worth, you don't want to lose your data and you want to make sure you're leveraging it's theCUBE coverage here at Informatica World. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. More live coverage after this short break.