 Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering Informatica World 2018. Not to you by Informatica. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is live coverage of The Cube here at the Venetian in Las Vegas for Informatica World 2018. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of The Cube with Peter Burris, my co-host for the next two days of wall-to-wall coverage of all the action here at Informatica World. The next guest is Ansa Shakeran, who's executive vice president, chief customer success officer at Informatica. Great to see you, welcome back. Good afternoon. Thanks for coming on. Glad to be back on The Cube. Sorry, the fist pumps all around, a lot of love going on. Data's hot, data's not just an industry segment, it's horizontally cutting across all of the action. You're in charge of a lot of customer success stories, but more importantly, the transformation. A lot of the customers we're hearing, one came on earlier, says, I love Informatica. Product rocks, it's kick-ass. You didn't say that, that's my words. It's rock solid, but allows me to bring in the new and do new things. Talk about the customer dynamics that you guys are seeing now more than ever, intelligent data. These are the themes, next generation analytics, GDPR's on the horizon. So you got some tactical and strategic things going on. Your thoughts? You know, these are exciting times. You know, as we look at our customer base on how they are embracing Informatica to drive disruption and realize business value, being as part of the services arc, indeed exciting to see how we can play a critical role in transforming their business. As we transform our business at Informatica to be a subscription company, to be a cloud-hosted company, we have dubbed 2018 as the year of adoption. In my capacity as the chief customer success officer to ensure the company as a whole is aligned towards driving adoption so that customers can realize value from a business. You hinted on customers transforming from the legacy, mainframe world to cloud big data. We cover the entire gamut. You name it, we have products wherever we have data reciting to integrate them so the customers can realize value. This morning I was speaking to a customer, you know, you heard us say many years ago, write data at the right time. You know, he said, we are trying to push petabytes to the customer every day. You know, we have gone through a huge transformation in my 22 years. You know, it cannot be any more exciting to be at Informatica. So I'm really happy to hear you say that answer because the industry broadly, but especially in more complex software domains, forgets that there's a difference between inventing something which is an engineering act and innovation, which fundamentally is a social act. Customers to do a lot of these more complex things we're talking about need knowledge and expertise, not just represented in the products that they buy, the services, the cloud-based services they procure, but also other ways of thinking about getting access to knowledge and smarts, a lot of what you guys have. Talk about, as in the role of customer success, how you regard Informatica's participation in that journey to innovation, to adoption, to making that change real. I think Informatica was one of the pioneers to realize, you know, great products are just the beginning. We got to make sure you come up with offerings which can connect those products to customers' business value. Our strategies, you know, we have a three prong strategy. We look at our products set, you know, first thing we want to do is, what is the experience we want to offer to our customers? And then we look at what products and service offerings we need to put in place to deliver on that experience. And the third, where I think we are a trendsetter is, how do we innovate and I would say reinvent ways on process and technology to deliver on that vision. I think every four years we've been relaunching our success offerings. I'm pretty excited to talk about what we have in store in 2018. We heard that you're revamping the customer, Informatica's customer success program. You guys have been iterating. What's the new iteration? What's coming? Can you share a little bit about where it's going? What's happening next? I touched upon the fact that Informatica is transforming. It said to be a subscription company offering all our products on the cloud. And we have, you know, as a sign points to me, 24 years of data innovation, thousands of customers, we can't forget the past. You know, we're going to take the lessons we learned from the past and how do you apply for the present and the future. We are, want to offer a simplistic model where we want to offer a success platform, not position offerings for customers, professional services, education services, support services. We want to build an abstraction layer, a simplified layer where we call it success offerings. The functions underneath will plug and play. Add to the customer, it'll be just one offering, which is be a seamless end to end experience. These days with the advent of web and all the Omni Channel, we realize a customer, we are involved in the customer's life cycle even before they are a customer. So one of the best services you can provide to your ecosystem is to transfer some of that knowledge. It's to show away for a lot of your partners to that notion of an offering that's a combination of the product, the channel, as well as the service know-how about making sure that things actually work. Are you participating in that process of moving customer success, subscription, but also trying to bring along the ecosystem to show them how you can catalyze better lessons for them? I mean, as part of this support offerings, we are also coming up with what we call as the Informatica Network, where it brings in the assets from all we have gathered from customers and disseminating this back to the customer base so that they'll be able to leverage best practices, build customer communities, and our goal in support in our vision is pretty simple, right? Our charter all along is the best service, they say is no service, right? In what ways can we push the knowledge to the customers so that they don't have a need to reach Informatica? So we are very active participants in building communities by product lines, by solutions, and to the very intent years that how do we push it back to the customers? And we have sessions at Informatica where we bring customers to different verticals to see what we can learn and what we can connect to other customers, right? I mean, customers under tremendous pressure to do more resource-wise, they have the same or less, so I think they look to Informatica to partner with, to realize business value. Well, I also think, and this is the test, I also think a lot of your non-technology customers are also looking at ways that data is going to improve their products, improve their engagement, improve their operations, and they themselves are starting to imagine themselves as providing SaaS-like capabilities. Exactly. Just as you are helping your traditional technology partners envision a different way of engagement, a different way of improving how they improve the productivity of their engagement, are you also helping your customers see that other route using Informatica products, using Informatica know-how to becoming a better digital supplier themselves? Absolutely. I touched upon how we are leveraging technology. We have products like Discovery IQ, a lot of solutions built on machine learning. When we host our customers' products, we have a window into what they're doing. To the extent privacy laws are low, we can track every click. It's all about mining that information so that we can provide personalized, real-time engagement to the customers. That at times we can see a problem going to happen before it happens. And the beauty of being on a hosted solution is, we can push solutions to the customer to recommend ways they can deliver better value, all about customer experience, right? In one of the key elements of customer experience is how do you reduce their effort? So technology, we've been able to bring up a number of ways to do it. That's a great point, you got to use the data, you can extract data, insights from that data. This brings up the question that we're hearing. I'm not a believer of it, by the way. Oh, automation is going to kill my job. I mean, automation is going to help. We believe that. That's our position. But yet, automation will shift the value up the stack or wherever the value opportunity is. So what is Informatica doing with things like AI? As things get automated with the cloud, that's going to create success of mining the data. You can provide insights. What are the things do you see with automation and AI from a customer success standpoint that's going to be harvested for the customer's benefit? I think what is really working in our favor, personally, I've been a support engineer myself. Doing a repetitive task was not my cup of tea. The job is interesting only if you find new learnings and see how we can help the customer. We have a great framework to automate a repetitive task. Shadbots, you have heard of them. Today, they are applicable a lot in the consumer world. We are looking at ways how we can leverage the technology in the enterprise space. We can predict based on semantic analysis, just the language, the words customer use to communicate with us, what is their tone? When should we interfere? When should we raise the priority of the case before the customer asks for it? The team is pretty excited because it has opened up doors for the team to do more initiatives to deliver better value to the customer. It's also, there's the good and the bad element of it. The automation also puts us the center of everything we do. It brings support right to the forefront of the customer. So you have to be careful. Impressions leave a lasting thing with the customers. So we've got a lot of customers here at Informatica World. What's the plan? You're going to wind and dine them, sit down, do briefings, do roadmaps. What do you do when you're here at Informatica World with customers? Celebrate, but also you do some intermittent. Right. We're going to be talking about the new offerings coming out in July, Q3. We're going to be launching the new support offerings. I think our landscape of the industry, I'm very excited to say, we're kind of the industry first, bringing everything under one umbrella. And what's even more exciting, I said 2018 is the year of adoption. We are bundling in what we call adoption services delivered by a professional services team at no margin to our customers. That's awesome. Now we're embracing the layer model, land adopt. If you truly mean adoption, you've got to bootstrap them and get them off to a good start because that is key. You asked about how are you leveraging and pushing knowledge, so when we bootstrap them, we shared the best practices which we could have learned from other customers. It's a merger, so you can help them take the first few steps? Correct. Get in the right direction. And lay the foundation in the right place. You realize when the foundation's right, then we can. Get them to embed in their business. Exactly. And horizontally scale that data for intelligent data, trusted insights, next generation analytics, it's all there. Absolutely. So thanks for coming on the Cube, really appreciate it. Live coverage here in Las Vegas at the Venetian. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. More live coverage after the short break. Thank you.