 Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here in Palo Alto for a special CUBE conversation here with Graham Thompson who's the new CIO at Informatica joined mid-year last year in 2016 here to discuss with me the Informatica World 2017 preview discussion kicking off as their event comes up next month. Graham, great to see you. Thanks for coming in for this CUBE conversation. Yeah, thanks John, nice to be here. So the industry's at an inflection point right now. This has been a really phenomenal year and past few years leading up to it, but we're now at this inflection point where you're seeing the tipping point with cloud computing, you're seeing the tipping point with data-driven strategies across the board. So more compute, more flexibility, more infrastructure, a lot of automation, but it's an inflection point we haven't seen in decades. We're expecting to see a sea change of transformation, wealth creation, value creation, whatever you want to call it, this is happening and it's putting people in different positions in the marketplace and in their competitive space. What's your thoughts on this? How does this play into Informatica World 2017? Yeah, so firstly, as an IT practitioner, it's really exciting, I think we finally, as CIOs and IT leaders, we finally have the opportunity to add the strategic value that we've been, that we've really been asking for. We've spent the last 20 years optimizing back office global processes, that kind of stuff and now there's more and more of the competitive advantages based on digital assets instead of physical assets. The CIO and the IT organization is really well placed to help take advantage of that. Interesting, Jeff ML, who I've interviewed on the panel, I hosted at one of their minds in machine conferences years ago, he has a famous quote that says, he went to bed as a manufacturing company, woke up as a software analytics company. Highlighting the fact that there have been industrial, a lot of industrial equipment, but really focusing on that the shift is changing to that software analytics as now the key thing that he as a CEO thinks about. So as a CIO, Chief Information Officer, like you said, that was kind of like, keep the lights on, run the trains on time, things are happening, yeah, patch the software, the stack and rack, some pets, you take care of the pets in the data center, now some are saying they're not pets anymore, they're cattle, but the CIO has certainly transformed. What have you seen and experienced in the sea change that's happening because the strategic impact of the CIO certainly you're the most important person because you have both sides that you've seen, you've seen the evolution of the data center and now going forward, what's changed? Yeah, so I think the CIOs and IT people in general, and generally engineering folks, they see the company, the enterprise as a system, it's a series of things that all has to work together. And we like problem solving, we like tackling different difficult problems and we like to make things better every quarter, every year. And this is really the opportunity to do that at the enterprise level, at the industry level, is here now where it probably wasn't so much in the past. So the obvious examples are the app economy companies like Uber and Airbnb, but less obvious and maybe just as interesting are traditional companies like GE where they used to do the maintenance based on what a physicist thought was likely to happen. Now they can do proactive maintenance based on what they actually know about the engine because of the sensors that are sending real-time data based on friction and heat and what altitude the things flying at that causes different wear and tear. So we, and that can only be done because people are harnessing the value of the data that's created as normal things go along their way. So that's the point that Jeff Emell Coat, as mentioned, this great point highlights that analytics data is the value proposition that's now changing how they do business. How important is that? It sounds easy. I mean, just throw data at it and solve the problem. How, explain how hard that really is because it's not trivial. You know, it was over-simplifying by just, you know, hand waving it away, but it's not, it's not easy. Talk about someone who's been in the trenches and you're in there right now, you're in the kitchen. You know, you got to take care of everything. How hard is it to be data-driven? Yeah, it's hard. So, and before talking about how to do it with the data, I think we have to reinforce that data really is the strategic asset. So if you competed based on how many factories you had and where they were located, if you competed on how much capital you had to invest, you would know where that infrastructure was. You would know where those assets were stored. You would know where the money was. But if you're now competing based on data, you ask a CIO, where's your data? Where's it come from? Where's it stored? How's it secured? How do you connect it from one cloud app to another cloud app? They have no clue. If they were talking about their money, in those senses, you would be scared. But because it's just data, people talk about it as the exhaust from the process. That's a horrible way to think about what's becoming a really strategic asset. So if you buy into the fact that data is important and data is now the asset that you're competing based on, then you have to take care of it, which means you have to know where it's created. You have to know where it's being used. And you have to be able to ask intelligent questions about where's the most profitable use of that data. My favorite example is between customer support and marketing. In a technology company, nobody knows more than the customer support organization about how your product's been used, what version they're running and what they're doing with it. And they know that because they have to provide support. The most profitable use for that data might be in the marketing organization. Marketing and customer support never share data. Yeah, they're siloed, and this comes back down to how the business practices are changing. Used to work great that way, but now there's a new normal. But also adding to that, I would also ask you to comment on security because I just got an email that here in Palo Alto, the school system, they didn't say it was hacked, but the way the words they used it got hacked. And they had a third party, nothing was compromised, so they just notify everyone they have to by law. But security is important because you now have relationships with third party, either applications, either APIs, the perimeter is no longer secure. It's like Swiss cheese, all these holes everywhere, but those are done with API and things are changing, right? So security is at the heart of it. So data hygiene, I can see that, but how does security play in there? Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the lack of effectiveness at the perimeter. So we used to try and control the security of our data by protecting the perimeter. And we do that by using traditional infrastructure techniques like firewalls and DMZs and all that kind of stuff. And you have to do that. You have to do that to protect the infrastructure. But if you're trying to protect the data, you have to protect the data and you have to protect it where it's created, where it's used, and as it moves around the ecosystem. So if you take a simple process like onboarding an employee, there's so much data floating around these cloud applications. You've got the initial employee record being created potentially in workday. It may have been born in a recruiting application like Great People. You've got benefits information flowing back and forward to healthcare providers. Somebody has to take care of where that information is and to be able to demonstrate that it's really secure. So I believe there's a big opportunity for companies that have solutions that secure the data where the data actually is and the ability to mask data that's clearly credit card information or mask data that's clearly PII, social security numbers and that kind of stuff. I think there's definitely an opportunity and obligation for us to take care of that. I'm speaking with Graham Thompson, who's the CIO of Informatic as a preview coming up for Informatica World in San Francisco. Graham, I got to talk to you about the debate we've been having in the industry and also internally amongst looking at another cube in our Wikibon analyst team. The CIO has always been the center of all the action when it comes to IT information technology as we talked about. But now with you mentioned analytics, you mentioned security and the emphasis of building applications in the cloud focuses on real-time value. So the roles are changing and you have a CDO, a chief data officer, you have a CSO, chief information security officer, you have a CIO and you also got a COO, CFO and CEO. So how are the roles changing because I could argue that the COO, it should be the CIO, it should be the COO because there's running everything, not just facilities. They're running top-line initiatives, they're running revenue-oriented. You mentioned customer service and marketing. Sharing data amongst those two teams could be a game changer for a company. So you could look at this as, I'm just not only mining the store at IT, you're driving an operational change over. How are these roles changing? How do you talk about that and what's your perspective on that? Yes, an interesting point. And we talk about that a lot as we're trying to segment our customers. As an example, we ask who is the target customer and we look for a job title. And in my opinion, that's a horrible way to do it and because companies aren't consistent in what they call these people. So in some organizations, the big transformation may be being led by the product team. In some companies, the big transformation may be being led by finance because you're changing the business model or by sales because you're changing how you go to market and serve your customers. So I think the title of the person I don't think is as important as the function that they provide and how that function fits into the big transformation that each company would be. And that's because of why. Is that because the companies have just have a different culture or semantics or just their transformation agenda is different? I mean, every company is the same anyway. It's like a human being. We're all made differently and more all unique. Is that the reason or is it just that there's no clean playbook at this point? I think there's no clean playbook. And I think it depends on the nature of the company. So some if you're a good friend of mine that used to be in a very high tech company and he left to go to be the CTO of a winery is completely different. And they look at him almost like he's the Wizard of Oz. You can solve these problems that for generations have been solved by looking at the sun and things like that. He can now put sensors in the ground and tell the the Vintners when to... He's a magician. He's a magician. He can tell them what day in September to harvest based on maximizing the volume, the quality, things that it took Grandpa Joe to figure out by looking at the sun. Well, this is interesting. I mean, the whole, that's a great example. Do you almost apply it to the enterprise in the modern world because there's an art to knowing your business, AKA the feel for the experience of knowing how to run a winery based on external facts, analog factors. But when you start to operationalize data, it changes. That's a great point. You guys are going through a transformation in Informatica and you were recently hired. What's some of the transformations that you guys are going through and how does that relate to what a potential customer who comes to your event will hear? Yeah, so we, as you said, we're going through our own little company transformation and I don't, we are very fortunate that some of our customers, some of the best companies in the world are transforming their business, their entire industry. So I don't mean to imply that our transformation is anything like what GE or Ford or MD Cancer Center or any of those great companies are doing. Well, they're bigger, public, they're huge. You guys are private and getting bigger. So for us. So different scale, I mean obviously scale point wise. So for us, our transform, we were taking private back in the fall of 15. And one of the things we are doing in this time period is shifting from being a license and maintenance traditional software company to being a subscription and cloud company. And we're doing that because our customers expect us to operate that way. We feel we can serve our customers much, much better by doing everything through the customer journey, much better. Traditional companies do a great job on the land and renew and they do a horrible job on the adopt and expand, which you could argue are the two most important activities in a subscription company. And honestly, it really forces you to pay attention to whether the customer's getting value out of your product every single day, not just when you sell it or renew it. So for us, that's a big shift and it has some major implications on the financial model. Revenue goes down in the short term because you have to recognize it rattably over the life of the service. Costs go up because you have to make investments in different sales models, IT infrastructure. So you end up stuck in a spot where costs are going up, revenue is going down, EBITDA is being squeezed and trying to do that as a public company is incredibly difficult. So we have the opportunity to do it. So you're retooling essentially with a new operating model of cloud and how customers are consuming software. I mean, you hear that all the time in the cloud transformation game, which is selling licenses and showing up as like a sales at the end of the month, hey, where's my renewal? That's over. You're going to start to see the value proposition be very much on demand, I buy as you go and cancel as you go if you don't like it. So it forces you to be better. Absolutely, it forces us to be a much, much better company. It forces us to be the kind of company that we aspire to be. And you have to provide value every single day. And also if you do that, if you do it well, it gives you the opportunity to help your customer out with those big buying cycles. And hopefully your customer doesn't wait until the compelling event to come back and buy more. They buy more because they love the solution, not because there's a compelling event that's introduced by us as a vendor. Graham, what's your advice to other CIOs out there? Because what's happening is you start to see a lot of people talking peer to peer, a lot of social activity going on because they want data on what's happening. So for the folks that are data hungry out there, pun intended, since you guys are data driven, what advice would you give, what data would you share and advice would you give to other CIOs that are really obviously know the transformation agenda's coming out? What should they be thinking about? What advice would you give them in terms of how to look at things, how to execute, what's some best practices from your perspective? Yeah, I mean, some of the best, most favorite discussions I have are with peers. And it may be misery loves company, it may be that we're all working on the same thing, facing the same challenges. But one thing is common across most of us, which is if we have technical debt and it could be technology debt or it could be legacy thinking debt, we've got a very short window to get rid of it because things are moving so quickly. You know, I think about where we are internally with most of our workload being in the cloud already. We're able to move incredibly fast. If I was encumbered by a legacy on-prem infrastructure, there's no way we could innovate at the pace that we're able to innovate. So there's a short window to get. So identify the technical debt and unroot it and cancel it. How do you do that? I mean, how do you identify where the debt is? I mean, is there, it might be that gut feeling it also could be some data. How do you look at that discovery of the debt and then how do you, once you discover it, how do you rectify the situation? Yeah, so part of it is, so I define it as anything that stops me going quickly. So there's no, you know, you could talk about some discrete definitions of age or technology types, but it's really for me, it's anything that's stopping me going fast. Anything that's encumbering quick innovation. So there needs to be a compelling event to rip it out because it's difficult. So we're fortunate that we've got this big transformation going on and when there's something big going on, it's easy to see how small the other things are. So instead of fighting over things like, is this business application that's been around for 10 years better than this one you could get from a major ecosystem provider, like Salesforce, Workday, Amazon. It doesn't really matter whether it's better or not, as does it fit the purpose that you have and does it serve the bigger objective of serving whatever transformation that you're in. So it's don't sweat the small stuff, get rid of the stuff that's stopping you from going quickly and then that frees up your cycles, your talent, your investment. Creativity is just off the charts. You get much more creativity in terms of building. Okay, final question. Informatica world's coming up. What are you excited about? What's going on? Share a little bit. I know you can't reveal any secrets in terms of the content agenda and announcements, but you have a feel for what's coming down the pike relative to the event. What are you excited about for Informatica world? So I'm really excited. This was my first Informatica world. I joined just after last year's event had finished. We have a new CMO. We've got a lot of new things that are going to be announced to the show. But for me, the most exciting thing is to hear about our customers and what our customers are doing with the products that we have. I'm very fortunate to have some of the world's best companies as our customer, and they are doing amazing things as they go through their own digital transformations. For some, it's IoT and AI and MI type things. For some, it's getting closer to their customers. For some, it's getting closer to other assets, product lifecycle assets, things like that. But every customer has a really great story to tell, and we've got some great speakers and great topics this year. So same as last year, a lot of customers doing the talking. I always say that's the benchmark for me. I go to a lot of events, and you know the good events when there's not a lot of company cool aid being distributed. Certainly you got to get the CEO up there, and you give the speech update. But if the agenda is packed with customers, usually that's a testimony, that's a really good track record. But also it's fun. I mean, you have a lot of customers in the audience, so the networking is phenomenal as well. This would be good. Graham Thompson, CIO, thanks for coming in with this special CUBE conversation, preview of Informatica World. Also talking about a lot of the threshold issues around being a CIO in this transformative market, super exciting times, as the roles evolve and change and change their interactions across companies. Certainly being data driven and being software and analytical focused with data has really been the key that's been your strength. Congratulations on your new role, one year anniversary coming up in June. I think June was it? Yeah. And your first Informatica World, great to see you and great to have you here for the CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for a special CUBE conversation. Thanks for watching.