 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2016. Brought to you by Informatica. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Okay, welcome back and we are here live in San Francisco. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal to noise. We are live at Informatica World 2016 for exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon Research, head of research at SiliconANGLE Media. Next guest, Matt Healey, enterprise software, serves as analyst at Neurolytics, a new firm, former IDC analyst, part of Ben Wu's new team over there. He's not new, he's been there for a couple of years. Welcome to theCUBE. It's great to be here. I'm very excited to be on theCUBE here with you, John. Yeah, so I got to ask, you're on, Dave Vellante always says, horses on the track as analysts, you have to look at Informatica World vis-a-vis the competition. They want to be Switzerland. They have the scale. They got bought out, they're private, no 90-day shot clock. What's your take, can they pull it off and where's the competition come from? Startups, what do you see in the landscape? All right. I think that when we come to kind of what Informatica is good at, which is the data, the big data, the data integration, power center and all of that, I've seen a real shift since they've gone private. They're on the right path, but I wouldn't confuse being on the right path with having achieved their destination yet. They are moving in that direction. They have the potential to become Switzerland because clearly you need that. You have a lot of the organizations want to be the repository, the hub for all of data. SAP thinks it's great if you move everything in Ahana. Salesforce thinks you can move everything in a force, I've come at all. IBM, move everything on to here. Just store it all on EMC and we'll all be fine. So I think that there is a role for Informatica to play, but in the market that they're in, where I think we are right now is we're getting through the hype on big data and analytics and we're at the point where we're about to split this market and if you go back to the late 90s, 2000s, we're about to separate the Google and the Amazons from the pets.com and the living.coms and all of those other ones that bust it. Pretenders and the players. Right, exactly. Yeah, for lack of a better term. Yeah, the pretenders. Well, what do they got to do to break away? I mean, obviously their messaging is right on track. The team's got great product chops. So they got a nice vector. I mean, obviously the runway is looking good, but they're not at cruising altitude yet. No, and their messaging is good. Their products are good. Their messaging is good. It's getting better. Getting better, it's complicated. It is complicated and I think that the next step that they have to take is if you believe that the market's about to split between players and pretenders, I think the separator's going to be the company that can go to a client and say, if you deploy this software, here's going to be the tangible business results that you're going to see. Now, it's too easy in this market to sit there and go into, oh look, it's customer 360. Well, look, I've seen a million customer 360 data integration demos. I've seen a million suppliers. I've seen a million risk and fraud. What is there in the business beyond just those types of things? And so I think that their messaging has to get much more focused at the pain points of very specific industries and start demonstrating that they can really do that. Get out of this product chops really good selling to the IT but augment that with some real business expertise and some real business results. I think if they can do that, they'll probably be able to separate themselves. Well, I think, so, sorry, I'm speechless. Oh, I'll take it over for a minute. No, how could you be speechless? Yeah, so if you think about that, let's take it down, let's take it down on a level in the sense that their core promise is to stay focused on the data. Right. Data is hard. Yes. There's an enormous amount of new invention that has to take place to make this real, both from a technology standpoint, but also from a utilization standpoint and even from a conceptual and messaging standpoint. How do you think they're doing in terms of establishing themselves not only as a provider of great products and now as an emerging provider of great services but also as a thought leader in this space that's a miasma right now, is people try to understand what it means to provide data assets? Product side and technical side, I think they're doing very well. Services and great solutions, I think they're coming there. Thought leadership, I think they've got a very long way to go. And the reason they have a very long way to go is their history is in the plumbing. It's in the very technical side of things. And so I don't think that they're at this point really understanding what it needs, what it means to be a thought leader in how you get data and how you utilize data and how you use the data to bring out actual business results. And I think that they need to do a lot of work there. Now, what I'm seeing from the executives and the one-on-ones and the customers and the sales teams and conversations at the bar is they recognize that and they're working on it, but I don't think they're there yet. One of the biggest challenges that anyone who wants to be doing data has is this notion of data governance. And historically, governance models are a direct response to the characteristics of the assets that are being governed. Whether they are machines or buildings or people or processes, if it's an asset, governance is applied, says who gets to do it, who uses it, who manages it, et cetera. Data as an asset is a tricky concept. We don't really understand what data as an asset is, which means it's difficult to bring governance models concretely to data. As you talk to customers, how are they viewing this transition of data from something that's being stored, as you said earlier, EMC, or something that's being run in HANA to something that's an actual asset for the business? How are they making that leap? So right now, what I see more often than not is executives and senior leaders saying, I know my data is my most important asset. Okay, what are you going to use it for? I have no idea, but everyone keeps telling me it's very important and I need to. So what I see is a lot of raising of a hand that says, I know I need to do this, but can somebody help me evaluate what my data is worth and how I'm supposed to govern it and how I'm supposed to treat it like an asset? I think that that's why Informatica has an opportunity in the thought leadership area to take that step forward. I don't think they've done it yet and I think that somebody is going to take that leap forward and say, this is how you figure out what your data is worth, this is how you use it. These are the types of problems that you can solve with it. I think that there needs to be a lot of maturity in that area and I think we're getting to the point where senior leaders are within the customer base, there's a thirst out there for help me do that and the organizations, the players to use Dave's term, sorry, John's term, the players are going to be the ones who can explain that to customers and move forward with that. If I can build on that just for a second, John, it's one of the things I think has to happen. I think you'll agree with me on this, is we need to identify how data as an asset is different from other assets and therefore how governance models for data are necessarily going to be different than governance models elsewhere and it's going to be very interesting to see how the two worlds are going to work. But that's a good point, but you also have to at the same time build into that that they have to encourage an innovation strategy. Oh, very much so. Data with purpose, like you mentioned, data in context is just really, really critical. Yeah, and just to bring up speed, what we talk about within the whole SiliconANGLE family of this notion of context being crucial and that data is best used when it's used in context and then it's best applied when it has purpose. So we think data in context leads to data with purpose. I'm wondering what you think about that. I think that the data, I think that you're right, the data in context is, you know, leads to data with purpose. And you were talking about how it's hard to value data because it's different from an asset. When you talk to any business leader about what their assets are, they immediately think of, all right, these are things on my balance sheet, they're this, they have this depreciation schedule, they're worth this, because that's what I paid for them. Data is a different kind of an asset in that case. Some data in a certain amount of context can be worth a lot, change the context can be worth zero. So the more context you can bring and the more you can focus on what problem am I trying to solve and then figure out what data I need to solve that problem, that becomes the context from which you can actually value the data because all of a sudden solving a problem and that has an intrinsic value to it. Excuse me there. Quite right. But do you see kind of how I'm looking at it and I'm thinking about it? Yeah. And that's why data is so tricky because what the context of this data being valuable right now is really important. And in three months that context has completely changed. So all the governance that I put around this really valuable data might no longer be appropriate because it might not be valuable anymore or the data that I had that was worth nothing due to a market shift, due to an externality, due to a competitor doing something can all of a sudden become very valuable. So I think that valuing data, valuing what it means and what you're going to do with it is really where you're going to really where and vendors who can help customers do that are going to be the players. Vendors who just say, yes, do big data in analytics and you can understand your customers are going to be pets. And nobody wants to be pets.com. I mean, they had a crazy talk about that. Well, you're saying they have a whole lot of wood behind the arrow relative to the tech and outcome. Yeah. So Peter, I'd love to get your thoughts on this because you guys both look at the marketplace and look at this. One of the things you pointed out last week at Sapphire was that there's new processes that are unknown. IoT is a great example where you don't know who the pretenders are yet or the players. It's an evolving set of new processes so you need to be enabled for IoT at the same time. We're trying to squint through who's best prepared for that because you got to have the products to be enabled. Well, so the way of thinking about that, John, is that every pundit has a way of describing industry change. We hear a lot, for example, about what is it, the fourth platform or something like that, which is, you know... Third platform. Third platform. Is that what it is and, you know... EMC calls it two and a half. Look, so the point... Yeah, they were talking about two and a half at EMC all the few weeks ago. But the point ultimately is, is that there's a couple things that are seminal that really deserve most of the attention. And one of the things that's seminal is that historically, software has been created where we knew what the process was, but the challenge is we didn't know what the underlying technology was and how to use it. And so we knew, for example, how to do accounting, and we could define it rigorously enough that we could create software to do it, but did you run it on a, you know, mainframe? What did that mean? Did you use client server? All of these questions were very real and it dominated the relationship between the customer and the industry. Now today, we're actually looking at a whole bunch of technologies that are relatively well understood. Cloud has characteristics that are common all over the place. It doesn't mean that there's no uncertainty associated with it. It's just that we have a pretty decent idea of what cloud's going to mean. But what we're trying to do is we're trying to apply technology to processes or to activities for which there is no defined, concrete, consistent process. Like how do I engage a customer? Like how do I provide control information back to a room at three o'clock in the afternoon as the sun moves? There's a lot of uncertainty in the IoT space. There's a lot of uncertainty regarding the processes we're actually going to utilize. And data is essential to discovering those patterns that then will become the statements of process that we're going to build software around. On that note, I want to ask both of you a direct question because we're both looking at this from a hands-on perspective. Is Informatica world set up for that scenario? And what you're seeing at the announcements today this week, Matt, what do you think? Are they set up for that? They are trending in the right direction. Don't confuse a clear view for a short path, but they are definitely heading in the right direction. One of the reasons is they do have a lot of understanding about how to ingest data, how to set it up, and how to do all the data integration. That's going to be important and that's going to be critical. They're going to have to stay on that path. What do you need to see to convince you that as they move down the path, they're not thinking the short path, they're thinking the long path. What milepost markers do you want to see them pass through? Is there anything you can share and are your thoughts on that? Is it more customer revenue growth? Is it more wins here and there? Or what's specifically? I want to see the marketing message change and continue to evolve and get less out of the, I want to see them selling less exclusively to the IT departments and more to call it SVPs and GVPs of various lobs because that's where I think you're going to see a lot more action going on and then I'm going to need to see the innovation and the evolutionary change of some of their products and the integration of other their products continue. I was happy with what we saw about the data streaming product and the data integration product, but these are all of evolutionary changes. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that in a lot of these products, they're staying close to their knitting right now. Yeah. And I don't think you need revolutionary change in a lot of these. Here, your thoughts on it. Are they ready for it? And what milemark do you think it's going to be? I'm going to cheat, right? Because we already talked about this in a previous CUBE segment. That Informatical World is a great place to talk about products, product road maps, the introduction of services and the role that Informatical wants to play in the industry. But if it's actually going to establish the regime that's going to do this, right? It's got to have a separate form looking at something like what will be the role of the chief data officer or whatever we call it. There's got to be a place where folks who are going to be responsible for valuing the data, communicating the value of data, and creating the culture as well as the tooling necessary for business to be run based on empirical management techniques or data dependent. That's not what this conference is. It's probably not what this conference is going to be become, but the industry needs that conference. And that's where I think that they need to go in terms of thought leadership. And that's only going to come when you start bringing, when the data officers and the business units start getting on the same page together. Somebody's got to catalyze that community and make it real. And certainly we're going to do our part, John. Well, certainly we put the microphone, we put them on the CUBE, but here's the thing. I interviewed Anil, who's going to come on next at AWS re-invent two years ago. And he wasn't body squirming at all. He was forthright there. So they're not shy and Informatical to talk. They're geeks. They like to talk about it. And this guy's have chops. So we'll see. We'll keep an eye on it. Guys, thanks so much for sharing, Matt. Thanks so much for sharing the insight here. Anil said, and Neurolytics and of course, Peter Burr's general manager, head of research through the media. We'll be right back with more live coverage here on the CUBE at Informatical World. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burr's, Matthew. We'll be right back after this short break. It's always fun to come back to the CUBE because.