 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. Hey, welcome back everyone, we're live here in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the event happening at the conference, customer conference, industry conference, Informatica, Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Peter Barris, general manager of Wikibon, research at wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jerry Held, who's a board member of Informatica Industry. Veteran on multiple boards, CUBE alumni, third time back on theCUBE. Great to see you, Jerry, thanks for joining us today. Great to be back. So, I mentioned you're an industry vet, which means you have a lot of experience. You've seen many waves of innovation. You've seen cycles up and down, you've seen many of the movies many times. Right now, people are more concerned about digital transformation than I've ever seen before. I mean, it just won't go away, business transformation, the impact now of cloud data, social, mobile. It really is causing a lot of movement into a whole new modern era, if you will. Another wave. So, what wave is it? Because is it public cloud? Is it private cloud? True private cloud? Is it hybrid? Certainly, hybrid cloud is dominating. What's your thoughts and reactions to the waves or wave that's happening? Yeah, well, the thing I've seen about waves, I've been in the business for about five decades now, and I've seen a lot of waves over time. When a wave comes along, the new technology, my first wave that I was really heavily involved was when relational databases came along. Wow, great wave, great technology. Everything will be relational in a few years. No, it's not going to be. It's going to take a long time for that to happen, no matter how good the technology is. The wave to the internet, client-serve, all those waves took a long time. And some of them are waves that are just little ripples, not big waves. Oh, at the time they might have seemed big. They may have seemed great. Someone has never seen a wave before. That looks like a wave. Hey, object databases, they're going to be great. Well, they were good for some things, but they weren't great. Take Hadoop. Hadoop is a pretty interesting technology. It was going to replace all the relational database. Not going to happen. Important component, important technology, but it was a big ripple, but not the wave that replaced everything. So when you look at data now, data is migrating to the cloud. A lot of data is going to the cloud, but there's a ton of data that's on-prem. There's a ton of data in a lot of places. And I think that the biggest thing right now that people have to be focused on is the word hybrid. For the next multiple decades, we're going to be in a hybrid data world. And if you think it's all going to be in the cloud, you're mistaken. Maybe if we're a little company, you can run all in the cloud. But if you're a big enterprise, you're going to have to deal with data on-prem in the cloud. And the cloud isn't one thing. You're going to have data in one cloud, another cloud, a SaaS cloud, another SaaS cloud. You're going to have data hosted in a lot of different places. So the hybrid nature of data and dealing with data in more places than ever before is becoming a huge issue. It's great to have you on, seeing multiple ways work. I think I'm in my 30th year, third decade and ways. But here's an interesting point I want to get your reaction to. We were talking the other day, Peter and I, when we were at Dell EMC World, we were talking about the internet, when the internet came. What's your internet strategy? Well, it turns out the internet had a bubble, but it burst, but it was a big burst. But actually the things that were overvalued actually ended up happening later to your point. So they materialized along a different time frame than expectations. But at the time it was internet strategy. Now we hear, what's your cloud strategy? So everyone in the press and out in the world is saying, what's your cloud strategy? So to your point, you could, if you believe that what you're saying is true, hybrid is a longer journey. There is not about having a cloud strategy for a say, it's not like the strategy, it's everywhere. So what's your thoughts on that concept? Well, don't get me wrong. Cloud is extremely important. A huge amount is going to the cloud. The cloud is going to be a tidal wave. If not a ripple or a wave, it's a tidal wave. But it has to be placed in context of where is all that data. And that's what Informatica really plays a big part, is you need to have data that's in multiple ways. You have to be able to move it and manage it. And it's becoming a bigger and bigger challenge. Now it's interesting, I'm on a bunch of boards and one of the other boards I'm on is NetApp. NetApp plays a role at the storage layer and the data management services layer. And if you think about what customers have been concerned about for decades is large vendors having vendor lock-in. Whether it was IBM in the olden days or whether it was the Oracle stack or the SAP stack they were locked into, they were concerned about vendor lock-in. In the day of the cloud, they're concerned about what if I put all my data on Amazon? Am I stuck? Or are you or whatever? And so they're looking for a hybrid way to have some insurance policy. NetApp has this interesting thing where you can put NetApp storage on something like Equinix Colo facility close to the cloud, own your petabytes of storage, have it processed by say Amazon, use all that compute, all the facilities, all the software. But if you need to shift without moving your data and move over to Azure for some of your computing and with a software layer that makes it all transparent. So you could have their on-tap software running on top of AWS or on top of NetApp hardware and span these multiple on-prem and cloud environments. That's an example. How should customers think about this lock-in spec? Because I'm not going to appreciate your comments because back in the old days, you got to have a proprietary sustainable moat or whatever, you know, you go to business school, you learn these concepts, you have a sustainable competitive advantage. That was usually some proprietary software. But now with open source, you can have differentiation as a lock-in, but it still can be open with choice. So what's your thoughts now in this new modern era of how to be a supplier to customers? How can customers understand what lock-in is versus value differentiation? Well, it's always been the case that if you're willing to use proprietary features of a vendor, whether you're using an open standard like SQL, you can maybe get a little bit better performance, but then you're going to trade that off for now it's harder to move. So take for instance, Amazon, which has a phenomenal product and they have a good database product now in Redshift, but Redshift is Amazon. So if you're going to stick with Redshift, you're on Amazon. Another board that I'm on is a startup called MemSQL. They're doing super high performance database. And if you're interested in real-time, super high performance, now they'll run on Amazon or Azure, they'll run on on-prem and whatever. So you get the choice of multiple platforms. Whereas if you pick Oracle, for instance, who makes a phenomenal product, you're going to get tied into that. And there's trade-offs. You want those advantages because they have unique features. How does that trade off to your ability? It's a buyer beware basically at this point. It's absolutely buyer beware. But there's also an increasing understanding that there's a natural relationship between the characteristics of your data and how you're going to manage that data because of these issues of proximity. Latency's a real feature. Bandwidth is a real feature. Geofencing and regulations are a real feature. So as we think about in the informatical world, as we think about an increasing emphasis on data management or managing data as an asset, how is this relationship between data, strategic business and knowledge about the data and where to put it in this context of hybrid starting to evolve? Well, that's probably the biggest news out of the conference here today. If you had to pick one thing to focus on that's coming out of Informatical World this year, it's a lady named Claire. And it was just announced a few minutes ago here and it's all about metadata management. Now, if you think about your CFO, and you walk into the CFO of any company, say, where are your financial assets? Tell me where all the money is. Tell me where all the assets are. They'll tell you down to the penny where everything is. They know where all the financial assets are. Go into your chief data officer and ask the same question. Where's all your data? Not just all your on-prem data, but all the data you use in the cloud, all the data. Who's using it? Who has access to it? I will bet you any amount of money they don't know. They might know some of it, but they don't know. This to me is the single biggest challenge facing enterprises today. They're using all these great technologies. Whatever you like, whether it's Hadoop or this or that, they're all great technologies. But the biggest risk is this data asset, which we all talk about is the thing that's leading to digital transformation. How do you manage that? How do you know where it is? It's the basis of digital transformation. The basis. But how can you have something that's so, so valuable and you don't know where it is? So, what Informatic is doing and stepping up to is providing, we're sort of the Switzerland of data. We're not dealing with anybody's stack. You get data from Oracle or SAP or from your app or wherever on the cloud, on-prem, from structured, unstructured, whatever. The metadata is all coming together into this thing called CLARE, which is not only metadata, but AI applied on top of it. And giving you all of the insights you need to manage all of that data. It is a major, major breakthrough. So, describe CLARE a little bit. Is CLARE an artificial intelligence system, machine learning system? What are some of the technical attributes of it? And specifically, it's helping a business track, understand, find patterns in metadata. Give us a little bit more visibility. Well, there's quite a bit to it and I'm sure you'll have guests and I'll dive in even deeper. But the basic concept is to collect metadata from every place. Now Informatic already touches a lot of the data in the enterprise, so we already see a lot of the description of data. We have the metadata that describes all the things that Informatic attaches, so collect all of that. But then, there's metadata that comes in from competitor systems that do data integration and collect all of that. There's metadata that describes all the databases that we don't touch, collect all of that. There's metadata that describes email and unstructured data, collect all of that. Bring it together in a way that you now know the description of and the location of all this data. That's the first step. Then, you have to start correlating that and here's where the AI and the machine intelligence comes in. Customer information there, customer information there. Maybe you have an MDM system which has a master data version of it, but then you have other customer data that hasn't been brought into that. Start bringing it all together so you now have a view of where it all is. Claire is an enabler, the foundation for a lot of technologies. Nobody's going to buy Claire because they want to manage metadata. Metadata is not a problem. Metadata is the solution and the foundation of a problem. So, you have a governance issue. To solve your governance problem, you need to know where all your data is. You have a security issue. Security source is a technology which lets you look around and know who acts as all your data. You have an analytics issue. You're an analyst and you want to ask questions about your customers and that yes, you have some of the data, but new data is coming in all the time. When you sit down, you're typically only dealing with the data at hand. This changes the dynamic of the interface to data. I mean, in quoting from the keynote, Claire puts AI at the center of the data management world and Mitt Wally mentioned. But we're talking about an Alexa kind of model where the interface to data is being multi-touched now. It's not the one department dealing with it in the old ways. You guys are looking at it as a horizontally scalable layer, but also access method to whichever user, whether it could be AI software or analysts. Is that, am I getting that right? Yeah, it's sort of the Google of enterprise data so that you can ask a question and say I'm really interested in doing a broader look at customers for this particular marketing exercise. And I know all this data, but I'd like to now see if I can get information from some of our social media systems. And I don't know where that is. You make a query and all of a sudden, Claire can help you find out where that data is, bring it in and link it in to your analytics. So Claire's really creating metadata about metadata by identifying linkages, relationships amongst the data, it's amongst data and metadata and uses and presenting that as a way to facilitate the discovery, processing and utilization of data sets through the metadata. Exactly, and it's going to enable every single product that Informatica provides. So they all come together in one unified description of the enterprise data, wherever it is, on-prem, in the cloud, on any other cloud, on a SaaS system. Independent locations. But Jerry also said something really important. He said we don't have a metadata problem, but the reality is that historically, it has been very expensive to maintain metadata. And so Claire, I presume, will also help identify where things may be aging a little bit wrong, where descriptions may be a little bit off. So it might help the administrator of all this start to pinpoint where they can actually upgrade and enhance the quality of the data in some places. Absolutely, but I think the mistake is metadata data has been around for a long time, metadata management system, people have tried it forever. The problem is, if you just try to go out and sell metadata management, people don't say, oh, I have a metadata management problem today. They have business problems. Yeah, they got to apply it. What it is, is it's the enabler to solve these problems. It's the enabler to do way better data governance, way better data security, way better analytics. Without, but my point is, without. And it's sort of, it's underneath, it's the enabler. But without adding new, enormous new and onerous administrative costs on data. Right, and that's why we're the machine intelligence, because you're talking about a huge amount of data and growing it, as we know, at amazing rates. We hear terms like data hygiene, managing, I mean data is, you know us, we love data. We think the data 3.0 enabler model absolutely is the right path, 100%. In fact, we should have our own cube, and they have Claire, we got to get a name for the cube data set. Jerry, just to change gears, I know we got to wrap up, but I want to get your thoughts because this is important to us and our audiences with Informatica. We've been chronicalizing the journey over the past few years. Going private, great move. You've been on the board for eight years. Share your perspective and give us the transformation of the company itself, also the new branding, new CMO, you see a lot of brand building exercises going on. Always had good product shops. But take us through the journey real quick on where the company has come from and where it's going. Yeah, well it's been a great ride. I've been involved for quite a while now. It's always been a company with phenomenal technology. I think it's always been rated in the top right corner of all of the magic quadrants. But it's in need of a transformation, just like a lot of other companies. If you look at Informatica, both from a business model perspective, we were an on-prem enterprise software company. We sold software with a licensed model. The world is changing. We had to move from licensed to subscription. We had to move from on-prem to on-prem in cloud with cloud first. There were a lot of transformations. They're not that easy to do as a public company. And so the idea of going private actually was a wonderful thing because the changes that we had to make were pretty substantial. And if we had to report all the financials, we would do them much more slowly. It would have been, you're more agile as a private company. 2016 was a massive year of change. We changed all sorts of stuff and we could do it in the privacy of being private. No 90-day shot clock. And we've made rapid progress. The other thing is we were perceived as sort of a legacy ETL company, data integration ETL company, when in fact we're putting out all these new products. We needed a new image too. We were just unbelievably fortunate to hire Sally. She's just off the charts. This is Sally Jenkins. Sally Jenkins, she's been with us for only four months, is transforming the image of the company, as you can see all around here. Absolutely outstanding job. We needed to have this company be the innovative leader, seen as the leader in cloud, which we are seen as an innovator on a lot of fronts. And that's all coming up. And moving from an important partner of companies to a strategic partner. And let me just give you this one last thought. I've been talking about this for quite a while, but if you go back, you guys have known Informatica for a long time. Informatica was sort of known as the data plumber, right? We did all that. In a particular subset of applications. In a lot of places, we were the guys that moved the data around underneath. Very important, great products, data plumber. With Claire, what we're doing is we're going to the heart of a company's strategic, most strategic asset data. And we're sitting above all those other systems. So if you think about all these great products from Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, all the things from the SaaS providers and Salesforce and Workday, all the other data on-prem and cloud. What Claire does with the metadata management is sit above all of that. And we've gone from being a data plumber to a heart surgeon. It's still plumbing, but it's much, much more important plumbing. And that's the transition to becoming a strategic vendor where what we're going to be providing for our customers is maybe the most important part of managing their most important asset. And that's a massive transformation. Jerry Held, board member of Informatica, again, back on theCUBE, sharing his amazing insight as a board member. You have good visibility on the thing. I, we agree, the data is the heartbeat of the organization. It's competitive advantage and also resource. It's the new oils, new gold, whatever metaphor. It's a big wave with the cloud. Thanks for sharing your insight. Really appreciate you coming back on theCUBE and sharing your awesome data with us. We're here bringing the data here to you real time at Informatica World. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break.