 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in theCUBE Studios. I'm Chairman Ronan Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Integration and Cloud Integration at Informatica. CUBE alumni have been on multiple times here to do a preview around Informatica World coming up as well. Let's just catch up. Ronan, great to see you. Really happy to see you and you guys have a beautiful place here in Palo Alto. I know you live right around the corner so we're expecting to see you come on multiple times and come in and share your commentary. But I want to get your thoughts. It's been a couple of months since we last chatted. Interesting turn of events. If you go back just, you know, September of last year and then you had Amazon re-invent, they announced outposts, multi-cloud, starts hitting the scene, first it was hybrid, first it was all public cloud. But now the realization from customers is that this is now a fully blown up cloud world. It's cloud operations, it's just public cloud for unlimited cloud natives activity, on premise for existing workloads and a complete re-architecture of the enterprise. Yes, and I think from re-invent to Google Next just a week before, I agree with you. It's a world of hybrid and a world of multi-cloud. I think a lot of exciting announcement and a lot of changes. I think from my perspective, what I see is that the Informatica customers are truly adopting cloud and hybrid. And as data is growing, as data is changing, the cloud is the place that they actually address this opportunity in the best way. So I know, we've talked in the past in your title, it's data integration, cloud integration. Obviously integration is a key point. You're starting to see APIs going to a whole another level with Google. They had acquired Apigee, which is API marketplace, but with microservices and service meshes and Kubernetes momentum, you start to see the advent of more programmability. This is a big trend. How is that impacting your world? Because at the end of the day, you need the data. Yes, it actually means that you can do more things with the data in an easier way. And also it means that you can actually share it with more users within the enterprise. I think that especially the whole ability to use containers and Kubernetes is an amazing example of how you can do it. It's actually giving you unparalleled scale, as well as simplicity from the obstruction perspective. And that allows more and more developers to build more value from the data that they have. So data is actually in the core. Data is the foundation. And really a lot of these new technology allow you to build up from the data more valuable capabilities. I'm really happy that you're mentioning Apigee, because one of the things that Google and Informatica notice together is the need for API to actually leverage data in a better way. And we strike a very strategic partnership that has gone into the market in the last few months, allowing every user of Informatica iPass to basically publish APIs in a native experience from the Informatica iPass directly to Apigee and vice versa. Everything that you build in Informatica Cloud is basically automatically an API inside Apigee. So users get more value from data faster. So can you give an example? I think this is one of the things that we saw at Google as a tell sign or the canary in the coal mine, whatever a trend parameter is that end to end, CICD pipelining, seamless execution in any environment seems to be the trend. What you're kind of getting at is this kind of cross integration. Can you give an example of that Informatica Cloud to Apigee example of benefit to the customer or use case and why that's important? Yes, definitely. So if I'm a retailer or a manufacturer, I'm actually looking into automate processes. There is nothing better than deleting the iPass from Informatica to actually automate process anything from order to cash or inventory validation or even next best recommendation coming from some AI in the backend. Once you have created this process, exposing these processes at API is actually allowing multiple other services, multiple other capabilities to very easily leverage that, right? So this is basically what we're doing. So what an individual in the retailer is doing is they're actually defining this process of order to cash and then they're publishing it as an API in one click. At that stage, anybody anywhere can very, very easily consume that API and basically use this process again and again. And that means what? It's faster execution of application development? It means faster execution of application development also mean consistency and basically scale. So now you don't need to redevelop that. It's available as an API. You can reuse it again and again. So you do it in a consistent way. When you need to update, you need to change. You need to modernize this process. You modernize it once and use it again and again. Sorry to drill down on the kind of the unique use case there, but this points to the integration challenges out there and the opportunities. Mission Google Next, Google Cloud. You got a relation with Amazon. This is part of your strategy for ecosystem. This is critical. Integration is becoming, because if, I meant while I was saying that you could compose, have that foundation for the data and you compose your applications, but if you're going to have a lot of composition, you need to have integration points. That's going to be either APIs or some sort of glue layer. This is huge. This is like the entire thesis of cloud architecture. Right. And the reality that our customers are facing is basically a reality of a multi-cloud. They will use the best of breed cloud for CRM, the best of breed cloud for ERP, as well as the best of breed cloud for their data warehouse, their databases, as well as their analytics, AI, et cetera. In that world, the only thing that is kind of common across this cloud is the data. And if you're actually able to allow the data to reside in the best place, but you keep the metadata managed centrally by software like the one that Informatica is giving, you're getting the best of breed of all of these offerings without actually paying a fine for that. So you guys are in a lot of the magic quadrants out there in terms of categories of leadership and focused on data from day one. As you talk about your ecosystem, can you explain what that means because you're also an ecosystem partner of cloud players, but you also have your own ecosystem. Talk about the ecosystem. How is it laid out? What's the update? What are some of the momentum points? Can you share just an overview of how that's all happening? Yes, definitely. When we're looking into our partnership with Microsoft Azure, with AWS, or with GCP, we're not talking about just Informatica supporting the technologies that they build. We're talking about Informatica supporting the technologies that they're building, as well as their ecosystem of partners. We're talking about an end-to-end solution that supports the entire ecosystem. What that actually translates to is Informatica building services that are giving best of breed experience for users within this cloud environment and really giving you the full power of data management, integration, data quality, master data management, data security, data catalog, across all of these cloud. In a way, you're right. We can look at it in the same way as like we have an ecosystem. And in that ecosystem, we're seeing a lot of strategic partners that are very, very large. Definitely all of these cloud scales are key partners for us and for our customers, but we're also seeing a huge amount of smaller innovative vendors that are joining this ecosystem. And Informatica World in May 20th is a great place to come and actually see these vendors. We're actually showing for the first time our AI and cloud ecosystem in one place. And these vendors are coming and they're showing how are they leveraging Informatica technology to basically bring new value in AI and machine learning, in analytics to their customers. If you ask me like what is Informatica doing to help them, we're basically making the data available in the best way for their offering. And that kind of allowed them to focus on their innovation, rather on how do they work in the different places. Ron, you got ahead of me on the Informatica World question, but you just brought it out. You're doing the innovation, John. Let's talk about Informatica World, because again, this data, there's a lot of sessions. So you do the normal thing. We've covered multiple years there. Integration is the key point. Why should someone come to Informatica World to serve a customer or a prospect? And you mentioned the AI zone. What's the core theme that you're going to be seeing there? How do you, from your group and from the company? Informatica World this year is an amazing place for people to come and see the latest that happens within the cloud and hybrid journey. A great place to actually see next generation analytics and all the innovation there. It is a great place to see customer 360 and master data management and how can that change the organization as well as an amazing place to see data security and data privacy and a lot of other innovations around data. But I would actually say that it's great to see everything that Informatica can share with you. It is even a better place to see what our customers and our partners are sharing. And especially from a partnership perspective, Informatica World 2019, you're actually going to see leaders from Google. You're going to see leaders from Microsoft. You're going to see leaders from AWS, the people that are leading the best data warehouses in the world, the best analytics in the world, as well as innovators like DataRobot and Databricks that are changing the world and actually advancing technology very, very fast. And the AI zone, there's a cloud and AI zone. I see my notes here from the prep. What does that mean? AI is going to be hot. I think that's a big theme and getting clarity around as Amit kind of shared with us on our previous interview. AI is hot because automation, kind of blocks the blocking and tackling, but the value of creation is going to come from using the data. Where's the, and if it's not integrated, you can't get the data in. If it's not integrated, you can't leverage machine learning. So having access to data makes machine learning get great. If machine learning gets great, AI is great. So tell us what's going on with AI. Give a little sneak preview. It's actually amazing what we can do leveraging AI and machine learning today, right? I wake up in the morning and I say, Alexa, good morning. And I actually get back like, what's the weather and what's happening? I get into my car, Google is telling me how fast will I get to the office or the first meeting? I left to come here and I knew exactly what's the best route to take. A lot of that is actually leveraging AI and machine learning. I think it's not a secret that the better your data is, the better the machine can learn from the data. And if your data is not good, the learning can actually be really, really bad. You know, sometimes I can use like with my kids, if their learning books are bad, like there's no way that they can actually get to the right answer. The same is data, data is so critical. What we're seeing is basically data engineers, data operation becoming a super strategic function to make AI and machine learning even possible. Your ability to collect enough data, to make sure that the data is clean and ready for AI and machine learning is critical. And then once the AI and machine learning have actually contributed the automation, the decision making, the recommendation, you have to put it back into the data pipes so that you are actually able to leverage that to do the right thing. You know, I think you nailed this. We've talked about this before, but I think more important than ever, data cleansing or data cleaning was always an afterthought in the old data warehouse world where, well, we're not getting the answers we wanted. So you kind of had to fail to figure out that the data sucked, so you had to get the data to be better. Now it's much more acute in the sense that people realize that you need quality data. So there's now new capabilities to make sure there's a process for doing that on the front end, not on the back end. I'll talk about that dynamic because this is something that's critical in the architecture and how you think about data pipelining, data management, the things that you guys do. This is an important trend. Take a minute to explain that. Yes, I totally agree with you and I think the rise of the importance of data quality and it actually is coming also as part of a pattern of data governance. We want to make sure that the processes exist to make sure that the data that we make available for our AI research, for analytics, for our executives and data workers, that this data is really the right data is critical. To actually support that, what we are seeing is people defining data governance process. What are the steps that the data needs to go before it is actually available for the next step? And what is nice today is that this is not people that the data need to go through. These are processes, automation that can actually drive data quality. It goes from things that are very, very basic. Let's remove duplicate data. But also into the fact that you actually identify anomalies in the data and you ask the right questions so that bad data doesn't go in. Is this the kind of topics that people will hear in Informatica World? Definitely. They will hear about how they can actually help their organization get the data right so that machine learning, automation, and hyper growth is actually possible. You're excited about this market, aren't you? Super excited. I mean, I think each and every one of us, we're going to see a lot of innovation coming out. And I consider myself lucky that data is actually in the center of all of this innovation and that we're actually able to help the customers and our partner be successful with that. Yeah, you and I were talking before we came on camera. I wish I was 23 again right now. This is a great time to be in tech. Everything's coming together. You got unlimited compute, machine learnings, rock and roll, and everyone's get all kinds of diverse areas to play on. It's kind of intoxicating to be in this environment, isn't it? I totally agree. And I will add only one additional thing to the reasons, agility. Like the fact that it was available in your fingertip and you can actually achieve so much with very little patience is really, really amazing. This composability really is the new developer modernization, renaissance, it's happening. Yes, yes. And as we usually say, all starts from the data. Okay, Ronan Schwartz was talking about Informatical World but getting an update on what's going on because data integration, cloud integration, this is the number one activity people are spending their time on. You get it right, there's huge benefits. Ronan, thanks for coming in and sharing your insights, appreciate it. Hey, my pleasure. Okay, this is theCUBE here for CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California at theCUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.