 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in San Francisco, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017, our third year covering Informatica and more to come. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE theCUBE. My co-host, Peter Bursh, head of research for SiliconANGLE Media as well as general manager of wikibond.com. Check out the great research at wikibond. Some great stuff there on IoT Cloud, big data, great stuff. Of course, go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the coverage. YouTube.com slash SiliconANGLE for all the CUBE videos. Our next guest is Bruce Chisholm, board member of a lot of private companies, also special advisor at Informatica. You're on the board of Informatica, no? Or- Executive chair. Executive chair of Informatica, not only special advisor, executive chair. Welcome back, good to see you. Great to be here. You were on last year, great to have you back. One of the popular videos Jerry Held was on yesterday. Look at some board insights. So first question is, when do you go in public? Ha ha ha ha ha. Got you. Warms you up and then, no. I mean, the performance is doing well. Give us a quick update on it. Company's doing well. Q4 was a good quarter, Q1 was a good quarter. I think we will be positioned to do something late 2018, early 2019. A lot depends on how the company continues to do. A lot depends on the market. The private equity investors are in no hurry, but it's always nice to have that option. So it's one of the things we, yeah, great option. Doing well, we heard that also from some of the management. We got Anil coming on. We'll press him on some of the performance side, but always had good product shots. We talked about it last year, but the industry's going through a massive transformation. You've seen many waves over the years. The waves are hitting. What's your perspective right now? I mean, it's a pretty big wave. You've got to get the surfboard out there. There's a set coming in. What's the big wave right now? Data is driving every transformation within every organization. Any company that is not using and taking advantage of data will be left behind. You look at how companies like Amazon and Google and now a lot of our customers like Schwab and Tesla and others, the way they're using data, that will allow them to continue to either be successful in the case of a Schwab or be a disruptor like somebody like Tesla. Fortunately for us at Informatica, we are helping to drive that digital transformation. One of the things that I always observed, younger than you are, I've only seen a few waves in my day, but in the waves that were the most, I think impactful in terms of creating wealth and opportunity and innovation has had a cool and relevant factor. Meaning, if you go back to the PC days, it was cool and relevant. You go back to mini computer, cool and relevant and it goes on and on and on and certainly internet, cool and relevant. But now, you mentioned Tesla. I'm test driving one on Friday and my kid's like, don't buy the Audi, buy the Tesla. What's with my kids? So it's a cooler, it's a spaceship, it's cooler than the other cars. Or an iPhone on wheels. A computer on wheels. Cool and relevant. Talk about what is the cool and relevant thing right now because you talk about user experience. I mean, that's one. Data's changing it. So how is data being the cool and relevant trend? Can you point to some things that? If you look at what's happening from the chip on up, everything, everything will be intelligent. And I hate to use the term internet of things but the reality is everything will have intelligence. And that intelligent information will be able to be taken advantage of because of the scale of the cloud which means that any company will be able to take information data, analyze it on the cloud and then use it to do something with. And it's happening now. Fortunately, Infamanica sits right in the middle of that because they're the ones who could rationalize that data on behalf of their customers. Because there's going to be a lot of it and somebody needs to govern it, secure it. Can you consider them an enabling platform? Absolutely, absolutely. I was joking, we just went through a rebranding exercise and it's kind of cute, we have a new logo and it's kind of bold and sleek and it shows we'll have a leader but it's a logo. But it's really around the messaging. We are finally getting across that we are the ones unleashing the power of data. That's what Infamanica does. We just never really told anybody about it. We were very product focused, not really helping customers understand how uniquely positioned the company was. And it's also, you guys have done some things. Let's just go back and look at the private, going private, brought a new management team, have product chops again. We've talked about that in previous years, last year in particular. It's okay, you got the wind at your back. Now you got Sally in as a CMO. Now you got to start being a humble braggart about the cool stuff you're doing. So which is marketing basically. But now it's digital. So what's the board conversation like you say? Here's, go, go build the brand. So first of all, being private is great because we get to do things you couldn't do as a public company. Where a lot of our customers want to buy the products and solutions via subscription that has huge impact to the P&L, especially in the short term, cash flows fine. So the PE guys are going, okay, it's great because we'll come out of this as a better company and our customers like it because that's the way they want to buy products. So that helps a lot. The conversation at the board level has been, wow, we're number one in every category in which we participate in everything from big data to cloud integration to traditional on-premise to real-time streaming and data security. By the way, you're only one of three vendors in the Google general availability of Spanner which went out yesterday. We covered that on SiliconANGLE. We're number one there. We had AWS speaker conference. We had Azure speaker conference. All of the cloud guys love Informatica because we are the ones who are uniquely positioned to deal with all this data on behalf of their customers. As a private company, we're able to take advantage of that spend some extra money on marketing. You know, a lot of our customers know about us but a lot more should know about us. So part of coming out, having a new logo, having a new digital campaign, changing the website that costs money, but as a private company we get to do that because the fruits of those efforts will end up occurring a couple of years down the road which is fine. So let me see if I can weave those two thoughts together and what I thought was an interesting way. Given that increasingly a lot of the data is going to be in the cloud and that's where the long-run analysis is going to be required that means a lot of the tools are going to have to be in the cloud. Amazon Marketplace is going to be a place where a lot of tools are going to be chosen. People are going to go into the Amazon Marketplace and see a lot of different options including some that are free. They may not work as well but they're free. You guys, what happens with marketing and what's happening with that kind of a trend is you need to bias customers to choose tools that are actually going to work to serve or to solve the problem or to do the work that they need them to perform. And so what Sally Jenkins CMO has done with this new branding is introduce the process of how do you bias more customers to choose the right tool to do the right job. Does that make sense to you? It makes absolute sense, free is good but be careful what you ask for. Sometimes you get what you pay for. You're talking about enterprise data. You want it to be governed. You want it to be secure. You want it to be accurate. Now there's laws coming out where you have to do it. You look at GDP, PR in Europe, the privacy issues. You look at what's happening with Facebook or what was reported today with France and how they're not happy with Facebook's privacy behaviors. It's an issue. It's an issue for anybody who does business anywhere, especially if you're a global company and you do business in Europe, you have to worry about corporate governance, data security, data governance, data security. That's infobanica. The other thing is while there will be some customers who will say, I'm going to AWS, there will be more customers who will either say, I have some legacy systems, then I'm going to leave on premise and new projects will be in the cloud. Or they're going to say, I'm moving everything to the cloud but I want to be held hostage by one cloud provider. And they're going to go with Amazon and Azure and Google and maybe Oracle and and and. And again, because infobanica is Swiss, we're able to provide them with a solution that allows them to accomplish their data needs. Well, congratulations on the performance. I want to get that out of the way but I want to ask you a specific question on kind of the historical holistic picture of infobanica. Going back, what were the key bets that you guys made? Because you guys sit around and you have the private equity now coming into the table. They have expectations but at the end of the day, you got to build a business, right? What were the key bets that is yielding the fruit that we're seeing? The number one bet was that the company had great products and a great R&D organization. We believe that and fortunately we got it right because if you don't have great products and passionate R&D organizations around the world, you can't make up for that. It doesn't make a difference how much you spend on marketing at least not in the business that we're in. So that was number one bet and that proved to play out well. The second thing was, this was a company that had done so well for so long that it never needed to change their business processes to behave like a billion, two billion, three billion, four billion dollar company. Many of their business processes were like that of a $200 million company and that's easier to fix. So things around back end, IT, legal, finance, go to the market, marketing, sales. And that's a risk from an investment standpoint. That's correct. So that's what we believed we were right and where we've been spending most of our energy and effort is helping the company through the new management team improve their business processes and they go to the market. So we had a critical analysis yesterday during our wrap up session and one of the comments I made, I want to get your reaction to this was, although impressive you're number one in all these gardener magic quadrant categories, but that's an old scoreboard. If we're really living in digital transformation, those shouldn't really be a tell sign for what the performance of the new KPIs or the new metrics are. And so we were pontificating and analyzing what that would be. Still unknown when to see it, but Peter had a good point. He said, in the day it's customer wins. Yeah, that's what I was, that was my reaction. It's like at the end of the day, all that matters to the customers. What's the scoreboard look for customer wins? I know you were at the executive summit they had yesterday at Intercontinental right around the corner. I had a chance to meet some of them at dinner in some conversation, but I want to get your perspective. What is the vibe of the customers? What are those customer wins? And how does that translate into future growth for Informatica? Any customer who's looking at data, data management strategically is going with Informatica. There are a number of competitors that we have who try to compete with Informatica at the product level and they end up doing okay through pricing, through better sales tactics, but when we have the opportunity to speak to the chief data officer, the CIO, the CEO, they go with Informatica. It's the reason why Tesla went with Informatica on their project where they're trying to tie together the auto business with the solar business, because if they get to know both sets of customers and are able to sync that up, one plus one will be greater than two for them and that's why they did that deal. Or it's why Amazon has chosen our MDM solution for their sales operations. So you look at leading companies who are able to look at the enterprise level, at the strategic level, they are going with Informatica. That's why we know we're winning. So Bruce, give us three sentences. What is strategic data management? Strategic data management is being able to take reams and reams of data from all different platforms, traditional legacy, big data, real time solutions, and data from the cloud, and be able to look at it intelligently, use artificial intelligence and machine learning to be able to analyze that data in a more intelligent way and then act on it. So two questions on that point. I was going to ask you about the AI washing going on in the industry. Every event now is like, oh my God, AI, we got AI. That's not really AI. What is AI? We call it augmented intelligence because you're really augmenting with the data, but even Google IOs got a little neural nets and throw back to the 80s. But what's your thoughts on how customers should look through the lens of BS to say, wow, that's real AI or real augmented intelligence? It doesn't do anything. That's the ultimately question that a chief data officer or a CIO or a CEO is something changing because of the artificial intelligence being applied. In the case of Informatica, we announced a AI platform called Clare, Clare of Orients, Artificial Intelligence. What is Clare? It allows you to develop solutions like our Enterprise Information Catalog where an organization has thousands and thousands of databases. It's able to look at the metadata within those databases and then over time keep disclosing more and more data appropriate to the information that you're looking for. So then if I'm an analyst or a business person or a marketing person or a sales person, I could take action on the right set of data. That's true artificial intelligence. Bruce, I want to get to one final point as we get way winding down here. Again, you've seen many ways, but I want to talk about the companies that are trying to get through the transition of this Transformation Informatica. Certainly clear the runway. They've got some things to work on, certainly brand building. See that as air cover and maybe rising tide will float a lot of boats in the ecosystem, but there are companies where they've been in the infrastructure business and the cloud is one big infrastructure. It's selling boxes and whatnot. Other companies have traditional software models download, whatever you want to call it on-prem license is not subscription. They're working hard. Your advice to them if you are on their board or as a friend, what do you say to them? What do they got to do to get through this? And how should customers look at who's winning and who's losing in terms of progress? The world of enterprise computing is moving to the cloud. Legacy systems will remain for a while. They need to figure out how to take their legacy solutions and make them relevant to the world of cloud computing. And if they can't do that, they should sell their company or get out of business. And certainly data is the goal, it's the lifeblood of an organization. And the organization, even in Informatica internally, we're using our own intelligent data platform to do our own marketing. Sally Jenkins is working closely with our CIO, Graham Thompson, on working on solutions where we could help better understand what our customers want and need so we could provide them with the right solution leveraging our intelligent data lake. Bruce, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your insight. Again, you've seen a lot of ways. You've been in the industry a long time. You have great board presence as well as other companies. Thanks for sharing the insight and the data here on theCUBE. A lot of insights and analytics being extracted here and sharing it with you. Certainly we're not legacy. You don't need to sell our business. We're doing great. If you're not making the transition, good advice, thanks so much. Bruce Chisholm inside theCUBE here. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. Stay with us for more coverage after the short break.