 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. Welcome back to theCUBE. We're here at Informatica World 2017. We're going from the morning to the night, today and tomorrow to talk about some of the things that are happening in the world of data management, analytics, master data management, et cetera, very, very important topics. And I'm Peter Burris, and we're going to spend a few minutes now talking with Ansa. Sekharan. Shekharan, sorry Ansa, I got it earlier. Ansa Sekharan, who's the Executive Vice President of Informatica Global Customer Support and the head of the Informatica University. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. Good afternoon Peter, thank you for having me on theCUBE. So, global customer support, big issue when a company's going through a lot of transformation, compounded by the fact that your customer base is going through a lot of transformation. Business as well as technology. When you take a look at what's happening, 3,000 people at the show, what is the most important set of messages coming out about global customer support? You know, at Informatica, you know, we, the tagline says great products are just the beginning. As customers make this investment, we have a great services arc which looks at the investments customer make and see how they can help their desired outcomes. You know, at Informatica, when you look at innovation, you hear a lot about products, you see a lot of great launches. We have a very similar strategy in support. Every four years, we kind of come up with a major version of support offerings to keep up in line with our product innovations and also to meet customer innovations, right? So, and every two years, we have a minor release. So we look at our services as a product. You know, like the saying goes, you know, we want to make sure our customers do not have to call in. So we have a lot of emphasis on quality and the great interlock with R&D make sure, you know, we have been ranked number one in customer loyalty for 11 straight years in that regard. So we want our customers to take away that support and services is viewed as a product here at Informatica. Well, I want to push you on that a little bit. And I think this is an important point. In the world of, or characterized by a significant amount of change, it's important, I think, that we draw a distinction between inventing something and innovating. We're inventions and engineering duty or activity. And then innovating is a social activity. So we create something new and then through the innovation process, we get people to use it. So I like the idea of looking at support as a source of innovation in and of itself to talk about how that lines up with the idea of support to help make or ensure that customers are successful. It's two parts. It's like how you build the relationships along with automation, right? In this age of customers, a lot of emphasis is placed on how customers can do self-service and so on. It's a lot of great innovation has been built on the portal. You know, we leverage machine learning and AI and we have built a great platform to have the customers learn best practices and find the needs, the answers for the most common questions. But we are an enterprise software company. About 85% of the business comes from existing customers. And we enjoy great renewable rates of about mid-90s. This is only possible if customers are realizing value from our products. So we pride ourselves in our relationship. You know, we have a customer success team which also is emphasizing how do we drive desired outcomes? You know, people ask, what is desired outcomes? You know, when you make a purchase, there's an expectation of an outcome. When that outcome, in conjunction with your effort, the experience makes it decide. So that is where, as we pivot to a subscription company, that is all the more important. You know, customers now kind of rent our software when they are on subscription. The onus is on the vendor to make sure you build on the relationship and you deliver value back to our customers. That is where we are very different. I think, you know, to answer your question around innovation and we combine that with relationships, it's a great combination. So let me push you on one other feature of this. So the differences in innovation on premise or licensed software is a little bit different than the innovation process associated with cloud or subscription oriented software. On the one, you get the invention, customer installs it, you might help them install it, you might help them with a little bit of support early on, they're largely responsible. But in the cloud, the whole motion is, you're actually getting the service itself and not necessarily the software. How does the concept of customer support change as you move into a subscription cloud oriented world? So when you, on the cloud solutions, you have the metadata of the customer. You can measure every click. You know exactly what the customer is doing and not doing. So we have a product called Discovery IQ which minds that information and offers recommendations on how the customers could better leverage our product. To your team. To your team and back to the customers. And back to the customer. Now on an on-prem product, we help in installation, configuration, but the software is running on customer premises. That's where we have built in supportability tools which kind of share metadata back so that we can understand what phase of the project the customer is in. You heard of a product called Ops Insight which we just launched. So that's a cloud based product which connects with our on-prem products so that it gives you a window into what the customer is even doing on on-prem. The more we know about the customer, the better we can serve them. Some customers are very forthcoming to partner with us. And whenever we have a customer success manager, we have great collaboration. We know the milestones. We can orchestrate how we should march the customers towards the milestones. But if that level of communication is not there, then we have to rely on supportability tools to get the metadata back and then we push information back to the customer. And that notion of a roadmap or a journey to get to the outcome is crucially important. Extremely important, right? And in fact, we want to build those features in the product. Today, if you take a master data management product, the data model is the foundation. Today we are able to collect the data model and look for patterns to see if there's a better data model we can recommend to the customers. Because if the foundation is not right, months later, potentially there could be issues around scale and so on. What we have been able to do is detect that very early on to offer better solutions to customers. And we're talking about solutions. Data models vary by life sciences, vary by healthcare, financials, we're able to leverage this knowledge and share across customers. This is not customer proprietary information, just the foundation data models. And this is what our consulting services team is also able to go on site and leverage it further. So the historical interaction between a software vendor and a customer typically was around the characteristics of the products, the speeds of the, you know, the performance of the product, what was required of it, how to configure it, how users used it, the interfaces and whatnot. As you move more towards a solution, especially in a period of significant transformation, now you're talking about how a product does or does not support a business capability. And in the world of analytics, it's becoming increasingly obvious that that is a strategic business capability that has to be put in place. That means that your support people are moving from deep understanding of the product and being able to convey that to having to have a better understanding of the capabilities of the customers trying to achieve and helping them work through that process. Have I got that right? Right, so one of our focus areas currently is the topic of services convergence. In the past, customers would make a product investment, support is mandatory, it gets bundled in, they have to make separate purchases for professional services and education. As we pivot to subscription, we're kind of bundling the services along with the subscription. So we are coming up with some innovative solutions later in the year where as part of the subscription, which the customer is signing up for, we're going to offer a five day consulting services package or a 10 day consulting service package included in the subscription. Why are we doing that? When we talk about driving business outcomes, when we're talking about if you're really serious about accelerating those outcomes, you ought to make that investment upfront. And in the case of- Both parties do. Both parties, it's a partnership you've got to make. In many respects, it's a test of almost the seriousness of the customers that the customers, I mean, are you going to invest your time and not just your money into this process? It's not a one way relationship, right? Absolutely. It has to happen both ways. So when the professional services goes on site, it's to understand what's the business imperative the customer is embarking on? That information is shared back with customer support. So we have an idea. The support folks are still going to be product line focused, but the domain knowledge, in terms of solutions, we're trying to address it through our solution architects in professional services. So what is unique is we, at the beginning of this year, we launched something called the Support Accelerator. Support Accelerator. Okay, Accelerator, yep. Yeah, so you talk about big data, right? In my experience, like I said, I've been with Informatica for 20 many years. You know, when it comes to big data, I've never seen a technology which is changing so rapidly. It's getting disrupted every quarter, I would say. So we realized customers have to look at security, the Hadoop distribution, and those Hadoop distributions change pretty rapidly. It used to take them, could take them weeks just to install and configure the product. Correct. No fault of Informatica. It's just a complex ecosystem. So we come up with the Support Accelerator, we have some checklists, we'll get this information from the customer, we'll remotely install and configure the product in days. So you just gave a great example of exactly what I mean by the difference between invention and innovation. Where Hadoop is constantly inventing, but customers need help with the innovation side, to get it adopted, to get it applied, to get it used so that they can create value in and of themselves, embedded into their business practices, and that's essentially what you're focusing on. So this version of Support Accelerator is focused on installation and configuration. With the example I gave you, we just shaved off a couple of weeks, we are expanding this to other product lines, IDL, EIC, and then we're going to be offering upgrade services. When I talk to CIOs, they want to know, as I upgrade to the latest version, you have my metadata, tell me what value am I going to get with the upgrade? I know it's going to be supported, the latest certifications. If you can tell me if this feature is going to run X times faster. If there's some configuration I need to change so that I'm better leveraging the features in the product, that's the path we are on. I think we have made great strides on the cloud side of the house. We have a product called Informatica Discovery IQ, which can make the recommendations. We have to replicate the success on our on-premises solutions. That's what we're starting to do with Ops Insight product. So I used to do a lot of research around a particular topic and that was the customer journey within IT organizations. Turns out that the CIO is most involved in the discovery process and in that first application process, discovering the characteristics of the solution and then ensuring that they're going to get value out of the product, that first project plan. And the reason for the discovery is that's because the business typically is finding out that something's not working right and brings it to the CIO's intention. But interestingly, it's not at the moment that they're by. It's after they buy and sitting down with the team and making sure that the business gets value out of the purchase. And that's where your guys shine. And they know, we want to come up with a success plan with the right milestones along the journey. Through our customer success team, we want to orchestrate this journey. The role of customer success management is like, how do you orchestrate this journey as you go through these various steps? Customers' outcomes are also evolving. Because especially in the case of big data. I read an article that said companies, only if they have a business strategy which leverages big data, they have a higher degree of success, not the other way around. You know what I'm saying? Oh, totally, 100%. And when customers make this investment, sometimes it comes from top down. And working with the customer success team, understanding what they want to do, the good news is most of our customers are very happy with their current implementations. So they have a mandate to go big data. So we kind of tell them, hey, what's your workloads? You want to do data where it was optimization? You want to shift from TeraData to Hadoop? Here's how you do it. Here's the blueprint. We've been able to share some of our success stories with other customers to them. It's all about actually reading the journey for them. But it certainly is not about getting a cluster. No. Deploying a dupe. That's just the first. And looking at it and said, we're done. That's step point one, right? That's exactly right. And increasingly, because you can now buy a lot of that as a service, it may not even step one anymore. It's an option that you may not choose. So as you think about where customer support in the context of Informatica's journey, can you give us just a couple of insights as to where you think the customer support concept is going to be in a couple of years? A lot of emphasis is going to be on service automation. And the other big board level priority at Informatica is this customer experience. You talked about the journey mapping. It has a storytelling element and it has a visualization element, right? As customers come to our website, have awareness, become a prospect, a lead, make a purchase, we land, adopt, expand, renew. A gamut of interactions across the board. We're not going to be focusing on optimization every step of the journey. We're going to find the moment of truth which would yield the biggest value to the customer, have an outside in approach to validate that. What this has given us, the customer experiences, have a cohesive strategy which cuts across all functions. Before we had KPIs on a functional basis, now we have KPIs on a horizontal basis. Tied back to customer success. Tied back to customer success. Can we get them to go live faster? Are we getting them to renew on time? So these are metrics which are shared by every function within Informatica, not just the renewals team, not just the support team. I think with the emphasis from the board and with the support and investments we are making, I think this is going to take us to the next level and I'm pretty excited about it. Excellent, yeah. So answer, Shaqqaran. Shaqqaran. Thank you very much. Just to let everybody know, with Informatica, longer than Derek Jeter was with the New York Yankees. There you go. 21 years. Thank you Peter. Thank you very much for coming to theCUBE. So Ansa Shaqqaran is the executive vice president of Informatica's Global Support and Service Organization. Once again, thank you for being here and we'll be right back with more from Informatica World 2017 in a few moments. Thank you.