 You know, the discussion is always interesting and relevant. It's not scripted, which I think makes it real. And I think it's a really good service for the viewers who actually get that insight and the ability to understand the conversation and dialogue. And it's actually for the folks who are invited, as I've been invited back a few times. It's actually kind of exciting because you never know where it's going to go. Hi, I'm Scott Nell, CTO of Wordworks, and you're watching theCUBE. Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2016. Brought to you by Informatica. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Hello, everyone, welcome back to day two of wall-to-wall coverage for Informatica World 2016. Hashtag INFA16, that's their ticker symbol, I-N-F-A-16. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signals and the noise. I'm John Furrier. Our next guest is Scott Eman, who's the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Partner Ecosystems for Intramatica. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks very much, John. Thanks for coming on and welcome to theCUBE Alumni Club. You're now in one of the thousands of people in theCUBE Alumni Club. Great to have you. I'd love to get your expertise and views and insights on the partner ecosystem, mainly because everywhere we go, every show, it's really a key part of the competitive advantage of all the suppliers to customers around how they can build out and have the customers get delivery of value. And your ecosystem is critical for that, like everyone else's. Give us the update. What's going on with the ecosystem? How established is it? What are some of the key priorities that you guys are working on? Just give us some stats on, or any data you can share on what's going on with the ecosystem that we can drill into it. So 500 partners across the ecosystem that includes our global systems integrators, regional systems integrators, pure play cloud partners, bars, distributors, ISVs, OEMs, I mean, you name it, we got it. And about 500 partners altogether. Some interesting stats about our partners is that when we have partners bring us opportunities, those deals are 50% bigger and close three times faster than they do when we're doing it just on our own. Big reason why is because that ecosystem is so tight to the customer. Yeah, and interesting, indirect sales as is also called, or partners, really provides a great way for leverage from a cost to sales standpoint for Informatica and other folks. But more importantly, they're close to the customers. And we've seen the shifts in the business from the mini computer days to the PC computer days, internet days, and the resellers bars and VADs and ISVs and key systems integrators. They're all a big part of that growth. Margins were pretty much hardware, but now we have the perfect storm. You got data, cloud, you have infrastructure, converged infrastructure, unlimited compute now, completely changing the game for what can be done. So there's a nirvana happening right now in front of us. So the partners are in there in the front line. So they're best fit to deliver value. Now, the other thing that's interesting when we were talking before we went on camera was, there's a huge profit opportunity for partners. So everyone's kind of licking their chops, if you will. They're kind of sitting there saying, damn, who can bring me the value where I can essentially move product and our technology. That's well understood now, somewhat understood. But yeah, these new processes are developing in the market that customers are doing digitally. So the digital transformation affecting your customer's customer is really in play. So the partners are going to be attacking that. What are you guys doing there to enable that profitability? Is it services? What are some of the things that you guys are doing to help partners? That's really the key thing we're seeing. Well, one of the things that we started this year is a real focus on partner profitability. We know that if we could help a partner drive more profit with their business, they're going to be a more loyal partner to us and ultimately drive more business for us. So one of the things that we've done with that is we've really encouraged our partners to bundle our products inside of their services and offer those services off on a retained type of basis. So it's a big trend with our global systems integrators to embed that. That makes them more sticky and they get recurring revenue associated with a lot of businesses. Can you give an example of some of the partner motions that you guys interact with that kind of demonstrates how you guys are executing? Because again, if you can deliver profitability, they're going to be, their arms will be wide open. It sounds like that's the case. Oh, there's no question. An example of some of those motions that you guys engage with customers. How are they getting that profit? Well, the way they're getting that profit is really through that packaging exercise that they go through with talking strategically about a specific business problem, crafting their solutions. Accenture, for example, has a platform play around analytics that ultimately provides a one-stop shop for customers to ultimately get the analytics capabilities of their firm from a capability perspective, but also from a domain perspective, including our founded, you know, integrated data platform is part of that offer. What's interesting is that we're seeing some shifts in the partner ecosystems of the marketplace because of all the diversity and domain expertise. Some partners have different swim lanes than others as they say, or expertise. And you're starting to see the partners start to differentiate amongst themselves in value. Now you guys are in good position because data's data, right? So how has Informatica's business been positioned vis-a-vis these new kinds of partners? Because the end customer has to make a selection, a partner selection, and they don't want to miss out on the value of Informatica. So how are you guys organized and how are you guys taking that data value, the focus on data, wherever it may be, that the subtraction layer is genius strategy, but you know, how does that translate into the execution for the partners? Well, the big thing is really helping our partners identify the places where we're good at and where there's opportunities for us to fill gaps through those partners. So a lot of times what we'll do is work with them around. Identifying which verticals are best for them. Trying to really kind of craft a nice coverage model for our entire customer base with partners who have differentiated value inside of those verticals. And then we engage with them in campaigns specifically towards those verticals. And then using our partners to really focus on the business problem, because they're quite frankly more qualified to talk about the business issues that are facing our clients. And that leadership that they provide ultimately pulls our opportunity to leverage our technologies and those solutions. Scott, you guys talk about partner triangulation. Absolutely. What does that mean? I mean, describe that, because this is really now we're getting, everyone has different swim lanes, the end customer might engage multiple partners. Is that kind of like? It's happening more and more, actually. Over the last five or six weeks in particular, I've used this word triangulation a ton. Where it really is starting to happen is in places where big data is a big part of the conversation, like let's use Tableau as an example. We just had a big announcement with Tableau yesterday. The whole analytics conversation quickly in terms of the value it's going to provide to a business is quickly going to a conversation about data. Where is it going to come from? What's the quality of it? So a lot of times what we'll see is a conversation with a partner, like a systems integrator, like a Deloitte, for example, working with Tableau on an opportunity that needs to pull us into an opportunity. So now we'll suddenly have three different types of partners in a customer scenario. So getting back to your profitability question, what we have to do is simplify that transaction for a customer, because dealing with multiple parties gets complicated. They want one stop shop buying if they can. So our partners are in a great spot to pull up Tableau and Informatica together in a combined solution, make money off Tableau, make money off of us, and obviously make money off of services. So that's an operational challenge that you guys have on the Informatica side. So dealing with multiple partners and you guys are your operational partners. I see it as a great opportunity actually, because combining we're adding more value than any one of us trying to do it on our own. And the customers doesn't want to have five different touch points. They really don't. I hear it more and more all the time. Customers here over the last day and a half so far have all been about, hey, simplify my buying process. All right, so take us into the day in the life of Scott Eamon. When you're out in the field, you're going to talk to partners. Those conversations can be, what's in it for me? Hey, I want to make more money, it's certainly the profitability thing. Number one, got to nail that. You guys are doing a good job there. What are the conversations that you have when you're sitting in those offices and you're talking to the owners and or the business owners of these partners or the key stakeholders managing director or the practice leads and data? Because there's so many different touch points Informatica touches. You have on prem kind of traditional stuff. And then you have now an emerging business outcome where you're starting to see the messaging here, speed of business. These are like business outcome conversations. Yet this is an under the hood conversation going on. So what's your conversations like when you sit down with those folks? So there are a lot about what we talked about already. It's about profitability, about triangulation, about the opportunity that they have. These firms are really aggressively pursuing how to best leverage all these different partners. And my conversation with a lot of them is definitely around profitability and what's in it for them, what's in it for us and putting in a process that actually can drive that type of success. But the other thing that we're looking at doing with them is really trying to be as simple of a partner organization as we possibly can be. So it's easy to work with us in the field. It's easy to work within our Alliance team. And all that makes it a lot easier for them. So I'm sharing a lot with them on how to make money with our stuff and really encourage them to kind of get into again, the spaces where we have a white space for them to play really focused on how much they're going to make off of us or how much we're going to make with them. It's a big part of the conversation. So we have day in and day out with those partners. Scott, share with the folks watching. You've been in the business for a while. You've seen the movies play out, the different inflection points. Obviously the ecosystems have changed a lot. You know, the game might have changed, but it's always the same thing, profitability and density key. But what's been the biggest surprise to you or what would you like people to know about what's happened in the ecosystem relative to the market dynamics? What are the big changes that you've seen that is creating such a big opportunity for partners? Well, I think Cloud disrupted a lot with partners in general. I mean, the big multi-million dollar engagements went away, the long projects went away. So partners have to be a lot more nimble. And they also have, and because those projects are smaller, there's a great exit opportunity for customers. So because of Cloud and because of those smaller engagements, they really have to find ways to continue to be sticky. That's why these bundled offers and offering those services on some sort of retained basis with products included really makes it sticky for those partners. So it's a big shift from just doing typical project installation and move on. Those old days of like long, big gravy train. That's right. From the trough deals are over. That's right. And then the competition for resources is incredibly difficult for a lot of our partners. So what they're trying to do is make the shift from having bodies and hourly rates and utilization targets to coming up with other revenue streams like reselling products or packaging things like IP along with services and products as a way to generate incremental revenue without having to have people to actually do it. It's interesting. The partners have to differentiate amongst themselves and now triangulate with other partners, but also sticky is a real big conversation. So I'd like to drill down on that. So what does sticky mean to you in terms of your and your partner ecosystem? Is it differentiation? Is it building on a technology practice? Is it having intellectual property? Is it intellectual property sharing with you guys? What are some of the ways that it can get sticky? Or is it just recurring revenue? I mean, what are some of the things? The term I use to answer that question is continuous value. What are you doing to provide continuous value? And what's a phenomenal opportunity for Informatica and for our partners is that we have a wide range of products that can really broaden or I should say that can provide a comprehensive solution to the data story. So we have a great opportunity for partners to continue to add value through their retained services and outsourcing some of this data and analytics kind of capabilities to our customers. But there's also this opportunity to find other products that can ultimately add more value. So we provide a great roadmap actually for a partner to make a lot of money with our customers and for our customers to get a lot of value out of our point. Okay, so I'll play devil's advocate. All right. Scott, I am so busy, I'm a partner. I'm so busy, everyone's trying to get my mind share and they want me to sell their stuff and invest in the relationship. And why should I work with Informatica? What's the story? The story is, let's look at the Magic Quadrants, let's look at who's the market leader in this industry. Let's look who's got the most comprehensive soup to nuts sort of portfolio around data. And if you want to have a portfolio of products and services that you can provide to your customers that's comprehensive and is recognized by the analysts, if it's Gartner or Forester, and then you're going to be in a better spot with us than working with a bunch of niche players. And as partners try to simplify their line card of different vendors, it makes it easy for them to kind of choose us and instead of having a larger number of partners to support. It's interesting, I've been following Informatica for the years, but more closely with the past two years since Informatica world last year and now doing a cube this year. It's interesting, Informatica can be very geeky and under the hood because data is really, you can get really deep on that. So you can get in the weeds and for good reasons, there's a lot of data governance, a lot of nuances if you will on the technology side. Now you're starting to see the cloud come in. Certainly you guys have been working with AWS for a while, so you get cloud. And the notion of master data management now being a single view is really a compelling story. So I've seen the shift to higher level messaging around speed of business, kind of like top line messaging. There's a swath of Informatica value. How do you sort that out in your day to day and talking to partners? Because I'm not saying it's going to confuse partners, there's just a lot to get your arms around. Oh there totally is, I'm a business applications guy by background with services and partners in the past. And I can't believe we have such a multi-billion dollar industry around this complicated story around data. But when we talk about the high level digital transformation that's going on in the marketplace right now and how data ultimately can make that happen, I got to lean on the partners to help craft that story. We're coming up with more and more lines of business and more and more business outcomes conversations where we're seeing the value that our technologies provide to customers, but we can only take it so far. So we're taking these strategic initiatives around digital transformation and IoT and all that type of thing and really leveraging our partners to embrace our technology and what it provides in terms of value along with what they're doing. It's interesting, Peter Verus, an analyst at GM or WikiBond team also had a research for SiliconANGLE Media when I were talking last week about how the old days it was unknown technology, known processes, and you'd automate those processes through CRM, ERP, whatnot, and data and data management. Okay, park it, put it into the data warehouse and all that stuff. Now we're shifting to a new era of unknown processes and kind of known technology. So to me it seems that the parties would really embrace this notion that Informatica's got a lot of breath. Yet the innovation strategy of their customers is creating new processes and new ways to do things. So it seems to me that that seems to be fertile ground for innovation. It is, and it's our partners who have to lead us there. And is there any stickiness that you've seen like recurring, any business models that you can just, that are obvious to you that have been working for partners and that's generalized in terms of is it recurring revenue you mentioned retainer? Because you can, the projects might not be long but the engagements can be long based on that continuous value. Is there any formula you've seen that's working well right now? It's an emerging market for sure, an emerging opportunity. How partners help with the uberization, if you will, of traditional companies, businesses, wide open field in terms of the processes and the approach that they take and then how they use information, technology, and data is all a custom kind of story and offers up again great opportunities for partners. I would connect to Dawson and say that if I'm a partner, I would look up to say the data integration hub that you guys announced and say, wow, I could actually go into a customer and provide a SaaS offering and support and developers into a fully cloud native but yet legacy integrated environment and be embedded with that customer. Oh, totally, totally. The technology and the services to make that happen is just a real sticky opportunity for that innovation that they're going to put in place. All right, final question. What's going on at the show here? If you look at the show for the folks that aren't here watching on the video, what's the buzz, what's the highlights in your mind? You know, you're only five months of informatic but you've been in the industry for a long time. You've seen a lot of stuff. What's popping out at you here at the show? What's the most notable highlights from your standpoint? A few things. One is Amit did a great job yesterday rolling out our new product launches. CloudMDM was a big hit for the audience that created a lot of buzz. I really enjoyed the Accenture pitch on digital transformation and disruption that is happening in the marketplace that put that high-level context that we were talking about into play. Jim and Neil on Monday really set the stage for how we're transforming our company. So that's really rippled into all the partner conversations that I've been having and customer conversations that I've been having over the last couple of days. It's really jacked up the community in a really great way. And you guys are well-positioned for that. Well, congratulations. Scott, thanks for sharing the insights on the partner ecosystem. A lot of work to do. It's evolving. Absolutely. Absolutely. But the CloudMDM, again, I agree, is super hot. And also, this live map concept is really pretty impressive. So congratulations. Thanks very much. We're live in San Francisco for day two of coverage of SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back. You're watching theCUBE. Hi, this is Chris Devaney from De-